hameBlog

Blog change

2011-05-24T20:11:00.000+01:00

For a bunch of convoluted technical reasons I won't get into here, I'm changing my blog around.

The plus side? I'll be able to post more easily, so I can share more of my random thoughts here.

The minus side? Same as the plus side.

If you've subscribed to this blog with an RSS reader, here's the new address for your feed-reader:
feed://hamishmacdonald.tumblr.com/rss

Okay, it looks like all my old posts are here, but the comments are gone — and I do appreciate the comments a lot. I've saved them!

Tasty joy, no suffering

2011-05-11T12:45:00.000+01:00

I took a series of workshops years ago, and one of their sayings was "Suffering is optional." They meant it in the sense that experience happens and it's our layers of mental chatter and interpretation about what's happening that causes the experience of suffering.

Now, that might sound callous: "Oh, easy for you to say, with all your Western advantages," but even psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed this, and it formed the basis for his logotherapy treatment.

Which brings me to chocolate. No, really, it does!

My commitment in adapting the way I eat is to make this be a positive change, not a battle or an argument. One great way to make that work is to take the opportunity to find out just how good food can be.

For years, food to me was just kibble. Energy. An unavoidable nuisance. Naturally, this was often reflected in the choice of what I cooked and ate. Like I said in a previous post, I may have been a vegetarian, but I now realise I was a pretty clueless one.

It's been nearly two weeks since I made this change, and I feel great. I've been preparing really tasty meals we don't have to feel an ounce of guilt about, and they even look pretty. I can't help wondering if there's something hard-wired between attraction to colour and nutrition. Or maybe I'm just making stuff up.

The only thing I've been missing was the little treat the fella and I had with our tea before bed — like a fig roll or a biscuit. Nuts just don't work at that hour, and I haven't reached the point in the plan where berries are okay.

Enter chocolate: It turns out that, in its raw form, chocolate is not only not-bad, it's actually very good for you! So on a break yesterday I made my very own raw chocolates!

The process was a bit daunting, because I'm a cook, not a baker. But it all worked out, and it felt good to have a hand in making it — melting the cocoa butter, mixing in the vanilla (a fine powder that smelled like pipe tobacco), adding a big bag of raw cacao, then pouring in agave syrup (from the same plant used to make tequila, it's a sweetener that doesn't have the insulin effects of sugar and sugar substitutes).

...And with the left-over unsweetened mix, I made a chilli-chocolate soup — not one of those "hot chocolate in a bowl" ones, but a savoury soup that was Aztec-licious!

After dinner, we had one square of the chocolate each, and then another with our tea before bed. I've never been particularly fond of chocolate, but this was the best I've tasted in my life! And no guilt! What's not to love!?

As they say, suffering is optional.

~

Speaking of eating what nature intended you to eat...

This morning, Craig found a huge bee in the house. A co-worker had coincidentally mentioned to him just recently that when she finds a sluggish bee, she puts a "dod" of honey next to it. So Craig caught the dozy bee in a glass (it made a sound like a phone on vibrate), took it outside, then went back out with a big blob of honey for it.

What do you know? It loved the stuff, and stayed there licking at it for half an hour. We were just afraid that one of our blackbirds or thrushes would pluck it up as a snack. (I looked for it a while later and it was gone, hopefully on its way to a hive somewhere.)

Reflections

2011-05-07T12:11:00.000+01:00

The fella's having a very long lie-in, so I've spent the whole morning in a low-slung, soft, bouncy Ikea chair in one of the spare rooms with a big beige duvet over my legs up on a matching chair, reading. Just reading.

Delicious.

I stopped to ponder something my coach asked me in our second-last session, a question so big I put it aside and didn't get around to it. I put down my book and looked at the printed out e-mail in which she posed it to me: "Why are you doing this? Why are you telling this story? Why are you creating? What is its meaning in your life? How do you value it?"

I sat for a moment and the answer floated up from inside me, the simplest truth that has been with me my whole life:

When I write, I am free.
When I create, I am most myself.

As an adult, living in a world of money and power and responsibilities, it's no wonder I keep returning to these same activities that I loved as a child, because this need has never changed.

I get upset at the things about this world that are stupid and unjust — celebrity, constant war, the skewing of reward toward corporate good rather than what's good for humans and nature — but in moments of noticing, being, and creating, I literally become the author of my experience and have one small little corner in which I can add something I wish to see.

The Scottish election came and went, and we'll see what happens. I'm happy to return to my small corner and forget about all that, because it's way over there and I know that's not where my talents lie. They're right here. And this is where I'm free.

A decade in Scotland

2011-05-06T16:48:00.000+01:00

Wow: As of today, I've lived in Scotland for 10 years. That's like a quarter of my life.

Still no accent — damn!

Timers are a'changing

2011-05-06T15:58:00.000+01:00

I got a new magical timer today:

I feel bad about abandoning the mechanical one, partly because I was attached to the retro-tech notion of it (which, I suppose, is no more independent-minded than being identified with an iPad or any other object), and partly because I hesitate to buy a new thing that takes batteries.

Still, I had to confess that I had two problems with using the mechanical interval timers to pace my work:

When the timer ended, I stopped working and sometimes got lost until I came to and gave my head a shake. (Setting the timer for a break, then again for a work period, then again for a break... I often wouldn't bother.)
The timer ticked loudly while it ran down, and when it went off the bell scared the bajeezus out of me!

