Today marks a pretty big milestone in the journey of Living the Scene – 2005–2023. I have officially completed the first full editing pass of the manuscript, which puts the project roughly halfway through the editing process.

This stage was not just about cleaning up sentences or fixing typos. It was about building the structural foundation of the book. During this pass I finalized the core layout decisions, selected the typefaces, and moved the entire manuscript into the 7×9 format that the book will ultimately be printed in.

The funny thing is, the book has technically existed for a while now. The writing has been there. The stories have been there. The history has been there. But up until now it mostly lived as drafts, notes, and pages that were never really designed to resemble the final thing.

Now it actually looks like a book.

Right now the manuscript sits at 61,292 words across 401 pages, and seeing those numbers inside the real layout format was a bit of a moment. Nearly two decades of shows, friendships, chaos, creativity, and the strange little universe that grew around Official FN Radio and the Connecticut underground music scene have turned into something much larger than I originally expected.

There is still a lot of work ahead.

The next stage will involve reworking the visual elements throughout the book, particularly the collages and show flyers that appear throughout the chapters. Many of these will be redesigned to run as full-bleed pages, allowing the imagery to stretch edge to edge and give the visuals the same energy the scene itself had.

Beyond that, there will be additional editorial passes focused on tightening language, refining chapter pacing, and adjusting section lengths where needed. Editing is where the book really takes shape, and some sections will likely grow while others get trimmed to keep the narrative moving.

But finishing this first pass is a major step. For the first time, the project is not just a manuscript.

It is starting to look like the book it was meant to become.