This week, ‘Grosse Fugue’ finally appeared, ready for its soft launch. If you’ll permit, I’m going to be even more self-indulgent than usual.
Is the end also a beginning?
This week, ‘Grosse Fugue’ finally appeared, ready for its soft launch. If you’ll permit, I’m going to be even more self-indulgent than usual.
I can now hold in my hand a printed book of something that was once merely a figment of my imagination and a plan sketched out in a notebook.
For large tranches of the intervening period, I barely dared to hope that, one day, it might be able to take its place on bookshelves in homes, shops and libraries. That it might jostle for space with heroes like Primo Levi and George Orwell, well who could even dream of such a thing!
And yet, here it is, and here I am.
What’s strange is that I feel somewhat empty. I’m not looking for sympathy, I hasten to add. I know how fortunate I am to have got here. But in the confessional nature of some of these blogs, it seems to me that I ought to be honest.
First things first, I am a perfectionist. I also subscribe to Kant’s dictum that ‘from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made’. So I am alive to the novel’s flaws and imperfections, blinded by the might-have-beens. I’m a glass-half-empty kind of guy; in fact, I’m pretty sure someone peed in it when I wasn’t looking.
I revisit the entire editing process and think of all the times I might have been more assertive or built in more buffers to allow for reading the latest changes with some distance and detachment. My only consolation is that when it’s a runaway success (ahem), I can seek a revised reprint that allows for more improvement (and even revisits my original ending). Well, is there any harm in dreaming?
I’m also painfully aware that the high ambitions I set for ‘Grosse Fugue’ may well remain unfulfilled. While unpublished, there was no risk of failure or of a full frontal attack on the ideas it contains. Now, I’m a bit like a stand-up comedian – hopelessly exposed and nowhere to hide. It’s a strange sense of nakedness.
So this is a new phase. At the age of 58, I think I can say with some confidence that it’s never too late to live your dreams, and I’m so grateful to my publisher that they have enabled me to proclaim that. Leonard Cohen sang ‘there ain’t no cure for love’. We all know that there ain’t no cure for writing, either. Once bitten, we are forever infected. I feel the fever rising once again as I begin to think about the next book.
As I look at ‘Grosse Fugue’, I find myself drawn to some great words by Zamyatin: “True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and sceptics.”
And I wonder which, if any, am I.
Ian Phillips is a freelance writer for businesses whose first novel, Grosse Fugue, is being published by Alliance Publishing Press. Further information is now available at www.alliancepublishingpress.com. He’s tweeting developments @Ian_at_theWord.
Your blog posts are inspirational. I like your comment about it being never too late to live your dreams.
I'm sorry by being a bit uninformed - my fault - but... your book is already on sale?
Hi Adrian, let me try and deal with your points in order.
I'm an avid collector of quotations. My next blog will provide a link, among other things, to my own collection. I like your Tennyson line very much. I often think that I have come up with something startlingly original only to find someone far wiser has had the same thought, not only much earlier but also more beautifully wrought.
The situation with the book is this. My publisher devised a clear marketing strategy - a soft launch among friends and family to try to build a word-of-mouth momentum and some sales, hopefully accompanied by online reviews. This will be followed by a media campaign in June. Sales will be slow until then, I imagine.
Alliance Publishing Press is a print-on-demand publisher. Once the orders start to flow through Amazon and elsewhere then stock will be available but the first tranche takes a couple of weeks before they arrive. Would that it had sold out! But I've just had my first response from someone who knew nothing about it and it was what I would term a 'rave' so that bodes well. As we all know, however, this is a business of many false dawns and perpetual nights, so I'm not exactly holding my breath.
Who to star in the movie? Well, as it's a whole-life book, it might be several. I always imagined Dustin Hoffman as the elderly Reuben. Young to middle-aged? Daniel Day-Lewis, perhaps.
The score is another matter. It would require the distillation of great classics rather than, I think, its own music. I suspect this needs to be done by a classically-trained composer who can arrange and reduce without destroying the essence.
Lol re the Strad. Were you to read the book, there is something about actual violins within it and, at the end, a wry observation (I hope).
And thanks, Adrian, not just for the congrats but for your interest in the Long-Distance Writer and your comments. All very much appreciated.