This one's made for yoga classes, meditation, and suchlike, so you can set a string of interval sessions in a row — up to 50 of them, and it plays a choice of little Zen sounds at the end of each.

I've got a program going for myself like:

work (25 mins)
break (7 mins)
work (25 mins)
get up and move around (2 mins)
break (25 mins)
repeat

That might sound slack, but I honestly don't believe it's possible to do mental work straight-out for hours and hours. It isn't for me, anyway.

~

I'm nearly a week into the basic eating thing, and it's going well. I feel great, and am finally getting the shelves stocked (which was the hardest part of making the change — not having things around to eat).

Today I discovered something wonderful: fizzy water with lime juice (not cordial). Love it!

Stupid epiphanies

2011-05-05T13:02:00.001+01:00

Dammit! On a short holiday this weekend travelling around the north-west of Scotland, I read a book my editor recommended, and it turned out to be one of those awful ones that changes your life. After reading it I can't not know what it taught me. I was afraid this would happen.

I'm half-joking, of course: Since getting together with Craig, I've enjoyed learning how to cook, so this is just the next level of challenge — like someone's replaced all my tools with unfamiliar ones and now it's a game to figure out what to do.

The gist is "No sugar, no grains." Like we ate in the Pleistocene Era, before food got technological. I am bound and determined to do it — but privately (after this), and not become a zealot about it! But the guy basically describes all the horrors that Craig sees in his patients every day, and that's not the future I want for me or for him.

The biggest challenge is the outside world, where the food sold and served is the inverse of this, and where people can get quite angry and defensive if you eat differently — even if you don't say a word about their choices but it happens to come up because you have to decline something or ask for alternatives. This is my experience of being a vegetarian since 1991, when I read another mind-altering book, John Robbins's Diet for a New America.

...Well, vegetarian up until the last couple of years, when I acquiesced to eating fish as a guest in homes and restaurants where vegetarianism just didn't compute. On this plan, I'm eating fish as a regular thing, just for now, then tapering that off after two weeks and going back to just plant-stuff. (It's in phases.)

While I've experienced advantages from being vegetarian for so long, I've also slid into some unquestioned, dumb habits: Just because something isn't meat doesn't mean it can't kill you. And now I accept how the converse can be true, too.

Still, I don't want other beings to be killed on my behalf.

But then we're into the argument, and I don't want to have that argument.

It's just that I've recently got my pension back in order because retirement age looms about 20 years away. Then it occurred to me that it's really stupid to look after one's money in service of a future I won't be around for because I've been eating in a way that'll make my brain or my heart explode right about that time.

Food-stuff brings up a lot of conflicts, eh?

Morning dialogue from my kitchen

2011-04-15T08:39:00.001+01:00

Me: We don't have a baby, but we have a pineapple.

Him: I'd rather have a baby.

Me: I'd rather have a pineapple.

Accidental writing

2011-04-14T10:01:00.001+01:00

I woke up this morning with the start of my new novel in my head. I had a scene in mind to start with, but my subconscious had other ideas. So at quarter-past five I got up, went to my office, and scribbled down the opening paragraph.

This morning I typed it up.

I promise I'm not going to be bleating about every little bit of work on this book. I'm just really excited to be started.

Taxes (death later)

2011-04-11T12:39:00.001+01:00

I'm a self-employed writer, so my tax situation has never fitted easily into the usual boxes. Wanting to conduct my business on the up-and-up*, I've hired three different accountants since I moved to the UK, and each of them let me down — each in their own expensive way.

Two of them simply charged too much than I could really justify, given how simple my income and expenditures are. I kept a database each year and provided a print-outs to these accountants, so the calculations must have been quite basic, so their fees (sometimes more than £350) seemed excessive.

The other accountant goofed up, vastly underestimating how much I would have to pay one year, and neglecting to warn me I would owe £5,000 in January. When the time came, I got that bill — due within the month. I'd been carefully saving and paying into an ethical stakeholder pension, but this blew a cannonball-sized hole in all my plans and borrowing to pay this back set me back for quite a while.

This time around, I'm doing my own taxes. The confidence I got from reading Teach Yourself: Understanding Tax for Small Business alone inspired me to look into my account on the HMRC website, and I'm glad I did: I discovered an underpayment of £350 and that my address was outdated. Thank you, ex-accountant! Because of this, I've been able to take care of the shortfall in advance instead of being surprised in July.

Then there's the substance of this book, which is excellent. From the page layout to the plain English it's written in, it's totally approachable. In just a few places it dips into accountant-speak terminology, and the sections on pension relief and revenue expenses — the two things I was most curious about — were a bit thin and difficult to decipher. But as a general introduction to the subject, it still an excellent work. I feel comfortable now approaching HMRC's forms (which themselves are well-explained), and instead of facing a mountain of intimidating confusion, I now know exactly what I need to learn more about. Then I can file my own return, and keep abreast of exactly what's happening in my business's financial life.

For all that, I'm extremely grateful to the author of this book. For anyone who's self-employed, I would strongly recommend reading this book or your local equivalent and learning the principles it puts forward, even if you plan to use an accountant. Money mistakes — especially those that relate to the government — are the surest way to suck all the fun out of your small business.

*Yes, there's a good argument to be made that the tax system is unjust and unevenly applied (with individuals being hounded to make their tiny payments while corporations and the rich are able to hide or avoid their share). I think of my taxes as protection racket payments: If I pay them, the government leaves me alone.

