Again, I have been something of a phantom of myself for much of the last year,passing through the house on my way to write or paint with a distracted look.They kindly indulge my craziness, and my endless calls for cups of hot sweettea.I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr Alex del Rosario, and hisassistant Judy Azar. I recently described Alex as the perfect 'artist'sdoctor'. He has guided me through some lengthy periods of sickness in the lastcouple of years, understanding as no other physician in my history has thefierce and sometimes self-wounding passion that makes artists attempt to dothe impossible: to paint another world into being, while writing a two hundredthousand word novel while producing a couple of movies, for instance. For me,this is my natural, albeit obsessive, behavior. But my body isn't that of athirty-year-old any longer (or even that of a forty-year-old!). It complainsnow when I drive it hard; as I do daily. It has taken a massive contributionof sympathetic counsel, medication and alternative therapies to keep body andspirit together since my father's death and I owe Alex a huge debt of thanksfor my present good health.Finally, the powers that be. First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, myHollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned(in this book, for instance) as being for cold, artistically disinterested menand women. My thanks and great admiration go to the lawyer who has helpedshape my business life in the last two years, David Golden. The Abarat dealwith the Disney Company was the largest literary deal made in Hollywood lastyear, and it covers every possible shape and permutation that my inventedworld might take, in the hands of Disney's imagineers. To give you a taste ofwhat kind of wordage David Golden has minutely analyzed on my behalf: theDisney contract had three pages alone devoted to listing its contents!On the literary side, my dear Anne Sibbald, who has surely the tenderestheart of any agent who ever represented an unreformed maker of monsters likemyself, has been a constant source of encouragement, and a fearless championwhenóon occasionóthe machinations of the corporate world proved painful andincomprehensible.And lastóbut oh, you both know, never leastómy editors.In New York, Robert Jones (who's had his own wars to fight of late, andhas still always been there with a witty word of support; or some wonderfullydry remark at the expense of the many idiocies of the publishing world.)And finally we come to Jane Johnson. My Jane, I insist, the Editor ofEditors, who is never far from my mind when I set pen to paper. Increasingly,Jane, I think I write to entertain you, to please you. We have survived formany years together on a raft of shared beliefs about the necessity of dreams,tossed around in the tumultuous seas of modern publishing. In that time, Janehas lost countless colleagues to exhaustion, frustration and despair, and yetshe manages to be a mistress of beautiful prose as well as an editor of astable of authors, who, like me, could not imagine their literary livescontinuing without her.I would have given up the increasingly problematic ambition of having abroad audience for my work, and fled into the minor, the hermetic and theoblique, without her tireless encouragement.My love to you, my Jane; and, as always, my heartfelt thanks.Here's another tale for you, saved from the flood.CBCONTENTSPROLOGUE THE CANYONPART ONE THE PRICE OF THE HUNT
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