Hey gang! Sorry I suddenly dropped off the face of the planet for two weeks. I was working on a project…

If you follow my twitter at all you might have seen, but I made a book proposal to the 33 1/3 series. This is a series of books focusing on a single album for each book. I found the series through Ray of Idolminded, and as soon as I saw that the series was accepting submissions I jumped on it.

And yes, my submission is AKB48’s 1830m.

I have no idea how this will be received, to be honest. The series hasn’t really done anything like it; the majority of the albums reviewed are rock, and idol music isn’t the natural progression. Yet, on the other hand, they don’t exclusively do rock albums or even albums that are considered “good.” The book I’ve read from the series was based off of Celine Dion’s “Let’s Talk about Love” and it was focused on ideas of taste and why people like music that others hate. I saw that two people this year submitted ideas on writing about Miley Cyrus’ album BANGERZ. I feel like AKB48 isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Even still, this was an interesting experience for me. I was trying to pitch the idea of idol writing and a Japanese idol group to people who, as far as I know, have little to no knowledge of it, let alone interest. Writing my proposal was an interesting exercise in trying to convey idol culture and AKB within the constraints of the questions at hand. I worked hard at it, but if a miracle happens and they decide to accept my proposal I know that this is something I will have to polish and test on others, to see if I did a good enough job.

I like writing on Happy Disco. Writing about idols and Japanese music is fun for me, and it’s the type of thing that I wish I could do professionally. If this works out, this wouldn’t necessarily make me rich or famous, but it would be writing about idols, getting some money, and getting a very nice stepping stone to show for possible future writing jobs. But like I said, this is still a very long shot to get, so I’m not going to bet on this.

Ultimately, though, I do wish that something like this would happen; if not my book than another JPop book. There are some assorted books about JPop and idols; at this point a lot of them are academic and, thus, expensive. I would like to buy Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Culture, for example, but justifying that $69.30 price for a kindle version alone is difficult. Some books touch on the concept of idol music (like Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential) but not to a really major extent. An accessible book about idol music might be a good step into getting more people to talk about it and think about this type of thing seriously, which is something I’d like.

Again, I have no idea if this will actually be accepted, and I don’t want to get my hopes up. This is just why I’ve been away from the Disco for a while. Wish me luck!