Done

I've got a few more pieces of news to share. As you might gather, since I've changed the name of my blog, I now have a title!

Fearless: The Making Of Post-Rock.

Graham Sutton designed the cover. Being a great admirer of the Bark Psychosis artwork, I was delighted when he agreed to do it. Isn't it grand? The orange/green bits will look very orange/green, my name and the subtitle is in silver, and there will be some fancy technique I don't understand used for texture. Basically it will stand out on the bookshelves so even people going into Waterstones for a Peter James novel won't be able to resist it.

There are seventeen chapters, plus an introduction. I conducted forty-two new interviews for it. There are 129,268 words in the main text body (9,268 more words than I was contracted for, you lucky people). There'll be about fifty pictures in it, including rare flyers and posters, and many previously-unpublished photos. I completed my draft in the middle of November, I got an edited version back just before Christmas, and today I've finished my final version of it - taking out the odd libelous statement (!) and adding in clarifications and corrections.

I named it Fearless because that's the overwhelming attitude I found among the music and the people that I interviewed. The Making Of bit was a later addition and took a while to form, but it refers to the fact that I've not only written on things usually tagged 'post-rock'. but taken a wider approach (readers of this blog will be familiar with this, e.g. unpicking the influence of the Cocteau Twins); it also covers the idea that post-rock, as a genre, was 'made' - constructed, de-constructed and re-shaped over a lengthy time period.

I'm happy with my writing, I think, although I know I'm still too close to it and it's spattered with afterbirth. The real test will be next week, when I try to read it 'as a book' for the first time without my metaphorical red pen to hand.

Psychologically, though, it's tough. You know in Trainspotting, where Renton is trying to explain what heroin is like and basically says 'when you're on smack you only have to think about smack, you don't have to care about not having a girlfriend or some shite football team that always loses'? That's what writing a book, to me, feels like too. It's gone, and suddenly now I have to worry about my tax return and moving house and Brexit and Trump and whether others will like it and have I run out of tea bags and I really should have called that person back and so on. The world is more fearful as I leave Fearless than when I entered it.

Thanks for reading this blog up till now. It really helped me to extrapolate some key ideas which I used (or built upon) in the book. In the months to come I'll post a few teasers for Fearless, and share some of the masses of extra information I accrued that, for one reason or another, didn't make the final version.

Out at the end of May!