Thanks everyone for the well wishes - they are much appreciated. Yes PH, it does feel like an achievement. It's been a 12-year project, and not so much the writing of it - the whole thing only took a few years to get the initial draft. The rest of the time was understanding what I was trying to do: working out how fiction happens if it is going to be engaging for readers.
I knew a lot about this in theory, because the 12-year project has just been about this book. The fiction project as a whole has been a whole adult life project, really. Except that I spent a lot of that life thinking of it as an escapist fantasy. But I'd read a lot about writing, and studied fiction in my 20s under the Australian author Gerald Murnane - who is enjoying a fair bit of recognition internationally now for his novel
The Plains but that appreciation has been a long time coming. He had published it before I was studying with him - which was 35 years ago - and I still have not read it. I know he was disappointed then with how his publisher at the time had promoted it. Something that has informed my decision to self-publish mine, in much happier times for self-publishers (even if the new technology has crowded the market with junk).
So it feels fantastic to have got the book together, and especially because I am happy with it. In that sense - and it's a strong sense - the book is successful already. I'm not publishing it to find out whether I'm good. I'm good enough, in my own way. Which is very unlike Murnane's way. And I know that some readers will get a big kick out of reading the book, and others will wonder why anyone bothered producing it.
John I had to look up Robertson Davies. Now I might have to read some of his stuff. Yes, the right editor can transform a newspaper - and from the outside that looks almost effortless. As a reader, you start to appreciate the difference that editor made after the editor moves on. Unless you were a reader before he or she arrived.
I'm actually not prolific or dedicated to productivity. There is no way I could have edited a newspaper and produced novels at the same time, like Davies apparently did. And like many others do, at least analogously. After a day at work on a newspaper I would just want to get home and relax. Usually over a drink. I can look at that another way and say that if I have an engaging job - and I've been lucky enough to have those over most of my working life - then my creative energies tend to go into that. A fair bit of
Bongs for Steve was drafted when I was working part-time, but for a lot of it I had found ways to set up dedicated time.
Andre you make it sound as though Goldman had been captured by the fallacy that what seemed true to him actually was true of others. It would have been fun to be a fly on the wall if he had offered that bromide to Harper Lee or JD Salinger. But I imagine he was just being encouraging - offering from his experience the possibility that a lukewarm debut could be built on. If at first you don't succeed, etc. Talent is not enough; perseverance is everything. Which assumes a certain sort of point for the persevering: he was a driven man and wanted to build a career. Which he did. I learned about him from a book I read years ago about screenwriters, for which he was interviewed and as I recall it he gave a generous interview. If you knew him well, I imagine he was an interesting man to know. And it sounds like you have a story of your own here about publishing - am I wrong? I had thought that after a rich professional life you had dedicated yourself only to painting.
I think for me in many respects
Bongs for Steve is my gift to the social world - a world that has given me an adult life about 50 times more entertaining than I had thought it would be as I lived through my teens. To a significant extent even its self-publication as an ebook fulfils my ambition - or at least, my ambition when I conceived of the project about the age of 20, which was then just a project about writing a decent book. I wondered whether that might be possible for me, as I bumbled about wondering why I had dropped out of uni. It looked like an experiment - the endeavour - that might have made life feel like it was worth living. Indeed it has, and however
Bongs is received the experiment has returned a result and it's a result that has pleased me.
Thanks very much for offering those resources: I will certainly apply to the Facebook group, and I value your invitation to it. I've had good personal reasons for avoiding Facebook in the past but I suspect a good proportion of the people who might enjoy the book are of Facebook age and so I'll set up a page for it and go from there. That might take a few days.
Oh, and as it happens my life as an author looks like surviving the publication of
Bongs. I have a sequel in draft and it's well on the way. Having spent 12 years developing the relevant skills, I can focus mainly on the writing with this one - and so I am believing its production will run much more smoothly. We'll see.
in4 yes I'll do some promotion in the run to go-live and afterwards. Self-promotion doesn't come easily to me and so this is a challenge. The most obvious place to find readers who would love the book is within cannabis culture, and there is plenty of that online. First-readers (the people you ask to criticise drafts for you over the writing process) have pointed out that the book runs much deeper than its title might suggest, and have objected to the title on those grounds. That's true, but it's also true that its treatment of cannabis culture won't be found elsewhere. So I think the hunger for it might be strongest among people to whom the title appeals.
