About a year ago I received a suspicious email from a guy at Continuum Books in New York City. He said they were putting together a series of short books about music. Each book would be about a single album, and would I be interested in writing one? I don't know if he'd read any of my press, and thus had some inside information or not, but he suggested an album by the Smiths. He suggested The Queen is Dead, but my scheming little mind had Meat is Murder in the cross hairs.

Well, I was certainly intrigued. Even a little flattered. But to be honest, I had suffered through my share of paper writing in graduate school and had spent my last drop of critical juice back in 1997. By the time I finished my graduate degree, I was so burned-out on paper writing that I actually convinced an unsuspecting professor who was a distant fan of my first two records to let me write a ten page paper (my last) on post modernism IN MY OWN MUSIC! Give me a break. I don't know who deserves the bigger throttling for that one. Probably me. No wonder the American educational system is a wreck. I still have not the slightest clue as to what post modernism is.

So a critical book on Meat is Murder was completely out. But the album was so monumental in my life, I had to pay tribute to it. I started thinking about writing a piece of fiction (to protect the innocent and guilty, plus it would be more fun) that would show just how important that record was to a nameless, scrawny, horny, American kid suffering through Catholic school in the deep South Shore of Boston. I ran the idea by my soon-to-be editor, and he went for it.

A week after the Pernice Brothers finished mixing our latest album Yours, Mine and Ours, I cleaned out a five-foot by four-foot patch of floor in a storage closet, wrestled my desk and computer in past years worth of musical equipment that is literally touching the ceiling around me, and set to it. It should be finished by the end of April. Actually, it had better be done by the end of April or I'm in breech, which is all I need. I'm just waiting for my editor to say, "You know Joe, I don't hear a hit." ---

• Related item: Joe Pernice novella based on Smiths obsession to be published Fall 2003 - Oct. 23, 2002