Des amis d'autrefois

Geneviève Moreau est la mairesse de Choranche, et Laurent Drouot est son adjoint. Or, pour des raisons que je tente sans succès de comprendre, ces deux individus n'ont jamais voulu faire appel à moi pour que je leur explique comment réaliser un site web sur le camping municipal de notre village. Au lieu d'accepter mon offre, ils persistent à m'insulter. Drouot m'avait même envoyé l'email suivant :

 

On voit que cet homme n'aime ni le concitoyen William ni son Mac.

J'ai des kilos de documents qui montrent leur mauvaise foi à mon égard. Je parlerais même d'une sorte de haine viscérale. Je ne vois pas pourquoi ils seraient des xénophobes, mais c'est un terme horrible qui me vient souvent à l'esprit.

Une fois, quand j'avais tenté d'expliquer à la mairesse que son adjoint avait fait appel à un service israélien parfaitement honorable, Wix, cette dame m'avait répondu sèchement et bêtement que j'étais probablement antisémite ! C'était une insulte incompréhensible à l'égard d'un grand amateur de la religion juive et de l'hébreu moderne. (Mon fils François pourrait affirmer ce que je viens de dire.) J'ai même fait paraître un roman en anglais sur cette culture : All the Earth is Mine, publié chez moi par Gamone Press.

Dans un premier temps, j’avais cru naïvement que les lois de notre République ne permettraient pas à deux élus d’insulter fréquemment un citoyen respectable de mon âge. Hélas, j’avais tort. Ils ont parfaitement le droit, paraît-il, de cracher tout le venin puant qu'ils souhaitent vomir. Si je comprends bien, seule une offense physique infligée par ces deux énergumènes me permettrait de poser des plaintes contre eux. Voilà donc pourquoi j’ai fini par penser que la seule approche possible consisterait à signaler ici, en toute simplicité, leurs bêtises. Dont acte.

Tout ça, c'est de la folie d'individus intelligents mais désagréables à mon égard. Des individus dont les comportements absurdes confirment qu'ils ne méritent pas de rester des élus de la Nation. Plus rien à dire.

Copies of my Jewish novel arrive on my doorstep

My decision to use the typescript of my Jewish novel for a self-publishing experiment was intended above all as an experiment, enabling me to understand the revolutionary Ingram-Spark system. My All the Earth is Mine script was totally familiar, because I had been playing around for years with this imaginary political-fiction tale, and the only graphical stuff in the future book would be a simple diagram of Israel. So, this test enabled me to build up confidence in myself before tackling the far more complicated challenges of my two genealogy books: A Little Bit of Irish and They Sought the Last of Lands. Funnily enough, I believe today that this crazy novel—inspired by my lengthy fascination for the Hebrew religion and language, not to mention my love of the modern land of Israel—was in fact a more profound writing endeavor than my two family-history studies. Meanwhile, bringing out this novel was a memorable initiation process for Gamone Press.

Gamone Press books delivered to my doorstep

The mail-woman has just delivered to my doorstep the three copies of A Little Bit of Irish that I ordered recently. Really, the self-publishing solution offered by Ingram is perfect. Bravo!

Publisher receives copies of his book

This morning, the Choranche postman (who's replacing Martine for a while) brought me a big bag.

Inside, I found three immaculate copies of my book They Sought the Last of Lands. I had ordered them recently through the Internet from the Ingram Spark printing platform in England.

Their technical qualities are perfect: beautiful hard cover, fine illustrations (photos and ancestral charts on nearly every page), heavy paper, excellent printing. They cost me 43 euros per copy, delivered to my doorstep. That price takes into account the fact that I'm the publisher, Gamone Press. Most people would pay a little more. Regardless of the price, for people seeking solid information on the Skyvington family, my book is a convenient economic solution.

Medieval meat

Maybe I’m exaggerating when I refer to these huge pieces of freshly-shot wild boar as medieval meat.

You’ll have to excuse me. My head is in the historical clouds. I’ve been preoccupied for several weeks now by my work on the next book to be published by my Gamone Press.

It’s not so much the meat itself—which has been cooking slowly for the last few hours, in white wine, in my marvelous French-made SEB slow cooker (“crock-pot”)— that is medieval, but rather the means by which I obtained it. In a pure feudal spirit, one of the hunters who had killed the animal, on the outskirts of Gamone, dropped in yesterday with a big white plastic bag holding the pieces of wild boar. In contemporary terms, this spontaneous gesture is the way in which the hunting community (often denigrated by rural newcomers) expresses thanks to the land-owners on whose properties they’ve been operating.