Oh, sure, I'm with the Quakers: I hate the thought that my taxes will pay for war machinery and other despicable wastes of money. In general, I despise the UK government and hold it in the lowest contempt. Even the Scottish government is just marginally better.

The Green Party are the only people who seem to speak anything resembling sense, but like the similarly sensible New Democrat Party in Canada, everyone you speak to seems to agree with their humane, sustainable policies in person, which haven't been forged in the hell of corporate interests, yet everyone consistently votes according to some sick binary logic for one of two other parties who consistently prove that they will wind up cheating them or abusing them in the ugliest, most Dickensian of ways.

I just don't understand it.

So I pay my taxes and try to ignore it all until it's voting time, when I throw my vote into the wood-chipper and go back to being dismayed. And I get on with my own stuff.

Get involved? No thanks. Politics and direct action aren't really my thing. I'm not interested enough in policy and law to have a coherent understanding of everything involved. I just know what I believe in, and recognise when someone's speaking what feels like truth. Happily, there are some people who do that and are committed to making our government fair and responsible. I vote for them. And in the meantime, I do my own work.

A change of planner

2011-04-02T10:21:00.001+01:00

At the start of the year, I made a new planner for myself. After using it for a full quarter, I realised it wasn't really working for me.

For one, I accidentally mis-counted the pages I'd need and filled it with two years' worth of weekly pages. That made it awfully bulky.

More problematic, though, was that I'd divided the page up into blocks for each day of the week. As I used the book, I found myself scribbling notes from my weekly review in the margins and clipping a to-do list onto the page. What's the point of having a custom planner if you have to stick notes to it?

So this week, in addition to making a bunch of little books (I'm almost finished everything for the Alternative Press Fair!), I made myself a new diary.

This one's thinner, and I incorporated my own end-papers this time, made using inks and stamps. I kept the additional sections at the back (Follow-up, Thoughts, Projects), but overhauled the calendar page to work the way that, it turns out, I actually use them.

The original:

And the new version (with added colour, because colour is nice):

It turns out I don't really have many daily items to fill in, but I do have a lot of things I'm working on, so now there are sections for projects as well as the little tasks/to-dos that don't belong to a project. Plus, there's a section for the thematic/philosophical stuff I want to remember for the week.

This last part usually comes out of a kooky little exercise I do called "Weekly Review at the Imaginary Diner", where I sit down in a roadside café in my mind and talk with three different experts each week about the things I'm working on or struggling with.

I realise this is all made up, but I find it incredibly helpful and insightful. As in my novel-writing, I've come to discover that my subconscious and my imagination are a lot smarter than my day-to-day mind — or at least work more holistically and are less reactive.

The great thing about learning DIY skills is that you can create custom-made tools to suit every single purpose.

The bad thing about learning DIY skills is that you can create custom-made tools to suit every single purpose.

There's a book in my head!

2011-03-30T08:37:00.001+01:00

Tuesday and Wednesday nights are "Writing Night". For the past few months I've been doing research for a new novel, but as you'll have gathered from my witterings here, I wasn't feeling sure of it at all. The story just kept eluding me.

Last night I finally got around to doing my research reading, and when I started I was seriously questioning the whole project. Maybe I should just focus on making blank books, I thought, or zines. Or maybe I should just stop all this and just be a person for a while without thinking about creating things.

I kept reading, though, and by the time Craig got home from a work-related event in Thurso, my brain was sparking again.

This morning I woke up and the little cobbling elves of my subconscious had stitched together a whole story. Thank you cobbling mental elves!

My confidence with this project so far has been like a tide — one that was mostly out to sea. So what's different this morning? What is it about the package that arrived in my head that makes it feel different now?

The events in the book are a lot clearer, and that helps a lot. I'm looking at a period of history and specific government/security structures and events, and I knew I couldn't capture all of that (and wasn't interested in writing about that aspect of it). So having a specific lens of action to look through is a big help.

What really swings it, though, is having characters. I know who this book is about now. That makes it fun. That makes it possible to start.

And thank Odin for that! My lower eyelids have been twitching for the past two weeks from what I can only assume has been the stress of constantly thinking about this project, or rather the vacuum that was there in place of it.

Golden Days

2011-03-28T21:45:00.000+01:00

Am I stuck or is this process?

2011-03-25T10:21:00.001Z

Blather from my journal this morning:

I feel pressure this morning: Create! Produce! I'm looking through the lectures on iTunes, hoping to find the one on writing that will tell me what to write next. I have this story idea for my next novel but it's missing something — the bit that would make it interesting for me.
I feel like I should have written more books by now (as if volume mattered). I read about Liz Taylor dying and think "So what?" She's no less dead for being famous (though I guess her advocacy and awareness work for AIDS is why some people are mourning her so vocally).
I should be getting up at 4AM to write for hours — but write what? What matters to me enough to write about it for a year?
I should make this book fun for me. Or should it be gentle and slow? Do I need to address why other people should read it when planning what to write? That certainly isn't helping so far!
It feels like it should have some importance — but is that something one can really determine beforehand?
Now I'm searching for lectures on Heidegger because his ideas interest me — but that doesn't help with the writing.
Yes, but maybe I should allow myself to just be a person and let go of this notion of myself as a creative worker, as if I have some duty to produce — either for other people or to justify myself to myself or to a culture that demands product.
I want to write because I enjoy writing.
But do you? Why are you not doing it all the time then?
Because there is this pressure for it to matter, because I am doing other things, because the idea hasn't formed yet. This is a creative process, not a factory line!

