Out of my tree, into the Forest.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006 , 4:30 PM
I’m sitting in the Forest Cafe, quite enjoying it here. I had a cheap and wonderful burrito, and it made me smile. Why? Because it was smiling.
This is a huge old room with tall, narrow windows looking out on a lush green courtyard between here and the stone building behind. All the furniture around me is mismatched — velvety, deep couches of all different colours and eras, and wooden chairs rescued from a dozen kerbsides. The floor is wood, but the surface is completely worn away. The walls and ceiling are equally patchy. It’s a giant rec-room, basically. Home-made art is hung around the room, painted on the walls and the front counter.
They have free WiFi. That, the food, and the relaxed atmosphere bring me back. The exuberant noise of the young people who work here and frequent the place sometimes drives me away.
~
Last week was Sloth Week. Not on any official wildlife calendar, just for me.
From time to time, I can’t produce anything. I just need to vegetate, surf, surf, surf the Internet, and give myself a break.
Happily, that’s winding down this week. I’ve climbed out of my tree, and am bothering to exercise in the morning, to dress half-decently, and to get work done on my various projects.
Last night I was knackered and went to bed early, which turned into more of a nap: I woke up at midnight and started sketching out a short story I have in mind.
~
I’m meeting neat people lately. I’ve got lots of good friends here, but it’s been exciting to meet new people, as if I’ve broken through a layer of immigrant anonymity, and suddenly I’m getting to know new folk — people like Joe and Brian, who are up to interesting things and aregood at what they do. I get a lot of energy from that.
~
I hear there’s been a heatwave in Toronto. Crap. I booked my trip a month earlier this year in an attempt to avoid that.
Ugh.
I want to see my friends there, but I don’t want to leave home.
~
FlatmateGeoff is having a mover come around for an appraisal. I need to find a place to live for September, and have no idea where I’ll go. And it’s too soon to actually do anything about it.
(I could get two other people in, but I don’t want to end up being a superintendant, and have to keep dealing with other people moving in and out, which costs me lots of money. And it seems hypocritical for me to be banging on about original culture and heritage while living in this modern space penitentiary of a building.)
Okay, Universe, I’m putting it out there: help me with this one.
I want someplace where I have a nice cozy room, where I have a separate space to properly set up my press equipment, that costs me less than I’m paying now (I just need a pied-de-terre, not a showflat), and where I can come and go with some privacy. That’s what I want.
Ceilidh tonight
Friday, May 26, 2006 , 5:50 PM
Eighteen again?
Thursday, May 25, 2006 , 12:27 AM
Someone in a message board on a site I frequent just asked if people would want to be 18 again. I said “Hell, no.” Here was my summary explanation of why I like being in my thirties:
Teens — High school in rural Canada = The Breakfast Club meets Deliverance. First year of uni. In love with best friend. Total denial.
20s — More confusion. First boyfriend. First breakup. Suicidal angst. Change of careers. Shite jobs. Total confusion.
30s — Wrote three novels. Have dream job. Moved to Scotland.
I’m staying here. Still haven’t sorted out the romance thing, which is scary. This existence has its good bits, but I don’t want to have to come back to repeat lessons.
Permission.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006 , 10:55 PM
I just replied to an e-mail from a potential new friend here in Edinburgh. (I’ve been making more of those lately, and people who are into the same things I am. After five years, I think I’m getting some community here.)
In replying to him, I kept going and going, and realised I was writing a blog entry. What I wrote was in response to specific things he’d written, and I don’t want to include his text here without permission, so I’m just going to leave it as chunks, which should hopefully be self-explanatory.
~
For the past two days I’ve sat in front of the PC trawling back and forth across the Internet. I finally pulled myself away today and saw the sun, felt the rain on my face, breathed, went to the library, got work done, went to a reading tonight with friends… All very wholesome and lively.
I think I’ve been hiding out, because after the little launch I did of my book, I know I have to move on to what’s next for the project, but, not knowing what that is, yet suspecting it’s going to require more chutzpah (moxy, balls, whatever), I was sticking my head in the sand.
Also, stuff is moving inside me creatively, but I don’t know what form it’s going to take. It’s just feelings that I’m noticing, wondering if they’ve been there all along and I’ve just not been paying attention to them.