To tell the truth, it took me some time to become accustomed to all the agitation and noise of hunters on the slopes opposite Gamone. I suppose I imagined naively that I might get hit by a stray bullet. These days, on the contrary, I’m fond of these wild weekends, which must be thought of as expressions of ancient traditions in the valley of the Bourne. Besides, Fitzroy and I are well-placed—on our Gamone balcony—to see and appreciate what’s going on. This afternoon, for example, two hunters were wandering around with their dogs in the tall grass on the slopes. Suddenly, the fixed gaze of my dog led my regard towards the presence of a big roe deer, sprinting down towards Gamone Creek, just a few meters below the hunters and their dogs… who were clearly unaware of the deer’s presence.

For Fitzroy, too, there’s the pleasure of gnawing into a wild boar bone.

Getting back to my future book, I’m often tempted to say that living in a place such as Gamone without seeking to find out a little about the previous occupants strikes me as mindless, indeed immoral. I didn’t invent Gamone. I only “own” the place in a short-lived legal sense: the time to write a book, you might say. To use a quaint Victorian term, Fitzroy and I are lodgers at Gamone.

My historical research unearths many surprises, some of which are pleasant with a touch of sadness. Today, if somebody in this corner of the world were to evoke the name of the Macaire family, they could only be thinking, normally, of my aging neighbor Paul Macaire and his dear wife. You have to delve into local history to learn that members of this family once attained great world heights… but outside of France. These illustrious Macaire individuals belonged to a celebrated category of French religious expatriates: the Huguenots. Funnily enough, insofar as these Huguenots disappeared from the local scene, the French are not particularly aware of their existence and of the gigantic role they played on the world scene. I would bet that, if you were to carry out random street interviews in nearby Pont-en-Royans (once 100% Protestant), few people would have the vaguest idea of the meaning of the term Huguenot.

In this global context of forgetfulness and false ideas, I am keen to write my Gamone book during the all-too-short time that I remain a lodger here…

My second family-history book

This morning, the postwoman brought me a first copy (from the printer in the UK) of They Sought the Last of Lands, which can be thought of as a companion volume to A Little Bit of Irish.

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I’m more than satisfied with the result.

On the far side of the cover

This is my final cover design for the family history of my mother’s people in Australia, which is about to be published by Gamone Press in the form of a 266-page hard-cover book in Royal Octavo format (15.6 cm wide and 23.4 cm high) with a laminated cover:

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Readers with an idea of all that is involved in book publishing will be aware that, behind such a simple layout, there are many technical and editorial issues. Then there’s the question, on the back cover, of how a 73-year-old author of a family-history book might refer to himself. As you can see, for the circumstances, I’ve become Waterview “Billy”.

Does such a personage still exist today… or is the present-day old-timer (and blogger) at Gamone named William Skyvington a totally different individual? That’s an interesting and indeed profound philosophical question. To my mind, “Billy” still exists… but in a ferociously new-born fashion, where almost all the Jacarandas and bendy bridges behind him have been burnt.

A single marvelous tree remains. In fact, a frail sapling. A mythical female phantom. I shall refer to her forever, simply (in any case, I never knew her name), as the girl in the fawn dress. Once upon a time, I caught a glimpse of her as I was waiting for the school bus in South Grafton. She was an angel. Unbelievably beautiful, but ethereal and untouchable, beyond the bounds of my contacts. She was a Catholic kid: a pupil of the school run by the nuns of South Grafton. In my mind, there has always been a photographic image of the house where she lived. It was the humble abode of Mary. It was unthinkable, of course, that I might ever dare to knock on that door. Meanwhile, I have spent my life searching for her. The girl in the fawn dress...

Amazon lists my novel

There’s no doubt about it: my novel All the Earth is Mine is now available through Amazon like any ordinary book… and probably right throughout the world (at least, wherever Amazon is accessible).

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This proves conclusively that my self-publishing adventure has become a concrete reality, and that Gamone Press is indeed an operational publishing house.

The next title to be published by Gamone Press will be A Little Bit of Irish — My Mother's People in Australia.

BREAKING NEWS: A Google search for the expression ALL THE EARTH IS MINE carried out on my home computer here at Gamone (which probably behaves differently to other machines and Internet contexts throughout the planet) brings up a dozen or so references to Exodus (which has always been a top-of-the-charts book, for as long as I remember) followed by links to the present blog post and other stuff related to my novel. I'm up there with the best authors. Watch out, Yahveh, here I come!

