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Jukebox Hero: Regarding dreams and music


(9/10)


The Ultimate Deal is a massive saga. In its debut paperback format it was around 700 pages in Bulgarian, but I prefer the word count: 190 000 words.


The book has four sub-books with the four storylines, those of: Barry, Alexa, Dragan, and Entity.


From the start, I didn't want to underestimate my reader's intelligence.


In any case, such a massive project: without clear solutions to financing, without clear ideas about marketing and if anyone would actually like to read it, is actually written, edited, published, and translated on the afterburner. Under the influence of the antipsychotics.


This requires a lot dreams, faith, and delusion.


I will try to defend a geneticist's point of view with the caveat that I needed to sacrifice A LOT to make it happen (and this is not including the English translation).


Such sacrifices do promise (with very high risk) great rewards.


Apart from the potential dividends and leaving my name for posterity (humble), my egocentric dream was to produce something that is more than the common media trope "me, me, me".


I love that I'm alive. I love the world despite its wars, despite violence, despite corruption, despite disease and suffering. I've excused them to myself as necessities justifying free will.


Sure, a bacterium might have less freedom, and humans are slightly more complex, but I don't believe that God is so anthropocentric that They want only man to feel good.


That is why there needs to be an environment of freedom, within physical bounds.


Bacteria are allowed to infect us. We are allowed to kill them with antibiotics.


If you are a pessimist, open some statistics. Despite all the troubles, we live in the most peaceful time, we bury the least amount of children, even poor classes have access to products that kings of the past could barely obtain.


Life has many shitty things, but it's getting better no matter what the talking heads say.


It's very fashionable to spit on everything. But that's because it's easy to spit.


It's harder to laud life. It's harder to believe in a dream because as there are great things in life like the kiss of the beloved, to do stupid stuff with friends, to make a sad person smile, there's also a lot of evil and injustice.


We often feel life's other side, death, as injustice.


Media makes money out of this, mixing with some facts and even more pathos than what I wrote above has.


That is why I figured that a book about the same length as Dune, my initial benchmark for length, was necessary to fix the everyday sludge of spam. That is why it is so massive.


I needed to fight capitalist, communist, religious, political, fake propaganda about "We, the X group, can fix your life, if you'd just support us."


Writing The Ultimate Deal was not about "fixing others". It was about fixing myself.


The fact that I now have a written rock opera is a bonus.


Rock opera's don't necessarily need to be as long. Even the 4-minute song Jukebox Hero by Foreigner can make you believe that the stars can smile back. That is why I chose it for the culmination of the book.


After all, we are nothing more than soundwave in the rock opera of the Universe.


We are all jukebox heroes.



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