I’m sitting in Le Grand Vefour, between the seats commemorating ‘Pere Dumas’ et George Sand. It’s manifestly a pretentious way to start releasing a novel. But I never pretended not to be pretentious.
I started writing this years ago. Then I found I was too busy living to have the time or objectivity to stop and write about my life. I haven’t stopped living, several lives a day. But I can’t hold off any more on writing.
There are similarities, in what I write, to people who are living, or dead. I’m a writer, and I’m inspired, like all writers, by my experience. But it’s no one’s story but my own. And not even entirely that. I have mixed and matched my life with the lives of others and mixed their lives between them, so that in the end, everything here is true but it is no one’s true story, and everything is real but no one is real.
It’s called Pont Neuf. The new bridge. Bridges, for Jung, in the collective unconscious, indicate change, transition from one place to another, one side, perhaps of one’s self, to another. Something happened to me on the Pont Neuf that changed me, forever. But the reality beyond the physical facts is that what happened there happened with so many people, to me, in so many places at so many times. Maybe it’s only now that it’s stopped happening. And maybe that’s why, only now, I am ready to write.
I’ll try to release a chapter, possibly a short chapter, every week. It’s how Dickens did it. Sunday mornings at 11 am UK time. Some of it has already been written, and I’m rewriting for the present. Some of it I’m writing anew. I’d like people to subscribe because it demonstrates a commitment to me. But I’m not writing for subscriptions. I’m writing to tell stories.