There may be nothing more boring than writers writing about writing, particularly when they're writing about the difficulty of it (unless they happen to set themselves in a story in a haunted hotel while doing it).

I guess I'm just aware that I often crow about breakthroughs here, but sometimes the process is more like being lost in a wood. There's nothing wrong, but perhaps there's good in admitting being lost. I'm deep in research, and I just can't see the story yet.

On a somewhat-related note, I've been thinking about my mania for "retro-tech" like typewriters and shorthand.

On the surface level, there's simply a practicality to these things: A typewriter clears away distractions. shorthand is several times faster than longhand. And, most recently, I've been using an "interval timer" (a countdown clock, often used in photography darkrooms) to pace my work (a la The Pomodoro Technique).

It occurs to me that there's an imaginary space that goes with these things, and it's something like this:

(Creative Commons image)

It's the old "steno pool". Now, just about everything in our culture today talks about office life as being this crushing, inhuman experience, so why would any part of me pine for that?

Perhaps it's that this is the diametric opposite of my work, where nothing is structured and I have to pull all the work out of my head. In Steno World, the work is set and comes, fully formed, from without, and is responded to instead of generated from scratch.

More intriguing, though, is the promise of being able to have systems and tools for capturing, filing, and retrieving. Actually being able to keep up with life, encapsulate and control it.

Of course it's an illusion, and I've a long way to go before I could begin to touch on the skills that people — women — used to have with these things. In the meantime, though, they do work really well, and are a happy respite from the pressure-cooker of our information culture.

And in other news, I've just booked my travel and accommodation for the International Alternative Press Fair on 28-29 May. Even better, I've almost finished my quest to produce "ten of everything".

Here are the raw innards of the last five little hardcover books:

So I'm nearly ready.

I'm excited about getting out in front of people, seeing what others are up to, and meeting folks who are bothering to do this crazy thing I do. Surely there will be some insight or encouragement in that, and hopefully I can provide some direction for someone who'd like to do it, too.

Right, it's time to get back to the steno pool.

Forget the Children

2011-03-21T17:46:00.001Z

Craig and I watched the movie Last Night the other evening (Last Night, 1998, Canada). It's a great movie, full of moments and emotions I haven't encountered in other media forms — not to mention that it's set in Toronto and says it's Toronto instead of pretending it's Chicago or wherever else.

It's a pre-Millenial film contemplating the end of the world, and there's a great line at one point that I bark-laughed at:

Rose: I don't give a damn. People are always saying 'The children. Pity the children'. I'm tired of the children. They haven't lived, given birth, watch their friends die. I have invested 80 years in this life. The children don't know what they're missing.

As our local by-election approaches, candidates keep dropping off flyers that play on that theme of making Wick a great/safe/not-derelict place for "our children". I'm with Rose: Screw that! I'm living here now. Fix it now!

But to the local council I'd say "Leave it alone! Stop tinkering with public services and historic buildings, because you're only going to break them."

Blizzards, letdowns and menus - oh my!

2011-03-09T10:31:00.001Z

Here's what I got this morning for being so smug with my family back in Canada about their snow:

I found out this week that I've not been included in a London zine fair for April. On one hand, it's a letdown, because I've been working hard to make more stock than I ever have before for this show and another one (more on that in a moment).

On t'other hand, though, it's a relief: Travelling to London then staying there is time-consuming and expensive. And what if, in some far-fetched scenario, I sold everything and had to make all new stuff in just a month? I'd be worn ragged.

So, instead, I get to focus on the show that I am doing: The International Alternative Press Festival on 28-29 May. It's two days, which is good, seeing as I'm travelling the whole length of the country to get there, and it's a press festival rather than a zine event, so hopefully people will be more amenable to buying books (versus wanting everything to be £1 or free for a trade, which kinda smarts when my thing is a handmade book versus a pamphlet).

I'm really looking forward to meeting a lot of likeminded people, seeing what others are up to, and potentially reaching more readers.

I'm busy with lots of copywriting work, as usual, and trying to squeeze in time to do research for the novel I've had in mind as well as making books for this fair.

It's hard to strike a balance between all these things I'm interested in. My latest attempt at wrestling the time octopus? A menu.

I've tried assigning tasks to days of the week, but the problem with that is not feeling like doing that thing when the day comes. So instead I'm creating a menu of things I want to work on during the week, and each day I pick a few things off it. And I'm not assigning myself more than three! Even though I can cram in more, I start feeling harried and losing the sense of fun about my projects. So just three.

I'm conscious of sounding like a one-note piano here with my endless time management systems. In fact, I just unsubscribed from a particular RSS feed this week because I got sick of hearing this woman's constant complaints about wanting to escape and take vacations from her work and her clients — in other words, the very people who read her blog.

So my intention here is not to whinge, but to think out loud about what's working for me, because I like the things I do, but given the nature of my work I have to do all the motivating and de-procrastinating day to day, which is a constant evolution/regeneration. I do think I'm getting pretty good at it, though.

This novel — man, it's moving at a glacial pace, and I'm still feeling pretty wobbly about it. That's the danger of being away from the work for a long time: it starts seeming so deadly serious, and like the next book has to justify my claim to being a writer.

I'm loving the idea of mail art lately, and am tempted to hang up the novelist hat for a while and just produce monthly little mail-art zines or something. I can't tell if that's fear or inspiration talking.

