The luxury of writing

In the course of thirty years seven novels came into being. I wrote them apart from my translating work and without any institutional support or other sponsorship.

In the early eighties publishers still paid attention to well-written manuscripts. The answers in the negative were throughout instructive and shaped in more than three lines. Down from the nineties interest in unknown newcomers declined rapidly. Tricky inserted paper snippets were to be found in exactly the same place where they had been put in. Therefore, no one could have moved anything or read even a single line. In the flood of scripts which are offered, it turns out to be more and more haphazard, who of the many authors, writing nowadays as excellent as someone well-known, will be perceived.

Authors who are willing to contribute to publishing costs should be prepared for absurd amounts. Snakie - Diana was valued by a Berlin publisher in 2005 at 22.500 € plus 8.000 to 10.000 € for lector’s fees, because of "the exceptional text length."

Thanks to the digital printing process, which allows print runs of as little as one copy, I no longer write stories that gather dust in a drawer.

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The spelling in my texts follows Duden, 20th edition 1991. There are deviations in the anyway inconsistent spelling of separated and compound verbs. Parentheses in other languages are checked to the best of my knowledge. There, most nouns are written without capital letters. In the inconsistent notation of neologisms and artificial words out of the 21st century, the most frequent variant from Internet is chosen.

I thank in advance for any suggestion concerning spelling mistakes, as well as for factual errors or anachronisms. The fifties and sixties are long past and gone. For that reason alone, the memory is often cheating.