"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

Again, I have been something of a phantom of myself for much of the last year,
passing through the house on my way to write or paint with a distracted look. They
kindly indulge my craziness, and my endless calls for cups of hot sweet tea.
I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr Alex del Rosario, and his
assistant Judy Azar. I recently described Alex as the perfect 'artist's doctor'. He
has guided me through some lengthy periods of sickness in the last couple of years,
understanding as no other physician in my history has the fierce and sometimes
self-wounding passion that makes artists attempt to do the impossible: to paint
another world into being, while writing a two hundred thousand word novel while
producing a couple of movies, for instance. For me, this is my natural, albeit
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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
obsessive, behavior. But my body isn't that of a thirty-year-old any longer (or even
that of a forty-year-old!). It complains now when I drive it hard; as I do daily. It
has taken a massive contribution of sympathetic counsel, medication and alternative
therapies to keep body and spirit together since my father's death and I owe Alex a
huge debt of thanks for my present good health.
Finally, the powers that be. First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my
Hollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned (in
this book, for instance) as being for cold, artistically disinterested men and
women. My thanks and great admiration go to the lawyer who has helped shape my
business life in the last two years, David Golden. The Abarat deal with the Disney
Company was the largest literary deal made in Hollywood last year, and it covers
every possible shape and permutation that my invented world might take, in the hands
of Disney's imagineers. To give you a taste of what kind of wordage David Golden has
minutely analyzed on my behalf: the Disney contract had three pages alone devoted to
listing its contents!
On the literary side, my dear Anne Sibbald, who has surely the tenderest
heart of any agent who ever represented an unreformed maker of monsters like myself,
has been a constant source of encouragement, and a fearless champion whenєon
occasionєthe machinations of the corporate world proved painful and
incomprehensible.
And lastєbut oh, you both know, never leastєmy editors.
In New York, Robert Jones (who's had his own wars to fight of late, and has
still always been there with a witty word of support; or some wonderfully dry remark
at the expense of the many idiocies of the publishing world.)
And finally we come to Jane Johnson. My Jane, I insist, the Editor of
Editors, who is never far from my mind when I set pen to paper. Increasingly, Jane,
I think I write to entertain you, to please you. We have survived for many years
together on a raft of shared beliefs about the necessity of dreams, tossed around in
the tumultuous seas of modern publishing. In that time, Jane has lost countless
colleagues to exhaustion, frustration and despair, and yet she manages to be a
mistress of beautiful prose as well as an editor of a stable of authors, who, like
me, could not imagine their literary lives continuing without her.
I would have given up the increasingly problematic ambition of having a
broad audience for my work, and fled into the minor, the hermetic and the oblique,
without her tireless encouragement.
My love to you, my Jane; and, as always, my heartfelt thanks.
Here's another tale for you, saved from the flood.
CB