There are a lot of people to thank for helping me bring this one home. It was a devil of a book to write, for a host of reasons. For one thing, I began writing it the week before my father passed away, and inevitably the long shadow of that event dimmed the joy of writing, at least for the first six months or so, slowing it to a crawl.
Paradoxically, even as my production of useable text diminished, I could feel the scale of the story I wanted to tell getting bigger. What had originally begun life as an idea for a short, satiric stab at Hollywood began to blossom into something larger, lusher and stranger: a fantasia on Hollywood both in its not-so-innocent youth and in its present, wholly commercialized phase, linked by a sizeable cast and a mythology which I would need to create and explain in very considerable detail.
I don’t doubt that this second incarnation of the book will be much more satisfying a read than the firstwhich I had written almost in its entirety before changing directionbut Lord, it was a son of a bitch to get down onto the page.