~
[About Science Fiction.]
Yeah, I don’t generally read SF anymore. People have classed my first and second books as SF, but I think they’re pretty mild examples of it. More like “What if?” stories, since they take place in — well, 1999, and 2026 — so the imaginable past and future.
~
I had a breakthrough at the Reading Room at the Edinburgh Central Library this afternoon. I was reviewing notes I’d been given in a writing workshop I attended two weeks ago — a selection from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and some of Tennessee Williams’s diaries — and loved both. I found them moving and inspiring.
In writing an e-mail to the guy who’d led the workshop, I started going on about how he knew about all these gay writers and I’d barely read anything by them, when I saw a pattern:
As a kid, I used to draw comics, but I rarely read them. (Only when my parents bought packs of them for us on holidays, which usually contained two that I wanted and one weird horror one.)
And…
I like writing more than I like reading.
Don’t get me wrong, I just finished The Time-Traveler’s Wife this weekend and loved it. Great big brick of a thing. I cried at the end, just had to. It was a bit girly — I would have explored different aspects of the story — but it was well-crafted, well-written, and touching, a healing tonic after dreck like The daVinci Code, which for me was like trying to eat sea salt as a meal. That it’s at the centre of popular culture right now makes me sad.
Tonight, I went to see Canadian radio storyteller Stuart McLean read from his new book. (Ottakar’s was hosting, and they’re also going to carry my book!)
In-between his stories, he fielded questions from the audience, and I was completely disarmed by the raw honesty in his answers. They weren’t slick or self-promoting. He talked candidly about his joys and challenges as an author and journalist, and I was especially impressed by his answer when an audience member asked what he thought about another Canadian icon, humourist Stephen Leacock (1869-1944): McLean said that he hadn’t read much Leacock. In fact, he hadn’t read a lot of anyone.
“I’m not a student,” he said, “I’m more of… a craftsman.”
I breathed a sigh of relief: It’s alright, then.
Of course I’m going to keep reading. Of course I’m going to keep trying to improve. But ultimately I can only do my work.
I was impressed by how much the leader of this workshop a few weeks ago knew about all these other authors, about writing styles and movements. But I also wondered if one might not fill up his head so much with all that that it becomes paralysing, impossible to do anything of one’s own.
~
[On having people ask to see or show you work.]
I’ve had this go both ways:
People ask me to look at their work. I insist that I’m a writer, not an editor. I can only tell them what I would do instead. Also, the idea of writers critiquing writers gives me the willies. Maybe that’s ’cause my training was as an actor, and it’s a cardinal rule that actors do not give each other direction. It’s considered bad manners, and presumptuous (that’s what the director is for).
Then there are people who ask to see my work while saying “And I’ll tell you what I think”, like it’s a threat. Wait, you haven’t seen it. Why are you saying it like you’re going to hate it then tell me, and why do you think:a) I want to hear something like thatb) that would be helpful, andc) that you’re qualified to give me an editorial critique?
I tell them to just read it like a reader. I wrote the book I intended to. If they like it, they’re my audience; if they don’t, they must not be.
~
I was worried when I started writing for a living that I would lose my energy for my other writing. But I didn’t. My own writing got better. And being able to fill in that “occupation” box on forms with “writer” feels good. I don’t have “what I do for a living” and “what I really do”. It’s all one life. There’s an integrity to that.
~
It’s way late. There’s more in my head, I think, but it won’t come out. Maybe it shouldn’t, like rice in the salt shaker.
Every flavour of e-book.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006 , 11:47 AM
The very bright Matthew from ManyBooks.net has run my novels through his giant code machine to make them available in every major e-book format, and even readable online. Each of them has already been downloaded at least a dozen times!
Here’s my author’s page on his site: Hamish MacDonald on ManyBooks.net.
Thanks, Matthew, for all your help!
P.S. Patrick told me that one of the formats works on iPods, for those of you plugged into the world of white deciduous appliances.
Yes, THAT easy.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006 , 12:59 PM
A friend of a friend of a friend who found my site through somebody or another’s blog just bought a few things from the webshop.
“You’re actually much easier than eBay,” she said.
Yeah, that’s a line I’ve got to use: I’m easier than eBay.
