Rambling Around The World

One of my 2016 writing projects was a memoir.

Went through various formats and titles, now settled down.

Below is the first part of the synopsis I punted out, to total indifference from agents and publishers.

NON-FICTION PROPOSAL BY EWAN MCVICAR

RAMBLING WITH MELODIUS INTENT

SUMMARY

Adventuring to make shows and songs that celebrate ill-remembered achievers, from Siberia and Walcheren to Nova Scotia, from Orkney and Glasgow to Campbeltown.

1] On a crowded tram in the Russian Urals city of Perm in 2000, Ewan McVicar strives to write a Scottish children’s Christmas song, while passing Diaghilev’s boyhood home, the missing house where Pasternak wrote Dr Zhivago, and the longest armaments factory in Europe. He reflects on what brought him to the Centre for Scottish Studies in Perm Pedagogical University, and is asked about forgotten famous Scot Roderick Murchison.

2] He walks up Siberia Street where exiled convicts had gone before, struggles with Cyrillic lettering and University toilets, and in the Centre’s small library tries to learn about Murchison. Bureaucratic battle is joined to rescue a parcel of books from the Post Office, to get permission to stay in the city, and then to be allowed to leave.

3] Safe home, Ewan learns about various links between him and Murchison, in childhood, then in 1960s Uganda. Ewan reflects on his own early songwriting and his singing influences and friends in Glasgow, then his writing a forgotten Top Twenty hit.

4] He goes to work as a banker in Uganda, Kenya and South Yemen, travels in Morocco, India and Japan, and sings and works illegally across the USA.

5] Ewan returns to Scotland, tries to become an agent, is a part of the Great Whammy Diddle Fraud, and instead becomes a psychiatric social worker. He is pals with Billy Connolly and Aly Bain, eventually begins creating shows and exhibitions. The first is about the 1920 Clydebank Rent War for the BBC series Odyssey.