Just so you know I’ve not abandoned the site. I’m just still working on the California Dreaming book, adding in the extra stuff that didn’t appear on the site. It’s turned into a much bigger task than I ever imagined when I first Kickstarted it — I suggested then that it would be about 50,000 words, the same as my previous music books. The ebook version I sent to Patreons and Kickstart patrons in December had already reached that, and the final thing will top 90,000 words.
That may not sound like a lot — it’s a medium-length novel in length — but every one of the eighty separate essays in the book requires separate research, fact-checking, and multiple listens to the song in question (or in some cases the album it’s from). It’s turned into a quite massive undertaking.
And at the moment I’m finishing that off, completing the thirteen essays that haven’t appeared on the site. There are whole extra threads of this giant tapestry that I haven’t put in yet, and I’ve generally left the more difficult stuff til last. For example, I need to deal with Lowell George & The Factory, and with Fraternity Of Man, to properly show the path between the Gamblers (the first band in the book), the Mothers of Invention (who turn up in the middle), and Little Feat (who turn up in the last chapter) — this is an essential part of the “plot”. But there’s a lot less to say about Don’t Bogart That Joint than there is about Good Vibrations, which means I have to work harder.
Every essay is also getting rewritten — usually only slightly, for stylistic consistency and to remove redundancies, but sometimes extensively, where the original was inaccurate (like the one on Woodstock).
I’m hoping to have the final thing done by the end of the month, and then I can get back to blogging properly, but this is one of those “the last 20% takes 80% of the effort” deals…
I hope it’ll be worth it, at least for those of you who like my music writing. For the rest of you, once this is done I can start talking about comics and politics more for a while…