U2-A Diary

Here’s a good example of the kind of information I’m missing and could use some help finding.

1. What was the exact date that Mt. Temple opened? What was its first day of classes? I know it was Fall of 1972….

2. On a related note, I’m 95% sure this is correct based on all the reading I’ve done. It’s each band member’s first year at Mt. Temple:

Bono: 1972
Edge & Larry: 1974
Adam: 1976

Can anyone provide reliable information to correct that if it’s wrong?

After getting TDIH in place as the foundation of U2 Diary, I put together a TO DO list to keep the research and writing organized and moving along.

Item No. 1 on the TO DO list was to start re-reading my entire collection of U2-related books. I believe I started with The Unforgettable Fire. Knowing that it has some mistakes in it, I figured if I read that one first, I could correct anything that didn’t stand up as accurate against all my future research. (And that plan has worked, thankfully.) To date, I’ve re-read the following books specifically as part of the research for The U2 Diary:

The Unforgettable Fire
U2 (by Mark Taylor)
The Complete Guide to the Music of U2
U2 – A Conspiracy of Hope
Outside Is America: U2 in the U.S.
Killing Bono
U2 – The Early Days
The U2 Reader
U2 & I: The Photographs 1982-2004
Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas
U2 – The Rolling Stone Files
U2 At The End Of The World
Race of Angels

What’s cool about reading book after book after book is seeing the variety of information each book has, and knowing that when U2 Diary is finished, all that information — and a lot more researched on my own via interviews, etc. — will be available in one book.

I can’t wait.

Welcome to the blog for a new book I’m writing, tentatively titled U2 Diary. This book has been in the works since 2005, so I want to start with a couple posts to get the blog caught up on what’s been going on — how I got from way back there to right here.

The publisher came to me with this idea after I had pitched a separate U2-related book idea. We talked about a U2 diary-style book for a while, and at one point I was sure we were about to sign a contract to make it happen. Then? Nothing happened. For a while. We resuscitated the idea in late 2006 and came to a publishing agreement in Spring 2007.

When the publisher first approached me about doing this book, I knew I had a head start because of the U2 timeline that we do on @U2 — “This Date in U2 History” (TDIH). It’s offline right now for a couple reasons, only one of which is U2 Diary. I hope to get it back online at some point in the future, but can’t say for sure if it’ll happen or when.

So U2 Diary actually started a couple years ago. Even though nothing was happening on the business side, I’ve been researching and writing since those initial conversations.

My first step was to take all of the material in TDIH and export it into a usable form inside Microsoft Word. Once that was done, the foundation of the book was in place. Then it became time to build on the foundation.

I quickly realized TDIH was only a start. The target for the book was (and is) 150,000 words. The TDIH material came in somewhere between 50,000-60,000 words, so you can see how much work was/is left to do. Plus, the formatting of TDIH will have to change for the book, too — every TDIH has its own headline/title, but that’s not gonna fly in print. So I’m having to go through and remove every headline/title, which will ultimately kill another couple thousand words.

But despite those bits of extra work, this project wouldn’t be possible without TDIH — the perfect place to start putting the book together.