Thank you for signing up for my newsletter, which I plan to send out on a monthly basis. As you know, commencing in 1994 I spent twenty-five years researching, writing and publishing The Tale of Frieda Keysser, which is a very long time indeed to write one book, even a very large one. At times I thought I might never get to the end of it, for most people in the Strehlow family don’t live much beyond 70 and I was 73 by the time Volume Two was launched in Alice Springs on 17 December 2019. I think I am now older than anyone in my direct male line – ever. What a thought! My friends told me it was all taking too long and I ought to just rush through to get to the end years before, but there was simply so much to discover and nobody had ever even looked at most of it, let alone drawn on the information it contained. So – ignoring all advice to the contrary – I decided I had no option but to continue to plough on through thick and thin and would just have to hope I made it through to the end. I did – and I’m very glad I didn’t just rush the ending. It would have been a big mistake to rush the closing stages, and would have defeated the very purpose of setting the record straight I had set myself at the beginning of this very long journey.
Naturally I came across all sorts of information which I personally found fascinating but couldn’t include in the book because I had to tell a story which was already impossibly complicated and long. So I did the only thing possible – I put it to one side and thought, if I ever reach the end of this saga, maybe I can do something with it later. I am currently working on a book all about the process of writing ofThe Tale. I am calling it Investigating a Forgotten Past. It is taking rather longer than anticipated, but progress is good and with luck I shall be able to publish it early next year as an e-book. I have not used this format before, but it seems I am somewhat out of step with the times: lots of people now read e-books. It will also be available as a PDF, with perhaps a POD (print-on-demand) version as well. I hope you will find it fascinating when it’s finished. It’s going to be a modest-sized book, probably around 50,000 words, so not a further brain-buster. It will be purchasable directly from my website, which is due for a major upgrade in the immediate future. Later there will be a print version, maybe even an audiobook, since people are now asking for such things, though I shall have to learn how to do this, for it’s a complicated process and I gather it’s also expensive to do.
If possible I intend to include something rather fun in each newsletter, just to avoid giving the impression that everything of importance is deadly serious. Humour is part of just about everything good for us, especially today, when nearly all the official news is depressing and deliberately made so in order to attract people’s interest: as they say, only bad news is real news, anything good can’t be news, and the rest is irrelevant trivia. My experience contradicts this: people say and do all manner of entertaining things which are important, and though I was tied down to the main story, at times I became completely caught up in the sideshow and had to tear myself away from it to keep my eye on the goal I had set myself, or I would simply never have arrived.
One such sideshow event occurred when I was in Bamberg, a very charming medieval-baroque Catholic city north of Nuremberg which fortunately wasn’t bombed in World War Two so retains all its centuries-old charm, complete with hidden nooks and crannies. I spent a lot of time researching and writing there. I discovered it in the 1990s while running my theatre company and we always had large, enthusiastic audiences roll up to our shows, often doing as many as four performances in the city theatre to fit them all in.
Outside the touring I used to talk to people about my book, and they of course were keen to offer me advice, though when I asked if they had ever written a book themselves and were speaking from experience, the answer was usually no. I discussed with them my problem of how to finance an operation taking so many years to accomplish, and when we had exhausted this topic we got on to how I was being overwhelmed with information and the question of how on earth I could organise it. What follows is an excerpt from my latest book. It is my account of an anecdote I was told as a joke. I greatly enjoyed it and hope you will too