The Nashville Musicians Survival Guide Update

I am now about fourteen months into this project and am happy to say that there is an end in sight. As I have about 95% of the writing finished, I decided it was time to turn it into an unformatted hard copy so I could give it a read thru and assess. So last week Kelly turned it into a PDF and we ordered 3 copies thru Café Press which we received in the mail last Saturday. Even though it’s only a first draft and there’s a lot to still be done, it was pretty exciting to open the package and see my work finally in print.

All week long my daily ritual has been to wake up early, eat breakfast, and tear into the reading with a pen in hand. I’ve been fixing some grammar and punctuation mistakes, assessing the overall flow, and making notes about potential changes and images to obtain. I’m almost thru with this first read thru/edit and so far I’m quite pleased. Among a few of the big tasks that lie ahead are the writing of the last chapter “Define Making It” and the Rhett Akins interview on songwriting.

I’m writing this from the road in a hotel room in Wake Forest, North Carolina (tonight I’ll be performing with Rhett at the nightclub, Crossroads, in town), and I just finished the interview. As Rhett is on a mega roll with his writing as of late, his perspective was deep on this subject and I can’t wait to transcribe and edit our 55 minute exploration.

I still need to find a couple dozen more appropriate quotes, a few specific photos and images, write the acknowledgements, and the glossary, and of course make all the editing changes from my read thru. Then I need to hire a professional editor, an interior designer, and find the most affordable way to get this printed. To learn more about these final steps I ordered the critically acclaimed book “Dan Poyntner’s Self Publishing Manual”. One last thing, I also plan to add one or two of my “Flood Blogs” to the book, with a brief summary, as this was one of the most important things to ever happen in Nashville.

So if all goes according to plan, this book will complete and ready to ship sometime in September. It’s been a long road, but ultimately, the road has just begun. Well that’s it for now, I’m off to the show.