I've been doing creativity coaching for the past few months with Lisa Pijuan-Nomura (my editor's sister-in-law, and a powerhouse/hub in Toronto's crafts and performance art communities). She's been great, and one of the exercises she got me to do was to doodle a picture of my "internal editor". It turns out his name is Mr Mudflaps, and he's pretty brutal:

"I'll have ten of everything."

2011-02-28T20:04:00.001Z

No, that wasn't my lunch order today, it was the decision I made about what to have at my book fair table.

Turns out, that's a lot of product to make:

ten of each of my novels
ten big, medium, small, and tiny hardcovers
ten cereal-box notebooks
ten waterproof paper wallets
ten perfect-binding presses
ten perfect-binding press construction/instruction guides
ten Quick-and-Dirty bookbinding guides
plus a zillion magnetic bookmarks

Phew!

Some of these are fiddly to make, too, especially since I can't justify charging much for them — like these teeny books I made yesterday and today:

The thing is, though, people really like the little books. They draw attention — which I figure will be even more important than usual if I'm down in London, where the crowd will presumably be a lot bigger and there'll be a lot more vendors.

The economics of the micropress don't work, I realise this. And "ten of everything" has been stressing me out. So my approach for today, when I'd finished my copywriting and had some spare time, was to just do the thing in front of me and enjoy it, rather than thinking about getting everything done at once (which, of course, does not work and throws my amygdala into lockdown mode).

As a result, I had a lot of fun doing these, and went slower, so the result is better.

You could swallow some of these books and not be harmed.

I think I see a story.

2011-02-27T17:10:00.001Z

There's a point where ideas for a novel start to clump and to break off like Antarctic ice-shelves and drift on their own. The vast "it could be anything" for my latest book is starting to solidify into pieces of a story.

Plus there's the freedom to direct it into being exactly the kind of novel I want it to be. Up until now, a story has always sprung out of the depths more or less fully-formed — or at least that's how it seems in my memory. Maybe it's always been like this.

I'm still doing research for the book, though it's tricky when I'm also using my spare time to make ten of everything for the indie book fairs I'm planning to go to down in London this spring.

Weird that writing books should compete for space in my life making them.

I sold the Corona 3. It was a beautiful object, but a bit noisy and quirky to type on daily. Happily, it fetched back what I paid for it, with a tiny margin of profit that covered the new ribbon, so I don't have to feel bad about having 'rented' it for a while.

Oh, and I'd also bought a Corona 3 Special, because I figured I really needed the Cap and Fig keys on the right-hand side, too. Now that's up for sale on eBay. The type it produces is all crookedy, though, and I knew that when I was bidding on it, so I instantly had Buyer's Remorse the moment I won it.

So, instead of either of these, I spruced up the Empire-Corona and made it mine: I discovered that it was easy to get the bottom off it, so I cleaned out all the barnyard filth I could.

Now it looks a lot better, plus I've put my mark on it, which means I want to keep it, so I'm free from the insidious cycle of searching eBay for objects of desire then trying to win them. (There's some sort of junkie endorphin reaction involved in that process, though when you just want to buy a damned thing it's very frustrating to have to play the whole auction game.)

What ultimately turned the tide was a little self-reflection which made me realise that buying these typewriters had become a substitute for the original intention, which was to create with one.

So now I'm back to tapping out words, and that's fun.

Must not let this become a hobby!

2011-02-16T16:49:00.001Z

I won another eBay action last week, and first thing Monday morning, the postie came with this all wrapped up in a package for me:

It's a Corona #3 folding typewriter. Looking up its serial number, I learned that it was produced late in 1919. With some oil and some fiddling, though, I managed to get it working perfectly, and last night I wrote a short story on it.

The mills of the gods grind slowly,
But this mill
Chatters in mechanical staccato,
Ugly short infantry of the mind,
Advancing over difficult terrain,
Make this Corona
Their mitrailleuse.
- E. Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's wife Hadley gave him one of these machines for his 22nd birthday. He referred to it as "the only psychiatrist I would ever submit to." (Of course, he later put a rifle in his mouth, so this damages his suitability as a role-model in this, and many other things.)

It folds up...

And becomes a little box...

...which then fits into a small hard case:

It's easy to romantically fetishise these objects, but I have to say that there's a world of difference between writing on a computer, which tempts me to do a hundred other things at the same time as writing or instead of writing, versus doing it on a dedicated writing machine — particularly one as stylish and historic an object as this.

V-Day Project

2011-02-14T23:00:00.001Z

...The text messages from our first two years together, bound up into a book.

Big moments, little inanities, a history.

Animal actors' rights

2011-02-12T10:08:00.001Z

The fella and I watched The Swiss Family Robinson last night. I've no idea why he added it to his DVD rental list. He hated it. I was the one with nostalgic memories about sitting cross-legged in the exercising-kid-smelly gymnasium, watching projected movies at the end of the semester (always Disney films, because Billy Miller's mum worked at the school, and that's all she allowed him to watch — he later joined a rock band and developed a drug habit, I was told).

Geez, they were rough on the beasts in that film! Dogs attacked a tiger, which later fell into a pit. And the kids were determined to mount everything on the island -- an ostrich, a donkey, an elephant, a sea-turtle, and even a zebra.

For the whole of my adult filmgoing life, I've been seeing that notice at the end of the credits: "No animals were harmed in the making of this film". There's no way this movie would have been allowed to say that. It probably wouldn't have even occurred to them since, from the looks of it, they considered animals to be funny props and not sentient creatures who might rather not be jumped on by little actors (who were shirtless, tanned, and oiled in a way I also imagine you'd run into uncomfortable questions about today).

