All Pens Blazing
(Vols. 1 & 2)

Neil Daniels
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Buy *All Pens Blazing - A Rock and Heavy Metal Writers Handbook (Volumes 1 & 2)* by Neil Daniels online

All Pens Blazing - A Rock and Heavy Metal Writers Handbook (Volumes 1 & 2)
Neil Daniels
Bright Pen / Authors Online Ltd.
Paperback / Paperback
350 pages / 350 pages
August 2009 / July 2010
rated 4 1/2 of 5 possible stars

buy this book now or browse millions of other great products at amazon.com
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Ever wonder about who those people are behind the bylines you read in music magazines? Well, Neil Daniels did in a big way. He was so intrigued that the journalist in him assembled All Pens Blazing, Volumes 1 and 2, digests filled with interviews he conducted with dozens of different rock journalists. Here, in the first couple paragraphs of the author's introduction to Volume 1, Daniels talks about his book.

About thirteen months ago I started to a run a series of exclusive interviews with writers on my website www.neildaniels.com. This section of my website has since expanded into an interesting albeit still relatively small archive. Most of the interviews are with music writers but there are also some interviews with respectable authors like Kim Newman and Ramsey Campbell. My ongoing aim with ‘Interviews With Writers’ is to understand the publishing industry (both books and magazines) as well as to take advice from published authors and experienced journalists of pop culture; it’s a learning tool for the aspiring writer more than anything else. More interestingly, there’s also a chance for the writers to digress and talk about some of the artists they’ve interviewed, books they’ve read, plus their favourite authors, musicians, gigs and albums, etc. I was flicking through an old issue of Kerrang! not too long ago and thought: wouldn’t it be great to get in touch with a lot of these scribes and interview them about working for the world’s most famous heavy metal magazine during the Eighties?

Consequently, I began to build up a solid list of contacts and fortunately many of those writers agreed to be interviewed. The difference this time was that I didn’t want to just add them to my website but actually publish a collection of interviews dealing specifically with writers of heavy metal and hard rock. My list of interviews expanded day by day, from writers who began their careers working at Sounds and Melody Maker to contemporary writers who began their careers writing for webzines. Of course, Internet rock journalism is a contentious issue and has been criticised for the decline in the quality of rock journalism. Long gone are the days when readers would buy every album positively reviewed by one journo or when readers could recall the entire list of staff writers on a particular rock magazine. I’ve personally bought albums by artists I’ve never heard of just because a favourite writer of mine reviewed their music positively. Star names like Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Mick Wall and David Fricke, et al, are no longer being born. There were also a number of writers back in the golden age of rock journalism who were not especially great wordsmiths but had an incredible knowledge of the music and their enthusiasm shone in every paragraph. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to be prejudiced so I decided to include writers from all eras and formats.
The author was serious about this first volume and went onto create a second. They are tremendously entertaining and reveal much about the names you've seen in every magazine from Creem and Guitar Player to Rolling Stone and Classic Rock.



Click here for Steven Rosen's interview with All Pens Blazing author Neil Daniels

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Steven Rosen, 2010

Also by Neil Daniels:

buy *All Pens Blazing - A Rock and Heavy Metal Writers Handbook (Volumes 1 & 2)* online
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