Ambrose Bierce once said that erudition is dust shaken out of a book and into an empty skull. That has nothing to do with this post, except for the skull part. But…now you have a Bierce quote to throw around so…you’re welcome. This is primarily a photo post.
This 1985 picture…
…was taken in the bedroom Marky had grown up in, in his family’s Zurich apartment. In fact, it isn’t one picture at all. I’m not sure if the camera had no timer, or what have you, but no one was there to take this, so the pictures of each individual were taken, and Marky used his graphic design skills (for which he was in school at the time) to make a composite. Turned out great!
And this picture…
…was taken by me during the September 2024 research trip (almost 40 years later!), in the very same apartment that Marky grew up in, and in which he currently lives with his beautiful family. And that is the same skull. Also, Marky is a lot of fun.
Here it is in color…
I got to hold a little metal history right there. I got to hold a number of historic Coroner items, actually. I even broke one of them; yes, I was mortified. More pics and posts to come…
Fraction of what I sorted through during a 2.5-week trip to Zurich in September 2024, graciously hosted by Marky Edelmann and his lovely family. I never ate so well.
As the title says, I’m getting back to the book. If you’re new here, I was unavoidably waylaid en route to finishing this book (this book being the official Coroner band biography) for quite some time, after two years of, geez, just a tremendous amount of work. I had an Instagram account specifically for the book, but I can no longer access it, which is a bummer. If you came from there, I’m glad you found me. This is starting from scratch.
That said, here I am. And I’ll try to give writing updates here, though, I have to tell you, it might be a little boring. I may have something interesting to say about the band, but…I’m writing. Researching. Processing a lot of video interview material. It’s very practical and time consuming.
I was going over everything where I left off when I finally gave up trying to keep the work up. So, writing-wise, I’m roughly 37k words in. I have no idea what the final MS will look like in terms of length. I know when I started writing, I set out some perimeters for myself, but blew right past the limit for each section I got through. There was just too much to include. I expect this book — at least in my own final draft form — to be hefty.
Research. I have, literally, a few thousand pages — Word docs, single space — of transcribed, translated press from all over the world, from 1986 to the present. I have lists out the wazoo — live shows (there might be a few missing, but it’s pretty exhaustive), releases (down to which Punishment for Decadence had the glossy black strip and when it got a matte strip), etc. I am coming up on a thousand pages of transcribed interview notes. More. It’s a lot, and a lot to manage.
The video interviews themselves…I figured it out at some point, but I can’t remember the number — I had, at that time, at least 100 hours. To be fair, my interview style is very chatty — it takes a while, but it seems to be the best way to jog memories and also just talk around the immediate topics at hand, giving a fuller picture of whatever we’re talking about. So, great for information gathering, not great when you have to sit down and do notation. And, again, time consuming, for me and for them (they’ve been very generous, particularly Marky).
I got four hours of sleep last night for no particular reason, but I’m determined to get something done today. I need to figure out/narrow down who else I need to talk to for this thing. I need to just sit down and read what I’ve written, then (or while) I update my 34-page outline (which, with the release of Dissonance Theory, will probably add a page or five). I am largely writing this out of order, so I need to organize a handful of sections to get my actual writing lined up (probably get back into the writing next week). Then, just some practical stuff.
We also have a wildlife person coming to start the process of removing the mice from our new home humanely, and the furnace inspection for the season.
See, the thing is that I am a single person. The fact is, I spent the first, say, eight months simply gathering press from the band, from online sources, from print magazines, etc., transcribing every single one of them, and then translating. I used a few translating apps, which have worked out very well, but they weren’t usable until I had transcribed everything, so that was absolutely necessary. It’s a lot of work, but it’s work that makes the sit-down writing go very smoothly, very quickly. Having it transcribed into a Word doc makes it possible for me to search all the information easily. I actually went through all of it, put it in chronological order, and separated quotes and paragraphs into topical sections, so, for instance, if I want to write about what Marky was saying about the lyrics from No More Color in 1989, there’s a whole section of quotes from myriad contemporary interviews, BOOM, all in one spot. I don’t have to go through every letter and word. I would then go to my master file of notes from the Marky interviews, search for No More Color and find everything he said about the lyrics. Easy-peasy.
Yeah, I’ve got the ’tism.
Anyway, the problem was that I literally did that 8-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, for months. Once I was finished with that, I implemented a No Writing on Weekends rule, and 5-7 hours a work day, no more. Frequent breaks. And…my husband is going to be helping me, in order to get things done faster (I must stress how much he’s helped by way of general support through this ordeal). Primarily, he’ll be conducting most of the rest of the interviews so I can concentrate on doing the stuff only I can do (so I know what I have) — processing the interviews and writing, writing, writing. And, of course, as always, he is my first, most perceptive reader.
See how exciting this blogging about writing this book is already? Oh, also, I’m not going to be talking exclusively about the Coroner book. I’ll be posting stupid shit here, too. Enjoy.
Lee Harper Oswald 