We won't even touch the Asian-esque jibber-jabbering of the pirates.

Nevertheless, there was something sentimental for me about watching the film — even though I hate everything about Disneyco now, just as I abhor McDonalds, but as a kid got excited to the point of squealing about the prospect of going to a birthday party in the caboose behind their moulded plastic restaurant.

Report from the Digital Sabbatical

2011-02-03T10:12:00.001Z

For a couple of weeks, I was spending all day on the computer doing my copywriting work, then my evenings weekends making a website for a friend — which took about twenty times longer than I first anticipated. I don't do this work anymore and I forgot just how much "scope creep" happens with these projects.

It was exhausting me, and I was growing increasingly upset about the fact I wasn't getting to write fiction, like I said I would do in the new year. That upset goes hand in hand with a kind of panic and that awful voice that says things like, "You haven't written a book in almost three years. You can hardly call yourself an author anymore!"

So, on top of the burning sensation in my eyes and that egg-scrambler-to-the-brain feeling in my head from the computer, I had this creative guilt to contend with and the gasping feeling that my life was slipping away and I had nothing to show for it. (Whether a person has to justify his existence by producing art is a whole other discussion.)

To turn the tide on this, I booked last week off work, since I had several days of paid vacation still in the bank with my client. I had a whole week just to play and create!

The theme of the week was "Digital Sabbatical": I was turning off the distracting, attention-grabbing, time-devouring machine, and devoting the time to reconnecting with my creative purpose and, hopefully, getting some work done on my new novel.

Of course, I ended up spending the whole first day working on my friend's website and cleaning up various other details. "Okay," I thought, "this is just what gets sucked in first to a vacuum of free time."

The next day, I went to the pub in town where I often work — a giant upended stone rectangle with WiFi and cheap lunches. Except I didn't bring my computer.

Instead, I brought along my various handmade notebooks and pads, and a copy of Creativity Rules — an old favourite guide to story structure and writing in general. Flipping through its pages, then sinking in for a deeper read, I was reminded of the endless possibilities of creating something straight from my imagination. And the author said something about recording reality.

I'd drifted away from this, but it's why I first got started writing: I did a theatre workshop back in Charlottetown and my director recommended a book to me called Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg. I picked it up and was instantly mesmerised by Goldberg's exhortation to "say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist".

Viewing the world through the filter of "How would I describe this?" was like gaining a second sight: I noticed things more. I savoured them. I felt more alive.

I filled books with ideas, moments, noticings. I'd leave a party in the middle of it to record some impression that came to me. Eventually, this led me to writing a play with a friend, which led me to writing books. The danger with this, though, is becoming ever more focused on product, because having that to show and getting public reinforcement is pretty compelling. But that's all far down the river from that first moment of finding and making.

Then came the computer-space, which, for me, is the opposite of that loving attention to what-is. It hooks me into searching, searching, never quite settling. Skimming. Grabbing. It's frenetic, and, while informative, it's the antithesis of the creative state, which starts with resting, noticing, listening, and bringing forth.

So in my pub-session I made lots of notes and outlines and thought about the structure of a short story I wanted to write. I had to get it finished before the end of the week because I wanted to submit it to a competition.

"Wait. Submit? I thought we didn't do that anymore."

Yeah, that's what I first thought when someone sent me the details of this Scottish story contest: "Art is not a competition. And I'm my own publisher; I don't hitch my expectations or sense of validity to anyone else's agenda." As designer Bruce Mau says in his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth: "Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you." I don't find them healthy or helpful, either. Pursuing this stuff leads to second-guessing, thinking about outcome and being pleasing. Those are the foundations of writer's block (in fact, every atom of that wall is made up of "What will they think?").

I have this exercise I do. I call it "Weekly Review at the Imaginary Diner." In it, I go to this diner in my mind situated in the middle of a desert. I sit down, say hi to the waitress, maybe order something, and then I wait as three people come through the door (the bell rings) and join me. They're three people I respect and admire who represent the areas of my life I want to have some breakthrough in or make progress in that week. I talk to them and get their advice.

Oh, it's all made up. I know that. Yet things often come out that I wouldn't have thought of. It's akin to the work I do with my subconscious when writing a book (my subconscious is a lot cleverer than I am).

So, about this contest, one of the figures said: "You are afraid of doing writing that isn't 'right'. You like to do things right. But there's no agreement here about what is 'right writing', so you're confused. There's a competition in front of you, which normally you shouldn't take part in, but on this occasion I'm saying you should because it's a chance to practice finding what you want to write, writing it, and sharing it without caring about outcomes. You've become used to sharing only when you can control the outcome. Just shine in your own personal heaven."

So Wednesday I brought my typewriter downstairs and... accidentally wrote the first paragraph of this story I had in mind. Then I did some other stuff and accidentally wrote the rest of it. Just like old times: it was already there; I simply had to uncover it and write it down.

I edited it the next day and sent it in. Then I went to the pub and did some research for my next novel. This book has been stumping me, because I'm not sure what the story is, or if there even is one here for me. Normally there's this point after a certain amount of thinking and research where a definite story breaks off like an ice-shelf and floats free, but my mind isn't committing to anything here so far.

After writing this short story and enjoying that process so much, I entertained the thought of just doing that for a while. Giving myself permission to not have to write the book, weirdly, made me want to keep working on the book.

