It is November 11, 2017 and in a few days, my novel Vigil in English will go on sales.
I have not realized it properly until this day, but just today a close friend asked me:
“Monika, are you looking forward to the start of sales of your book in English? This is exceptional for you, right?”
I admit that only these questions got me to stop and leave the spiral of events around me. It got me to think a bit.
Hallo? Is it true? Is this really happening?
Then I remembered little Monika, who thoroughly kept all her scribbles and poems, bound them with a thread in the middle and provided them with a “cover” page. Then she put her “books” into her parents’ library, among Les Misérables, Wuthering Heights, or Taking the Bastille. She was dreaming about once becoming a prominent writer with famous movies made according to her books. As a ten-year-old, she even wrote her acceptance speech for the Oscars.
I laughed and tried to remember something from that acceptance speech. I was swiping through my memory and I am quite sure I (of course) thanked God, parents and Alain Delon for accepting the role of the prince and for the great cooperation with him.
I suddenly felt a weird feeling that what is happening these days is actually absolutely natural and normal. This is what I have always been imagining.
Vigil came into existence under very peculiar circumstances. At that time, I had been fighting with fevers for few weeks already and I could not focus on my regular work. Basically, all my literary works were created under peculiar circumstances and under very bizarre conditions…
I was writing my first book of stories Hidden Facts during the most difficult period in my life, when I was literally fighting for life. Another novel Bruno in the Head was written “in exile” in Prague, Aluni, which has not yet come to its time of publishing, was created in a prison and Vigil was a result of fevers.
This may sound unbelievable but since the first moments this novel lived its own life. Somehow, it was different from all my previous works. Without me intervening into anything in any way, at first, my friends started taking it and working with it and then, after a short while, my published did. Only occasionally, I got some information about what is happening with it and what is to happen. I am really curios about its next next “part of the trip” will be.
I am excited mainly for Vigil being liked by the people I care about. One can think that publishing a sci-fi tale in the American and English market is like holding a candle to the sun. The whole world is flooded with sci-fi tales. What can I, a starting writer from the small Slovakia, contribute with?
I am fascinated by the trust vested in me and my work by my publisher. It may not be such a bullshit then, I guess. There must be something about Vigil! I got a few people around me, with whom I share information about my creative work. Recently, we have concluded that when it comes to Vigil, everything happened exactly the way I hoped somewhere deep in my soul. Really, everything.
Now, too, I wish few things, but I am not going to write about them… I will let Vigil “live” and let him clearly show me in the near future whether my writing is worth publishing at the huge market it is about to enter in a few days. I keep my fingers crossed!
Monika
P.S. Get the ebook in a running promotion for free. Expires 18.11.2017 >> http://amzn.to/2hxKLkW