What's It All About, Alfie?

So many of you follow my daily musings on rock music, and while AM prides itself in embracing great music from every era, there's a tendency to focus on the classic era of rock that roughly begins with "Satisfaction" and ends with Prog. Punk starts a new era with The Sex Pistols as a catalyst and culminating with The Clash and Joy Division. With the exception of Weezer and Radiohead, we tend to kinda skip the 90s. The whole emo thing kept us motivated in the naughts and today, thankfully, there are bands like Lord Huron and Rainbow Kitten Surprise. Here's the video I'm obsessed with at the moment.



Over the past three years, AM has had more than half a million unique hits. I've shared with you fictional passages from my novels Jay and the Americans - which is available on Amazon and for your Kindle (read it for free on Kindle Unlimited) - and Miles From Nowhere, a novel about Woodstock, scheduled for publication later this year. Miles takes place nearly 50 years ago with a time frame that begins in July 1969 and ends in October that same year.

The sequel to Miles From Nowhere is my current work, Calif. I'm on page 162. The action takes place from 1969 and throughout the classic rock era. The music within its pages ranges from Cat Stevens to CSN, from Joni Mitchell to the Grateful Dead. Music essentially becomes a character in the novel. 

The other day I had this brainstorm to share the writing of Calif., all its bruises and misspellings, as a way for the reader to experience the writing process and my racing thoughts. I'll intersperse chapters from the novel as I write and revise them and toss in my whims and frustrations. It's a bit of an experiment that I don't think has been tried before. The tentative cover art for Calif. is the masthead of this new blog based on a line-drawing I created, of which I hope you approve. When something sucks or makes no sense, let me know. I'm thrilled about the first line, by the way, so don't even try it. 

I love the places that I've never been.