Copywriting for the bro’.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 , 3:57 PM
“Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem — delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing.”- George Orwell, 1984
When I read that this afternoon, it felt uncomfortably like what I’d just been working on.
Answered calls.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 , 9:09 PM
This afternoon the police came by my flat. It’s okay: they came because I called them. More specifically, I’d called the Environmental Health line because of the noise the upstairs neighbour has been making for the past few weeks.
The policemen were charming, friendly, and surprisingly sympathetic and unjaded about my situation. Not only did they make me feel ‘heard’, they took action right away, leaving an official notice upstairs (because of course the neighbour was out and the flat silent when they arrived), and calling the upstairs landlord. Not only did they do that, they then called me to report back to me about their actions. I felt very well taken care of. Here’s a cheer for the Lothian and Borders Police!
And my friend Phil McLean has offered to take my picture. He’s one of the “Dunderheids” with whom I’m creating a collaborative zine-book. I met with two of the others, Sheila and Sergio, tonight to pick up the pace and talk about what’s next.
Lots of good, creative stuff going on these days, despite the dreich weather. I’m getting a bit run-down, though, and can’t wait to meet my folks in Italy next week.
I also had to sew three different things today — not books, but regular things, like the elastic on some boxers, a shirt-cuff, and the edge of a little travel bag for plugs and cables. I’m not sure what that was about, thematically.
Two requests.
Monday, March 27, 2006 , 8:53 PM
I need…
— Someone to take a new headshot of me. I like the one I’ve been using (the hallway one on the Photos page), taken by my friend Rannie Turingan. But that was six years ago. The one on the right is just a little low-resolution snap from last summer. Mom says the old one makes me look like Austin Powers. (Several people have mistaken my shirt-collar for some sort of ruff.)
— Someone to kill my new upstairs neighbours, who like to listen to crap boom-boom-boom music real loud. Who likes this music? And why do they always move in next to me? I end up having to be Bad Serious Neighbour who goes knocking on the door.
Ethics and androids.
, 10:02 AM
I’ve just switched to Smile.co.uk, an online bank that specialises in ethical banking. This means that, unlike my previous bank, they don’t fund activities like arms trading, predatory lending, and projects that generate excessive environmental damage.
Only one thing about them makes me uncomfortable:
Headquarters of Smile.co.uk banking:
Headquarters of Tyrell Corporation, makers of homocidal androids:
Do-It-Yourself Publishing
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 , 11:10 AM
An article I wrote appears today on Jim Munroe’sNoMediaKings.org. (Jim’s site is an excellent resource for indie authors, ‘zinesters, and filmmakers.)
In it, I explain everything I’ve learnt since 1999 (whendoubleZero came out) about producing your own book. Since August, as you’ll likely have read about here ad nauseum, I’ve also been learning how to literally produce books myself, first by learning how to saddle-stitch and bind hardcover books, then moving into creating perfect-bound paperbacks of my work.
~
I found a great site the other day by a man named Bob Baker, who offers creative types (authors, musicians, craftspeople, &c) ideas for marketing themselves. You can find it here.
Yes, he sells books on the site, but it isn’t one of those yeechy ‘zillion-pages hyping one secret product’ websites. There are actually lots of good free articles there.
~
The Scotsman ran another article about Edinburgh being named the “UNESCO City of Literature.”
If you’ll pardon my English…
Horsesh*t.
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p>This venture was spearheaded by a literary agent, and aims to promote Edinburgh as one of the world’s focal points for literature. This is already true of the city. But while the project dredges up the bones of Burns, Stevenson, and Conan-Doyle, and sidles into the limelight of JK Rowling, Ian Rankin, Iain Banks, Alexander McCall-Smith, and others…
- It does nothing for the small presses here that are going out of business.
- It does nothing for writers who aren’t already millionaires.
- It does nothing for independent bookstores like Ottakars, which just closed its flagship store in the city.
- It does nothing to promote literacy in the city.
Okay, they’ve talked about promoting literacy, but so far the project, which costs the city something like £200,000, has focused on bizarre schemes like putting an already-established writer in a mall to write about the “culture” there, and on predictable industry obsessions like securing an awards show (folks, art is not a competition).
So what’s an independent to do?
Ignore it. Get on with your own thing.
In producing my work, of course I hope to gain some more readers for my books. I’d also be thrilled, though, if authors and potential authors got religion about putting their own work out there. We creative people need to understand that we don’t need permission or validation from businesses to justify ourselves as artists. Editors and critics do not make a thing art or not-art, even though we’re thoroughly subscribed to that idea as a society.
Where are the indie authors in Scotland? I want to find them. I want to join them. And if they’re not out there, I want to help create them.
Actually, the piece was about Scottish PEN leveraging the UNESCO moniker as an opportunity to make Edinburgh a haven for writers in exile. Great! Turn a bit of PR puff into something that could actually be beneficial to people who need it. But what those writers are supposed to do when they get here, I don’t know.