Thursday night, the fella and I went to a talk by a local historian. It took place in an upstairs room of my beloved Wick Heritage Centre — several joined-up houses stuffed from floor to ceiling with artefacts from the town's past. They haven't been able to get the right to call themselves a "museum" because their installations can't be removed to be articled or put on show elsewhere. Of course they can't: they have ten thousand trinkets, two skerry fishing-boats, and the huge, mounted plano-convex lenses of a Stevenson lighthouse in there!

We got the last two seats — at the back, behind a cloud of silver-haired audience members. They dimmed the lights, and the speaker, Harry Gray, gave a slideshow of rough old black-and-white photos as he told us about the "gutters" — the women who used to work along Wick's piers, processing the red herring the fishermen brought ashore.

As Mr Gray spoke, the audience-members cooed like eiders and muttered the names of the people in the photos in unison with him as they appeared on the screen.

When the talk finished, the Centre's volunteers came around with biscuits and our choice of orange squash or ginger wine. I took the latter, and it was delicious — fiery sweetness in a tiny plastic cup. A woman in Staxigoe Harbour makes it (she was sitting next to Craig), but I didn't get a chance to buy any.

I still feel completely alien here, and I wish I could at least get rid of my accent, but it's great to have the chance to do these things and experience flashes of this place from a time when it seemed more... whole. That said, hearing the stories of these women's long, painful, severe workdays made me appreciate how very, very easy life is now by comparison.

This week I'm back to work, back here with the computer on. I made the mistake Monday of reverting back to a usual work-day; I flipped the machine on first thing in the morning and found my attention scattered and my time sucked away. (I do this, I know; it's not the machine's fault, but it sure does seem perfectly designed to facilitate this inattention.) As a self-employed person, this always goes along with a frightened feeling, because I need to produce work consistently.

So my task now is to find a balance that preserves this nourishing feeling of being in touch with my inner and surrounding worlds, yet still make use of the digital tools available, which open up so many possibilities (like being able to produce my own books and teach others how to do this).

As always, I come back to structure. Drifting in front of the computer is a recipe for losing my day and feeling stressed by it. So, in that spirit, it's time to send this, shut off my connection to the Internet, and plan my day.

Non-Readers in Power

2011-02-02T22:31:00.001Z

Canadian author Yann Martel just ended his campaign to get Prime Minister Stephen Harper to read a book — not his book, any book.

I have to say, I didn't particularly care for Life of Pi, but this line from anarticle about Martel's effort has got to be my quote of the year.

I can't understand how a man who seems never to read imaginative writing of any kind (novels, poetry, short stories, high-brow, middle-brow, low-brow, anything) can understand life, people, the world. I don't care if ordinary people read or not. It's not for me to say how people should live. But people who have power over me? I want them to read because their limited, impoverished dreams may become my nightmares.

Of course, Harper can't really be expected to reflect, because his kind don't have reflections.

"I've got an idea for a kids' book!"

2011-01-21T09:52:00.001Z

Lots of people tell me they've got an idea for a children's book, and ask me about how they can "get" it published.

A friend just asked about this on Facebook, so — based on what I know and have heard — this was my answer:

------------------------------
I think it's important to make a distinction here between self-publishing and "getting published". In the former case, you do everything and pick up the costs, in the latter, once you've finished the book, everything else is up to other people.

I self-published my first book in the sense that I wrote it, did all the layout design, then got a press in Toronto to do the production work.

For the next three novels, I did everything myself — writing, layout, printing, and binding.

Kids' books are a funny thing. A lot of people think they'd be easier to get published because they're 'lighter' (not so serious, so subject to critical analysis, or whatever), but in fact they're far, far harder to get a publisher to commit to, partly because of competition, partly because the production costs of making a full-colour, hardcover book are so much higher.

So that's my wet-blanket view of the industry, which is that it is really, really difficult — especially now — to get a publisher to buy a children's book.

...BUT...

If you're talking about self-publishing a children's book, that's something completely different. The only restriction you have here is what you're willing to pay.

I produce all my own books, so I couldn't tell you who could do this for you locally in Ontario. But this is the next question to ask: what kind of book run are you looking at?

Here your choices are either traditional offset, where you pay a lot up front and then receive boxes and boxes of finished books, and you can do whatever you like with those. Or you can take advantage of "print-on-demand", where the books are produced as you need them. The unit cost is much higher, but your initial outlay of cash is considerably reduced.

Search around for "PoD" or "print-on-demand" and you'll find lots of people offering these services. Lulu.com is the most well-known, and is generally well respected.

Beware the "authors' services" companies — or "vanity presses", as they used to be called — who will make it sound like they'll do everything for you in exchange for cash. Some of them are downright predatory, and will charge you way over the industry norms, and never deliver on their half-promises of "getting into every bookstore".

LightningSource is the company that Lulu and similar services generally use to do their production, but to approach them you have to have your manuscript completely ready to be printed. No hand-holding there. But a much lower price.

From there, you move on to issues like distribution (making the book available for bookstores to buy; you need a distributor because most aren't equipped to deal with individuals) and marketing (letting people know this book is there to buy, and what's special about it).

I hope that gives you something to go on for starters.

Digital Diversion and the Twitch Reflex...

2011-01-13T10:00:00.001Z

...Or, "Why I Sold My iPhone".

These days, just about everyone you see on a train station platform, in an airport, or even crossing the street is staring into their palm. We're hardly ever where we are anymore because we're busy checking in with our digital devices.

