Writing Off 2019 (but in a good way)

Carl Cafarelli's three all-time favorite pop groups are The Beatles, The Ramones, and The Flashcubes. So there. He is co-host (with Dana Bonn) of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, the best three hours of radio on the whole friggin' planet, Sundays from 9 p.m. to midnight (EST) at WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM in Syracuse, and on the web at sparksyracuse.org. His daily blog at www.carlcafarelli.blogspot.com covers pop music, comic books, and whatever glittery thing attracts his attention. Carl has written for Goldmine, The Syracuse New Times, DISCoveries, Amazing Heroes, Comics Collector, The Comics Buyers' Guide, The Buffalo News, Rhino Records, Big Stir, AHOY Comics, and several others. He is working slowly on his first book, The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). He still wants to write for The Monkees and take a ride in the Batmobile.

As 2019 approaches its climax and denouement, I have to admit it was a pretty good year for me as a writer. Even though I fell short of some of my targets, I accomplished just enough that yeah, I really can't complain.

Beyond continuing to maintain a daily blog, I had two goals for my writing this year: write and sell a book, and write and sell some short fiction. I made some progress on the former, and actually succeeded with the latter. 



Let's start with the works of fiction. I wrote a total of ten new short stories in 2019, each of them crafted with the specific goal of selling them to AHOY Comics, a national publisher based in my home town of Syracuse. AHOY is a paying market for short prose fiction, and I wanted in on that. The good folks at AHOY rejected five of my stories, but bought and paid for four of them. A fifth and final 2019 submission still awaits word of its fate. If that one sells before the ball drops on New Year's Eve, I'll have achieved the specific goal I had in mind for my short stories in 2019. If not, well, like I said: still a good year.

And those sales mean this was the first year since 2006 (the year I stopped freelancing for Goldmine) that I made any money from writing. And, even as modest as the sum was, I believe I made more money writing this year than I did in either of my last two years with Goldmine, possibly a little bit more than both of those years combined. For someone who's enough of an attention hound to blog every day, that's a welcome validation, and an incentive to keep going. 



It was all the way back on 9/5/18 when I first announced my intention to turn my blog series The Greatest Record Ever Made! into a book. The notion of an eventual GREM! book goes back a ways before that, and I've spent 2019 working in earnest to make that happen. It's expanded considerably over that time, going from a plan to discuss 40 songs, then 45, then 50, then 100, and now its current blueprint of 100 songs plus 13 bonus tracks, covering 113 GREM! candidates in all. 

I had really hoped to be able announce something/anything (couldn't I just tell you?) about the book's progress by now, but it's a long, long process. Most of the writing is done: more than 100,000 words out of a proposed 125,000 or so, only 17 chapters (out of 113) shy of a complete first draft.

It still needs to be sold to a publisher. My agent will do her best to get that important part done on my behalf. She helped me through the arduous task of building a professional book proposal, and she'll peddle it to presumably interested parties. It...well, it takes a while. But I believe in the book, I think you'll like it, and I hope you'll have a chance to buy a copy eventually.

(Heh. I just looked back at a 4/3/19 book update, when the proposed Table of Contents was only 50 songs. That book would almost be done now, missing only its P. P. Arnold chapter. Progress!)

"Progress?" Finish writing about ME already, ya slacker!

So 2019 was a positive year overall for your Boppin' scribe and his fancy dreams of bein' a writer. The daily blog continues. The weekly This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio show continues. My efforts to write and sell short fiction will continue. The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will continue its winding path toward reality. I've begun putting together a proposal for an original comic book mini-series, a project in embryonic form now, but I've got some ideas. I have at least two other books in mind to do, one fiction, one nonfiction, with more notions to follow, to succeed or fail, to be or not to be. If I didn't do everything I wanted to do this year, 2019 was still a positive step toward being the writer I want to be.

And as for 2020? 2020 is an open book.

THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! EYTAN MIRSKY: This Year's Gonna Be Our Year




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Fans of pop music will want to check out Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, a new pop compilation benefiting SPARK! Syracuse, the home of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl. TIR'N'RR Allstars--Steve Stoeckel, Bruce Gordon, Joel Tinnel, Stacy Carson, Eytan Mirsky, Teresa Cowles, Dan Pavelich, Irene Peña, Keith Klingensmith, and Rich Firestone--offer a fantastic new version of The Kinks' classic "Waterloo Sunset." That's supplemented by eleven more tracks (plus a hidden bonus track), including previously-unreleased gems from The Click Beetles, Eytan Mirsky, Pop Co-Op, Irene Peña, Michael Slawter (covering The Posies), and The Anderson Council (covering XTC), a new remix of "Infinite Soul" by The Grip Weeds, and familiar TIRnRR Fave Raves by Vegas With Randolph, Gretchen's Wheel, The Armoires, and Pacific Soul Ltd. Oh, and that mystery bonus track? It's exquisite. You need this. You're buying it from Futureman.

(And you can still get our 2017 compilation This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, Volume 4, on CD from Kool Kat Musik and as a download from Futureman Records.)

Hey, Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 100 essays (and then some) about 100 tracks, plus two bonus instrumentals, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).