Snip.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006 , 4:17 PM
Lesson: If your guy isn’t there, never go to the other guy.
Stopping for directions.
, 12:41 AM
Happily, though, the two days of downtime gave me the opportunity to unwind yesterday, then the chance to do some orientation work this evening after work. I needed to step back and figure out what my plan was in a couple of areas in my life, and because I wasn’t so busy blindly making books without even knowing why I was doing it, I had the mental space to ask some good questions. Of course, like any good questions they led to more questions, but I feel more confident: There’s a plan.
I’m one of those people who needs a plan — while recognising that plans are imaginary and reality often manifests itself in exquisite ways that make my plans look small and absurd. But will comes into it, too. How it all works out seems to happen somewhere between magic and sweat.
So what does this mean? What did I do?
First I reviewed Strategic Coach client David Bach’s book The Automatic Millionaire. I know: I flinch at the title, but it’s a good, straightforward book.
I don’t make much money on a relative scale, but I don’t have any debts and I live well. Still, though, I had no money plan. Yeah, last year I bought an ISA (that’s akin to an RRSP for you Canadians) and managed to max it out in a quarter — somehow. Bach’s book was an enormous help. Also, my mate Cosgrove’s mum once said of me (in her irresistably charming Irish lilt) “Oh, Hamish could live on sunshine and air”. And it mostly works. But while this, yes, is a finite mortal life, it’s still not smart to have no plans for my providence later on.
So I sat down tonight and reviewed my budget, my banking, and my values as they relate to money. Bach makes the very good point that any financial plan that doesn’t acknowledge and incorporate what’s most important to you is bunkum. I realised that I’m willing to spend endless amounts on expanding my creative capabilities, and I’m willing to spend more on travelling. But no matter how good the argument is for home ownership, I just don’t ever want to be in 25 years’ worth of debt to anything. More than two zeros, and I’m sweating. So no house, no car — none of that stuff. They’re right for some people, wrong for me.
The other day, Patrick told me what the financials firm he works for is worth: I think the figure was 45 billion pounds. Yeah, that’s a B, as in — well, “billion”. How can there be that kind of money floating around and all our issues not be sorted out? I suppose because we’re not committed to it. For my own tiny part, I realised I do have some commitments, and they say I can’t keep my money with HSBC. So tonight I applied to switch my money over to Smile.co.uk, who specialise in ethical banking. I have no trouble with people doing well, but if you’re going to do well, you’d better do good.
The next thing I did tonight was write a business plan for hame.land as a press, author, and copywriting service. That was a good exercise, and shone some light on what great resources I have in place in some areas, and how utterly clueless I am in others.
So that brought me around to searching for ideas about marketing. This is the one piece I’ve always been rubbish at, that connection between my abilities and the world. At The Strategic Coach, they refer to this fit between talent and need as “The Fundamental Relationship(TM)”. (And we pronounce the trademark. It’s a bit like that African glottal cluck.) It’s not my focus, self-promotion, but there’s no excuse for repeating a bad approach over and over and wondering why it doesn’t work. I have much to learn here. One thing I do know is this: Secret plans are the domain of the uncommitted. So on May 5th, here in Edinburgh, there will be a launch of my press and my novels
The Willies
and
Idea in Stone
. (This also happens to coincide nicely with my 5th anniversary of arriving here.)
Then I moved onto other bits of life, and decided I’d like to go on a few dates. Just for fun and for the sake of it. But I’ve put a creative limitation on the exercise: No one off the Internet. It’s pish.
And finally, feeling like I’d accomplished a bunch of things out of my 2006 book of goals (there is such a thing; the only handmade book I’ve kept for myself), I decided to give the computer stuff another try. I guess it was just time for it to work again.
Now it’s time for bed.
Big, fat day off.
Sunday, March 12, 2006 , 10:02 PM
So after a few hours of trying, unsuccessfully, to fix that, then writing to the producers of the software, who will be away all weekend, productivity ground to a halt. I wound up playing a videogame until 7AM €” EEK! (Silly, occasional habit when I have no mental energy.)
Today I wiped all the To-Dos off my whiteboard and took what, at work, we call a Free Day: no work-related thinking, communication, or action. I still have my To-Dos in several other places, but it seemed important to not have them glaring at me while I wasted time. But I’ve been working very hard lately, and suppose I’m at the point of burn-out, so this was good to do, even if I’m not accustomed to it and felt guilty all day.
Not surprisingly, I feel sleepy.
It’s snowy out today €” a rarity here (nowadays, at least; my mum tells me it used to snow Canada-style when she was growing up in Glasgow). Something about that, or the lack of light, is leaching out my energy lately. It’s the kind of feeling that could be mistaken for depression, except nothing’s wrong. On the contrary, actually. It’s just hibernation time.
