In the comments to the beard/mask post, Mark Walters (hi Mark, yes I remember you!) asks for an update on the mp3 book, with the “of course your health comes first” proviso. I am happy to think of myself as an author rather than a cancer patient, so here’s an update.
The book was fully drafted last summer and went out for review. It is now under contract with Duke University Press. Duke wants me to cut 10,000 words. (And lest you think they are being unreasonable, I am certain they are doing my readers a favor; the current draft is 140,000 words and there’s probably too much of me a) working stuff out and b) doing archival show-and-tell). The readers were very positive and had a few easy-to-implement suggestions. Of course, being the perfectionist I am, I want to do more. Also, the visuals aren’t as arresting as The Audible Past so I need to contract with an artist to draw me some diagrams that are visually striking and will endow the book with an appealing look. (If you know of someone who might be interesting and affordable, please pass along the information.)
I haven’t been able to work on it since the reviews came in. But I have this fantasy of logging a few hours each morning before external beam radiation treatment, at least until I am too fatigued to do so. I have no idea if this is reasonable. People’s reactions to EBR are widely variable and so I can’t really be certain of what mine will be like.
I also owe a couple people essays that I need to carve out of the ms (with some tweaking of course) and one “accepted with revisions” journal manuscript, and that will probably happen first as warm-up. Right now, it looks as though writing-in-earnest and EBR will start the same week — May 10th. We shall see.
In the meantime, some prospector nabbed the standard US domains with the name “mp3book” but I own “mp3book.ca.” Landed Immigrant status has its privileges. I have some ideas of what to do with it, though a book-related blog isn’t one of them (I am rejecting those kinds of “must keep going on this project forever or the site will atrophy” ideas out of hand in a grand gesture of self-preservation. I’m sure I will be giving talks on the topic for years but I would rather leave myself open to the possibility of a shockingly tangential next project if such a thing occurs to me while on sabbatical).
I also hope to finally get the wheels turning again this summer on the Sound Studies Reader.
Good to be thinking about this! Cutting 10k from a 140k MS is really not that much. I would say you lose at least that much just by tightening up the main text and footnotes. (I once cut an article in half, from 15k to 8k, by just removing every redundant word.)