Cover for my book on paternal genealogy

I’ll soon be needing a cover image for They Sought the Last of Lands, which describes the paternal dimension of my family history. Here’s a possible maquette:

For the moment, I’m not convinced that this maquette is good. My choice of the theme of wild horses in the Australian Outback (an image that belongs to Les Hiddins and ABC Books) evokes, above all, my grandfather’s childhood dream of leaving London and finding freedom in the Australian bush. Meanwhile, I've contacted ABC Books in the hope of obtaining a high-resolution file of this image.

We’ll see. All suggestions are welcomed. I plan to bring out this title at Gamone Press as soon as possible, shortly after the publication of A Little Bit of Irish.

POSTSCRIPT: I'm aware that a talented graphics artist (highly paid) would solve rapidly my cover-design challenge. But a professional operation of that kind would propulse me out of the self-publishing field, and disrupt the whole friendly common-sense idea of producing and distributing a family-history document without falling into the trap of paying a fortune to vanity-press printers. Please accept my amateurism!

Cover for my book on maternal genealogy

Up until now, I’ve been using the following cover for the typescript of my book on maternal genealogy, soon to be published by Gamone Press.

I’ve always been aware that this dull cover (based upon a Xmas card sent to me, 33 years ago, by an Australian uncle) was a temporary thing, and that it would need to be replaced, sooner or later, by a more attractive design. This morning, I created a couple of possible models for the cover, making use of Australian images that I can purchase (for some 50 euros) in high-resolution format (300 dots per inch).

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In both cases, I’ve used the metaphor of a rural road, symbolizing, as it were, the paths of my pioneering ancestors in Braidwood and the Clarence River region. An observer can no doubt guess that "my mother's people" came from Ireland, but we cannot know, of course, what lies ahead, beyond the crest of the hill. A little bit of greenness by the roadside reinforces the title (without seeking to “explain” it, since there are several subtle reasons for my choice of this title).

You might say that the left-hand maquette is classical, whereas the right-hand maquette is more “modern”. I would appreciate any reactions to these models.

FIRST REACTION: Each new blog post that I publish gives rise automatically to a Twitter message from my @Skyvington account. And that's how I received my first reaction, from a friendly Canadian woman, Diane Rogers, whom I thank greatly.

SECOND REACTION: And here's another Twitter vote in favor of the right-hand model, from a Skeffington lady in Scotland. I thank her very much.

VARIATIONS: It's not all that easy to submit variations that might respect the suggestions of critics. Here, for example, is a version of the right-hand cover with a totally different typography:

The title—A Little Bit of Irish—is certainly highlighted here, and the readability of the cover text is surely maximal, but I have the impression that the heavy typography is being shoved down our throats. I prefer the lightweight style of the initial version with its intriguing font. To be honest, though, I simply don't know how artistically-gifted critics (that's not my case) end up evaluating questions of this kind. So, please, help !

Gamone Press first copy

It arrived by mail this morning from the printing house in England: the first copy of the first book to be published by Gamone Press.

The look and feel of the final product are fine… although I can still see room for minor improvements.

My first publication

I’ve just sent off an order for 5 copies of the very first book published by Gamone Press. It’s a hefty novel of 388 pages printed as a Demy Octavo paperback. Here’s the cover spread:

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I believe that copies can be ordered through the international distribution channels of Lightning Source. For the moment, though, I’m not yet aware of how exactly this operation is carried out in the various countries.

Gamone Press

A new publishing house is about to emerge: Gamone Press. Our first title will be a paper book: A Little Bit of Irish — My Mothers' People in Australia.

Published by Gamone Press, this book will be marketed internationally by the giant UK-based IngramSpark organization.

Our second title will be a rather technical manual explaining, not surprisingly, how the first title came into existence.

After that, there’ll be another genealogical document: They Sought the Last of Lands — My Father's Forebears. And this will be followed by a paper edition of the novel All the Earth Is Mine associated with an official eBook version.

Other publications will follow at a modest rate. In particular, there'll be my long-awaited update on the Skeffingtons:

In this way, I shall be in a position to publish all that I have to say as a writer, while avoiding to get screwed by unscrupulous capitalists.

Furthermore, I'll no longer have to go through the boring process of attempting to convince dull employees of established publishing houses that I have something to say.