old thoughts, old facade

Found this piece in my documents today, left over from the old Jamais Vu (I saved certain posts as word docs before deleting the blog). Bittersweet to read it again. I don't really sympathize with any of it now. The more things change . . . the more things really change sometimes. js

5-25-06

Kubrick Facade update

My book went to press today two months earlier than expected. The book was always ahead of schedule, for better or for worse. And, from the original timeline I was given, it looks like they also skipped the final revisions stage--or, if they didn't, I wasn't in on it. I am assuming I won't see it again until its published.

The target date for its release is now mid- to late July, not September, as was originally planned. It will come out exactly two years after I finished my MA thesis at OSU, and 15 months after I sent a proposal and, shortly thereafter, the first draft to Scarecrow. I still remember that day--a rainy April morning in Michigan when I treated myself to breakfast at the IHOP on Woodward (having finished the then 160 page manuscript), sat there reading the document one last time before I mailed it off from the Birmingham post office a couple miles north.

And it came out exactly 4 years and 5 months since I first started writing what would eventually become a part of the book. But, that's deceiving, of course--I didn't write it continuously for 4 and a half years, but rather in short bursts. I wrote it mostly during 2003, the first part of 2004, summer of 2005, and then January of this year. And in the intervening times was when I was working on parts of Afferent Specters, which I started writing during the same semester and in the same seminar as the Kubrick project.

When I get to my dissertation and then when I get to my first job, I will make a conscious effort to focus mostly on one project at a time. I realize now that stretching yourself too thin just hurts all the projects you want to complete, and I'm better now at prioritizing one project at a time. The Kubrick Facade would have been much better if I had just focused on it exclusively for the last 4+ years, but then I couldn't possibly have focused that constantly on the same subject for the whole time. There were many points where I was genuinely sick of Kubrick--and hence I could only write in spurts. In some respects, one writing project was always a break from the other, and vice versa. But maybe being a truly great scholar--not just an accomplished one--means working through that sickness anyway. Maybe that sickness is the trick to a great book, and I've been avoiding it rather than embracing it.

I think invariably it will be something of a letdown when The Kubrick Facade finally debuts in a couple months. Kind of like that postpartum depression that hits at the end of a semester, only much worse. Four years writing this project, and now its gone. I can't attend to it, nurture it, focus on it anymore. Its debut will be its death--the end of the writing process. It will be nothing but a pile of pages. It will come into circulation. No one will read it cover to cover (and I don't blame them), and then it will drop out of circulation just as fast. With only its tombstone on my CV. Gone. Yes, it will get the job (literally), and it will gain some attention, fleetingly. But, that will be the end of it. Like any good parent, I suppose I need to stop being a control freak and just let it go its own way. I've done the best I could.

I guess, what I'm saying is that its difficult to let go of something that's been a part of my life for so long. I'll never again wake up and ask myself if I should be working on it, and what I should be doing with it. That's all over. I guess the sadness is here already. Maybe I jumped so quickly into the next book because I don't know how to let go of the last one. Or, at least, let go of that process. Got too many cats--empty nest syndrome.

It's a relief that it's all over, of course. It was a lot of work, and I couldn't go on forever, like Grady and his 2000 pages in Wonder Boys. The book has reached its happy conclusion. I got it where I wanted it to go, and now I need to move on alone. But its still sad--like that loved one who suffered for far too long and now the suffering has passed. But so have they.

js