a full manuscript
So maybe you saw yesterday's tweets!
Yes, that's right folks, Industry is Industry-ed. (There was a really interesting conversation in the replies about wordcount vs. page length, fyi!). Well, not really. There is a lot more to do. But now my "All chapters" folder looks like this:
(Astute observers will notice I've tweaked chapter titles a bit.) I still have a lot of revisions ahead, both terms of adding some new-ish stuff from the "to add" documents into the main chapters, and looking at the whole manuscript and seeing how things fit together.
I'm pretty happy with my Epilogue, for now at least. It was never going to be a Conclusion: it's less a "here's a big summing up" than a "here's a look forward." I had originally imagined it to be some massive, 45-page chapter that took every aspect of the previous chapters, which all stop by 2000, and trace what happened to them in the 19 years since (here’s six pages on arts funding post-2000! here’s six pages on the record industry! etc etc). Then I started writing it, and realized I didn't need to say as much as I thought it did, and now it's only about 10 pages. It takes us to the twenty-first century, in brief, and gives a sense of what Bang on a Can has been up to, and the legacy of the marketplace turn. As I say in the epilogue, my book tells only the first half of Bang on a Can's story, but I do think it tells the full story of the marketplace turn. My concluding paragraphs offer what I consider to be the book's only real "call to arms." I won't be writing about it here; it only makes sense after you've read the few hundred pages. But I'm happy with what I have imagined for the end of the reader's journey.
So here's what's next:
Transcribing a couple more interviews and adding them to the "to add" files
Mashing the bits still in the "to add" files into the chapters
Getting feedback from friends on a couple chapters
Looking at the chapters in comparison to each other and seeing how it holds up as a full manuscript (that's a big project!)
Editing my bibliography
Obtaining photographs I want to use, getting permissions for them, figuring out where they go in the manuscript, etc etc
Obtaining permissions for various other materials I'm quoting from in the book
A ton of other publication related stuff -- front matter, back matter, etc etc etc etc (Oxford has a long list of stuff that needs to be submitted)
But actually next, fortunately, is a break. I'll be traveling for a couple weeks, so no newsletters for a bit. Here's something interesting you can read in the interim: a 1991 conversation between James Jordan of the New York State Council for the Arts, John Duffy of Meet the Composer, and David LL Laskin of EAR Magazine (printed in EAR Magazine 16, no. 1, April 1991). It's really an incredibly interesting discussion that gets to key questions about new music, political action, popularity, and patronage that still resonate today. Here’s one of many fascinating passages:
Click here and you can read the whole thing.
Georgia really, really loves her bone.