Sunday 18 September 2011

Pas de Trois

Well today there was cause for a little celebration as I finally reached the end of the third draft of the book but not before a bit of tidying up. On the way to my destination I gave the whole work in progress another quick sweep, changing little details here and there and, as I suspected, there was still a section that I wasn't altogether happy with. This was the review for the Making of album that now forms part of the Complete Correlations boxed set. It is all well and good sitting, listening to three hours of music and recording every detail on paper but boy, is it dull to read later on. Something that I've definitely learnt whilst working on this book is that trying to say what you're saying concisely and doing away with excess information is very important. The trick is to know what to keep and what to delete but to do that it is sometimes necessary to have lots on the page in the first place. Anyway: the section is now trimmed and altered to my satisfaction...at least for now.

It is now time for a brief pause before I begin the fourth draft. I'm going to take a short break, really examine my work in detail and then start the next raft of improvements. I take comfort in the fact that each successive draft takes significantly less time to complete than the previous one. I'll be back in a little while for the next chapter......

Thursday 8 September 2011

Happy Birthday, Manuel Göttsching!

Wishing a happy birthday to Manuel Göttsching, born 9th September 1952.

Sunday 4 September 2011

A breakthrough

Well, today I've had rather a fantastic breakthrough on the journey towards completion of the book. After writing about Ashra's live appearance and award at last year's German Schallwelle Preis for electronic music I moved on to what I think will be the final section. This describes my memories of 2010, including staying at Berlin's UFA Fabrik in February, seeing Manuel Gottsching live in Paris in June and once again in Glasgow at Christmas. I also wrote what will probably be the last few paragraphs, which was a very strange feeling. I now need to do some tidying up here and there but I'm fairly close to being able to say that the third draft is complete.