In the spirit of James Joyce’s explanation of how he wrote Ulysses, I will lay down the writing markers in my creation of Out of Competition.
Out of Competition is a cracked mirror reversal of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
In terms of the underlying history – instead of a French coalition force under the leadership of an aging, misguided and infirm Napoleon, making his extraordinary blunders in the 1812 invasion of Russia, Out of Competition tracks the behaviour of some Russians who “attend-invade” an annual film festival in France on the Cote d’Azur, in the seaside town of Renne-Sur-Mer.
While Napoleon blundered into and around Russia for nearly six months, summer going fall heading into full winter, my characters blunder around a French Riviera film festival for just over one fortnight, one spring.
Out of Competition fortuitously foresees unfolding history in the 21st century.
In 2010, after reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I decided on a Russian invasion of a French Film Festival as the story basis to my novel. Then in 2014, again 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
In the writing 2014 onward, my description of street violence appear, demonstrators protesting for a democratic contest, was later mirrored in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. I had no idea these protests would explode during Trump 1.
In late 2019-20, I completed the first draft of a storyline, highlighting democracy as fundamental to the good operation of the film festival, without any idea how the democratic principles and processes would be attacked in a developed nation with a solid history in democracy, as the United States. Writing my novel, I never thought American democracy could ever be so fragile. I’m still bewildered by the rapid disintegration of it at the hands of this president who has been adjudicated by American Courts of Law as a sex-offender and a felon.
As well, in the writing my story’s denouement, writing it in 2021, one character, Merryl, manages to organise an extraordinary 2 billion dollar worldwide success in her self-written and directed Reinvasion of the Body Snatchers. At the time, I hadn’t even heard of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie’s plans to make Barbie. The first I learnt of their film was in 2023.
My novel became a prophecy of their success, and other matters on several levels. And if anyone doubts the truth of this, I have digital copies to demonstrate what I am saying.