In typographic detail.
Saturday, March 11, 2006 , 12:17 AM
Hamish sat at his desk, wondering whether to change the format of his books. It had been a long work-week, with lots of projects coming in from his main contract, and with much of his spare time in the evening spent printing and assembling books. If I make them a folded A4, there’ll be less trimming. Ah, but then I can’t print the covers at home ’cause they’ll be too big.
He looked at the text on his screen. Something isn’t right about this, he thought, looking at the open file for his novel. Whenever a character thinks to himself, I always put the thought in italics to separate it from the rest of the text.
Oh, nuts, he thought to himself (or something worse than that). When I set up a stylesheet in Word, it removed some of the italics. But not all of them. Aw, crap. Oh no, and it indented the first line of the first paragraph in a chapter. I always have the first paragraph flush-left. Why do I do that? I dunno, that’s just how I learnt it was supposed to be.
He’d had a nice dinner out with friends and came home early, partly because he’d eaten so much he felt like an anaconda who’d swallowed a pig, and partly because he wanted an easy night spent reading before turning in early and getting a good, long sleep. Instead, he printed out two manuscripts and made two books, happy that he could do that again, after refilling his toner cartridge that morning, which involved his hands doing a minstrel show with the impossibly fine powder, then his having to solder a new chip into the old cartridge, which was designed to commit hara-kiri when it was empty so the owner would have to pay the swindling price of a new one.
In the end, the cartridge worked fine, but the books weren’t coming out so well. He’d got a guillotine a few days ago, and was still learning how to use it to shear off the sides of books so they were smooth. Sometimes this worked beautifully, but just as often it produced a slightly weird result — an odd angle here, or a crushed corner from its vice-grip there.
These are hand-made, that’s part of the thing, he thought. I should really leave them alone as much as possible.
Shut up and re-work this typography, then go to bed.
And no more stylesheets in Word.
It snowed in Edinburgh today.
Friday, March 03, 2006 , 5:22 PM
Oh Happy Day!
Thursday, March 02, 2006 , 1:21 PM
YAY! I got a machine this morning that’s a bit of mailroom/direct-mail equipment designed to fold pages. Right now, it takes me about an hour to fold the pages for a book. This device will reduce the time to a matter of minutes. I had to fiddle about with its measurement settings for a while to get it to fold my small book-sized pages instead of letter-sized pages, but I knew it would be possible because the same machine is sold for both North American 8.5″ by 11″ and European A4 pages. And I did it! While making the final adjustments to it, I made the innards for a blank book in just moments. Yay! This will allow me to be prepared for much larger numbers of orders. I’ve yet to decide what I’m going to do for a launch, publicity, or to even articulate what my intentions are in doing this.
YAY! Last night I did up a cover for my friend Kirsten’s play that she gave me ages ago, and she loved what I produced. (She’d grabbed clip art to represent the characters in this murder-mystery spoof-cum-better-murder-mystery — she knows what sells in the summer stock, but still wanted to do such a play her way. The clip art worked as a sketch, but even better was having a custom illustration and proper type treatment!) This is just one of a bunch of long-outstanding tasks that have been nibbling at my attention and are now done.
YAY! While running errands I picked up some trousers I’d had mended: my two pairs of khakis which I mostly-liked, but was always uncomfortable about ’cause they had kinda big stove-pipe legs. No more! Now they are proper jeans-sized legs. About the same price as new cheap trousers, but these are good ones made by children. Yes, they’re Gap — I felt awful at the time but needed ones for work post-haste two summers ago, and I didn’t want to go buying more of them now since it’s probably the same story for any shop in town. So these will last and I haven’t sent an extra pair of trews through the world-net.
YAY! When I got home I found a cheque from the City of Edinburgh Council in my mailbox, refunding £125 for Council Tax from my last flat. I thought I’d already got and spent that!
YAY! The outstanding Council Tax and phone bills for this flat are now sorted. No more huge mystery bills hanging in my imagination. (£94 for electricity since August! Outstanding, particularly considering how generously I use it here in my factory.) [Boo! Flatmate Dave is moving out; Flatmate Geoff and I have to replace him by 7 April.]
YAY! I’m up to date on my work and will be able to meet my deadlines now in my usual fashion. The Production team offered to take over the design bit of a project I’ve been working on so I could focus on my writing — as I should be doing, since the company is all about individuals focusing on their specific talents, and web/PDF/whatever design is something I have some ability but limited energy for. This is a huge relief, because I was starting to catch on fire from the stress of doing the whole thing. I finally stopped and asked for help, and I got a firetruck full of it. You’d think I’d remember to do this by now.
YAY! I have time and space tonight to work on a short story and hopefully produce some books to test out my new process.
<
p>So as you can gather, it’s something of a Yay-Day.
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p>
