Don’s bio so far

In 2006 Don Powell asked me to write his biography and back then I thought it would be a 2 year project like any other of my books. Today I’m wiser.
I decided on a format for the bio pretty quickly and the sources were to be Don’s diaries, interviews with Don and with his family, friends and colleagues. I started out making the interviews with Don and over the course of 3 years I made 14 interviews with him, amounting to a whopping 36 hours. The diaries I didn’t get until 2008 and as they go all the way back to the 1970s it took me several months to read through them and pick out what should be included in the biography and what not. By then a 2 year timeframe for the bio was out of the question and we postponed a possible release date until 2010.
The work with interviewing Don’s family, friends and colleagues kicked off in December 2006. What first seemed to be a fairly easy part of the process, turned out more complicated than expected and I had to wait up to 4 years for some of the interviews that I needed. By February 2010 I thought I had made my last interview, but new contributors to the bio kept being added to the list and at the moment I’m still awaiting the comments from another 2 or 3 of Don’s colleagues.
Then in November 2010 Don found a number of diaries which he thought he had lost. I’m still waiting to get those and yes, you have guessed it. We’ve had to postpone a possible release date yet another time. With a little luck I’ll finish the biography by December 2011, but I won’t guarantee it, as something new seems to pop up all the time. Anyway, on this blog you’ll be able to follow the progress of the bio. Keep your fingers crossed that it won’t be a never-ending story!