INTRODUCTION

 

The purpose of this blog is to publish a 117,156-word book that I have written, entitled Uncorrected Bound Proof. I commenced writing it on 1 January 2023 and finished editing it on 3 August of the same year. 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 done my best to ensure that the central autobiographical narrative has remained united and coherent.

 

I have made a few half-hearted attempts to engage the interest of publishers with regard to this book but none has proved successful. Rather than embark upon an extended commentary about the current state of the British publishing industry, it is far more realistic for me to understand that there are no serious takers for a difficult and challenging book by an unknown writer based on what is now a two-year-old list of music. In truth the book should probably have been rushed into publication in late 2023 while it was still current (or "hot") but in the present environment, or indeed in any environment, that is unachievable.

As a consequence, I have decided to publish the book, chapter by chapter, in this blog since I believe it is the best thing I have ever written and am not keen on waiting until after I am dead before it is recognised as such. Who knows - some enterprising publisher might come across this blog and want to transfer it into print. Books, after all, are still easier for most people to read than a computer screen.

I do not intend to "explain" Uncorrected Bound Proof any further than the description in the first paragraph of this post; to paraphrase Ian McCulloch apropos "The Killing Moon," you don't buy a book of poetry then buy another book to explain what the poems mean. I trust my readers to have sufficient intelligence and enterprise to work it out for themselves.

 

Some of the writing in this book will be familiar. This is because I took the opportunity to include some of what is, in my opinion, the best writing that I have done on various blogs. A kind of "greatest blog hits" if you must, all the better to explain who I am and why I write as I do. Some chapters are extremely brief, others immensely long.

Above all, Uncorrected Bound Proof is a fragmented story of a jumbled confusion of a life which I believe is worth sorting out.