Printing the Book

So I’m nearing the point where I’m finally willing to unclench my fingers from the massive book manuscript I just finished and actually hand the whole thing to another human being to read.

I finally saw it in the flesh at Kinko’s last night. (OK, it’s FedEx Office now, but I’m always going to call it Kinko’s, you mindless good-trademark-ruining corporate bastards.) I’d dropped it off to print up a few copies; since I was getting four copies bound so as to ship it off and enter it into some contests—a $167 print job—I figured I’d see a proof first.

No sooner had the words “I’m here to pick up a proof” cleared my lips than the girl behind the counter—and her associate—looked at me with a mix of awe and disbelief. “You must be Alfonso,” she said. “That’s a big book. We couldn’t bind it.”

She motioned over her shoulder to a massive pile of letter-sized paper. It looked like it was 8 inches high.

I tried not to panic. One thought crossed my mind: holy shit, what the fuck have I just done with the past few years of my life?

I’d already known it was a good-sized manuscript—200,000 words, give or take; nowhere near War and Peace, but not far from Moby Dick. More importantly, I knew it was certainly long enough to make a lot of literary agents pass on it on that basis alone. Still, 200,000 was just a number, and this—this massive cube of dead tree that looked hefty enough to collapse the Kinko’s counter, or at least give the girl behind it a hernia—this was tangible, physical proof that I am a lunatic.

Strong words, you might say, but who else but a crazy man would spend such an obscene length of time on such a project without a clear idea as to how to sell it? Here’s a brief—by my standards, ha ha!!—history of the project:

Since approximately 1994, I’ve been more or less obsessed by the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “hidden pivot” of Nazi Germany. I went to Prague during summer leave in 1998 in part because I wanted to see the spot where he was ambushed by Czech parachutists. Then I thought about the project for a while, wrote a different book-length manuscript, did some intermittent research (and actually wrote a single unsatisfactory page) before deciding to write Pottersville instead, then finally started writing in earnest in early 2006 when I had a chance to go back to Prague. I first wrote a screenplay based on the assassination. I realized it was too long, so I split it into two screenplays. Then I went to Hollywood for a “screenwriter’s pitchfest,” where one gets a chance to meet with real life producers and try and sell them on your movie idea. (Basically, it’s like speed-dating, except you do all the talking, and they do all the rejecting.) Of course, I’d imagined everyone would love it; instead, I was told that expensive period pieces are one of the toughest things to sell. So I came back to Chicago and figured I’d just turn it into a book, because at least I could get that done by myself. Should be a jiff, I figured—I’d already imagined most of the scenes, right? I thought it would take me six months, tops.

Three years later, here I am.

The book’s in three parts, with three first-person narrators; I wrote the first part on the laptop, then—to differentiate the voices, I told myself—composed the first few drafts of the second part using a typewriter, and wrote the third third by hand in composition books. (The handwriting part was kind of fun; it’s good to be forced to rewrite stuff. But don’t ever write anything on a typewriter, people. There’s a reason they barely sell them any more: they suck.)

ANYWAY, I wrote it, and transferred the typewritten and handwritten parts to a computer, and revised the hell out of it, and re-read it and polished it many more times. And I’ve relearned a valuable lesson—the longer you spend on such a project, and the more emotional energy you have invested in it, the less willing you will be to actually stop work completely and say it’s done. (At least for me—it’s all too easy for the sharp needle of another human being’s disapproval to puncture the fragile, overinflated balloon that is my ego.) Rather than getting it in the hands of other people, it’s so much easier to just imagine it is perfect and not do anything that will dispel that illusion.

But, of course, you lose perspective on anything the closer you are to it and the bigger it is, and I’ve long since passed the point where I can objectively judge this particular piece of work. So I need to get it out there and put it up for some contests—hence the trip to Kinko’s.

ANYWAY, it turned out that they hadn’t printed the pages double-sided. And I’d made it double-spaced to comply with various contest guidelines, so that stretched it out a bit, too. The Kinko’s people still had to split it into its three component parts, but the new proof they hurriedly put together last night at least looked semi-manageable. (I tried to resist the temptation to page through it and try and figure out whether I actually, you know, still liked it.) I’m excited to pick it up this weekend, and excited to get some feedback at long last.

But I’m still scared shitless, too.