BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

I have written a 117,156-word book entitled Uncorrected Bound Proof. I commenced writing it on 1 January 2023 and finished editing it today. The book consists of 100 chapters, each based on a song in my personal Your Top Songs 2022 algorithmic Spotify playlist, in ascending order from numbers 100-1. The book’s purpose is to tell the story of my not uneventful life, but I have done so in accordance with the strict numbering order of the playlist. This means that the events of my life are told out of sequence; however, I have ensured that the central autobiographical narrative has remained united and coherent.

 

While this is a book dictated by music, and which in large part consists of musical criticism, it is, however, not a book about music. It ventures with moderate violence against the grain of what is normally perceived as music writing. It mixes autobiography, criticism and semi-abstract thinking in ways which have not previously been attempted in this field. Its influences would include the likes of Alasdair Gray, Simon Barnes, Nicola Barker, Lucy Ellmann, Michael Bywater, Percival Everett, David Thomson and Roger Lewis, rather than Greil Marcus, Nick Kent, Nik Cohn and so forth.

 

I was very briefly a celebrity in the mid-late 1960s due to being a misdiagnosed child prodigy. Since then, however, I have been an anonymous being with a solid NHS professional career but seemingly little to show as a writer. I am not a famous musician or even one with a cult following from several decades ago. I have written about music online, and sometimes in print, since the autumn of 2001 after I became prematurely widowed and had to do something in order to find a reason to remain alive. The few who do know my writing consider it among the best music writing there is, including several very well-known musicians, some of whom are no longer with us. So influential was my early blog writing that it directly inspired the late Mark Fisher to begin k-punk.

 

In the course of my own life, however, I have faced death on at least four occasions, most recently in 2018 when I underwent major and potentially life-threatening surgery. I talk about the lucid nightmares which I experienced in my 137 days as a hospital inpatient at that time in frank detail in this book. I also discuss my extremely personal relationship to music and regularly, and sometimes angrily, interrupt my own musings.

 

The 100 songs which form the basic structure of this book are, by and large, not well-worn “classics.” This is not the same, predictable list of songs that you will see in any other comparable book. They are simply, and mathematically, the 100 songs to which I listened most on Spotify over the course of one year and the list might best be described as a horizontal one – i.e. number 22 is three ALONG from number 25, not three ABOVE. There is no great climax to a classic, although that cannot be said for the writing. Many of these songs will be entirely unfamiliar to many readers, or at the very least unexpected.

 

Given the intended nature of this book, I could not avoid using material from blogs I have written in the past, but I have tried to be sparing and not obvious with those. There are no more than five extracts from Then Play Long, but these have all been revised for the purpose of this book, as have a number of pieces from former blogs, most of which have remained out of print for some while, or have never been publicly published at all. The reason for using this material will be obvious to those who read the book and are able to follow its emotional journey, and I have reprinted nothing that is not thoroughly relevant to the book’s underlying theme.

 

The book, as I said, is written. Now all that awaits is for somebody willing to publish it. While I would like to avoid pursuing the route of self-publishing if at all possible, this may well prove a chimerical dead end. Publishers only publish things which they think will make a profit; that is their nature as a business.

 

However, the primary purpose of Uncorrected Bound Proof is not to make money, but to prove to the world of tomorrow, should such a thing come to pass, that once upon a time I existed on this planet and this is what I was about. Since this is a book which I have written in a very deliberate and methodical way, I am adamant that it must be published as it stands, with no editing beyond that which I myself have undertaken. Otherwise it becomes somebody else’s idea of a book rather than my book. To paraphrase another celebrated blogger of a generation ago, other writers write what they think people will like, whereas I write me.

 

If any publisher or agent would like to email me at marcellocarlin@yahoo.co.uk I will be happy to send them a copy of the manuscript to read. Obviously with something based on a list compiled in 2022 I wouldn’t like to leave it until 2025 until it got published.

 

Thank you for your time.