(Photo by valakirka.)

I feel safe in saying that 95% of the things I looked up mid-conversation last year weren't of any lasting use to me. When travelling, I either spent ages trying get a signal and wait for something to download, or the roaming charges were so prohibitively expensive that I didn't dare use data on a foreign network.

As a self-employed person, my attention is very important, and I'm growing increasingly angry about how easy it is to have vast beaches of time slip through the hourglass while browsing and... checking in.

"Checking in" gets to become a twitch reflex. Any spare moment can be filled with checking the news ("Get angry about something you can't influence"), reading about the latest technologies ("Your thing is obsolete; here's a new one to buy"), or following others' social media conversations for no particular reason. True, connecting with other people is nice, and I like being in touch with folks from hither and yon, then and now.

Still, though, there's something toxic-feeling about it. "Checking in" feels an awful lot like checking out, like when you shake your head and realise you don't really know where the last half-hour has gone. And reading someone's updates isn't like sitting across from a person, having a coffee together.

When I was a kid, I used to spend all day drawing. My God, if I swapped my browsing-time now for drawing-time, I'd have a whole other career!

At the end of so many days now, I lament the lack of anything to show for my time because I spent so much of it interacting with the computer. And life feels so different, so much healthier, when I lift my head, look around, talk to real people, do my own thing instead of following what zillions of other people are doing.

I grew to hate my iPhone, and when I was in Canada at Christmas I refused to interact with it ("C'mon! Look it up! Check something! Fill your time with me!"). Instead, I asked people on the street for directions. I engaged with the world instead of fumbling to get out and squint at my little sliver of tech.

Last week I sold it. Used, with a screen full of dust, it still sold on eBay for more than a month's rent.

My solution isn't exactly the paragon of virtuous disconnection, because it involved a lot of purchases, but the things I bought feel like they get me out of the constant stream of connection and consumption: they do what they do, that's all they're meant to do, and I won't need them to do more. (The iPhone, on the other hand, was designed as a portal for consumption — buying songs and apps, each new year's model fixing annoying features of the previous one.)

So here's my setup:

1) My day-planner. A while back, I switched from using software for my project management and scheduling. Digital appointments got lost in synching, and I had to make an effort, to dig, to see anything or enter anything.

I can physically tell where I am in this, and I can order my thoughts it my own natural way. Plus I made it. It's mine in many ways.

2) A proper camera. I'm a crap photographer; I accept this. I haven't got the eye. Still, for years I've been pursuing the convenience of "converged" devices that do everything, and my experience is that, in the end, they do a bit of everything, but badly. All the phone cameras I've had too rubbish photos.

So I got myself a real camera. And it's shockproof, waterproof, and dustproof. Hallelujah to that last item, 'cause all my stupid smartphones got dust under their screens.

3) A phone, just a phone. I got a phone designed for old people. It does calls and text messaging. That's it. I will never expect or need it to do more.

I was considering John's Phone, a really stripped-down phone — just buttons on a rectangle — but then I saw a picture of one in situ, and it's a brick, bigger than an iPhone. I'm happy that killed it for me, because, in practice, not having text messages would have been a problem. That's how most of us communicate here in the UK, unless we really, really have to make a call.

4) An iPod. Yeah, I know, this seems contradictory, but I do like to listen to music while I write or walk, so I didn't want to lose that — and I didn't want something that was about buying content or reconfiguring it overmuch, so the new iPod Nano was perfectly suited to my needs. The screen and the capacity aside, this is basically like my first MP3 player. My needs in that regard won't be changing, so this should do indefinitely.

5) A typewriter. I've been toying with the idea of using a typewriter for a while, and I finally took the plunge. Will I actually write novel-pages on it? I'm not sure. But it feels great to write on this, and I love the idea of a single-purpose thing that doesn't have any other tasks running in the background for me to switch to.

When it arrived, it had some problems. At first I was gutted, thinking I'd have to send it back, but then it occurred to me that this is a machine. I can flip it over, I can open it up, and I can see what it's doing. And if it's not working, I don't have to throw it out — I can fix it.

First I fixed the space-bar, and was overjoyed to see the carriage moving along as it should. Then, yesterday, I fixed the bell (actually important, otherwise you get stuck at the end of the line mid-word). I even managed to get the model paint (or whatever it was) off the hood.

So now I have a brand-new East German typewriter from 1959. And it has a deliciously bad industrial smell, an oily smell like the workings of a streetcar.

Technology can be great: It's enabled me to do work I love without having to be on-site to do it, being able to print my own books has changed my life, and my husband's family was able to participate in our wedding via Skype — stuff like that. But it can also be an insatiable life-stealer, so this is all one step toward getting that in balance with the things I want to be doing.

Small Press and 'Zine fairs in the UK

2011-01-12T18:17:00.001Z

I want to get out more. As a publisher, like. So I went looking for indie publishing events in the UK and discovered there's quite a bunch of them.

In case this list might be of use to anyone else, here's what I've found so far.

If you know of any others, or have any insight (either 'yay' or 'nay') about any of these, I'm happy to hear about it.

Brighton Zinefest, 19 February
The Bristol International Comic & Small Press Expo, 14-15 May
The London Art Book Fair, 23-25 September
London Zine Symposium, 17th April
Alternative Press Fair (was November last year)
Leeds Zine Fair (was November last year)
Artists' Book and Independent Publishing Fair, Walsall (was in November last year)