P.S. Thanks to those who’ve left comments on my previous posts. I keep forgetting to look at them, then when I do it’s like finding little Easter eggs around my room. I know smart people.
Conclusion.
, 10:26 AM
A friend pointed out that I’d told 2/3 of the story about the writing workshop, which rather violates the principles I’d been talking about here.
The last night, we attended a short play which had been put together from oral histories about Edinburgh’s past. It was a good introduction to the highs and lows of what’s happened here in living memory. After that, the writing group read out what we’d been working on.
Everyone’s piece had some unique merit to it, and just within a day had grown stronger, as each participant had been open to feedback and incorporated it in their work. My advice to a few people had been to drop the political jargon and stick with the personal, which did have the effect of making the pieces more inviting and less of a closed-loop diatribe. And, as I mentioned before, the trick for me was to actually write something with a point. My piece was about my “army buddy” Andy, and my being his token gay mate.
Ironically, Andy texted me yesterday morning saying he was in town. We hung out, and had a great time, as he’s a very funny guy, full of great stories — one of those people like my friend Kirsten that weird stuff always happens to. Kirsten’s writing books about her experiences now, and Andy really should. Passing out at a latrine in the middle of the Iraqi desert, climbing out the window so as to not be found by a mad ex-girlfriend — it’s schadenfreude at its best!
The piece I wrote was an assigned topic, not something I was burning to write about, so ultimately I think it was kinda ehh. But after last night, I do stand by its conclusion: So I’m the token gay mate. There’s no problem here unless I choose to have one. And why bother?
On Sunday, I went on an LGBT history walk around Edinburgh. The walk was very good, because the guide, although he insisted he wasn’t a historian, really knew what he was talking about. I learnt a lot about the city, some of which was angering, some of it frivolous, some of it lusty, and some of it ennobling.
Afterward, I wondered what to do with all this information. It’s the past; things are different now. Ultimately, it’s left me with a feeling of gratitude, that I can be so blasé about it all.
Before the walk, I went to the “Remember When” exhibition that’s currently on at the City Arts Centre. It’s very well done, and I want to go back to take in some of the more involved elements, like the videotaped interviews with pro-rights campaigners like Robin Cook, and those who were vehemently opposed to scrapping restrictions on what people were legally allowed to do in private and at what age.
Soliloqueso
Thursday, May 11, 2006 , 4:44 PM
If I’m going to explore this idea of going back to first thoughts and original details in writing, this obviously isn’t the way to do it, because knowing now that I’m reading the thing aloud, knowing that they want to videotape the products of this workshop, changes the nature and intention of the work. It’s the Heisenberg Principle: I’m being observed? Okay, so I’m going to do what I like to do, what I know works.
Maybe that’s the lesson here: I can go away and explore, and I think that’ll be a valuable exercise, but I will keep coming back to these other things I’ve learnt about how to tell a story effectively. I guess there’s no need to apologise for that or think it makes me a wanker. The wankers are the ones who insist on not learning it.
Structure is why we care.
, 10:05 AM
In last night’s session of the writing workshop, we read pieces we’d written as homework, then the instructor and the others gave their comments. I didn’t realise this was how it would work, and I generally hate that sort of thing, since I think all most writers can say in these situations is what they would have written.
My piece was just some rambling, babbling thing because I didn’t really have anything to say about the topic I’d been given. I read it, though, and the class laughed and said they thought it was funny — which I hadn’t consciously tried for, but I always get something out of being successfully funny. In writing, so many people go to dark and twisted places, which in a beginning writer can be really tedious: Yeah, black tears sprung from the bottom of your soul and fell into the pit of your blah blah blah. Why should I listen? This is what Cosgrove and I call “Dungeons and Dragons” poetry. It has no entry-point for the listener because it’s not intended for the listener. Its purpose is to sanctify the writer’s pain. But as pop psychologist John Bradshaw devastatingly claims:“Your suffering is ordinary!”
Same thing with my piece, though: I didn’t really know what I was supposed to produce from the exercise, so I just wrote random stuff. But the feedback I got just reinforced everything I’ve learnt since those early Natalie Goldberg days. She was my grade school teacher, if you will (and those lessons are fundamental to everything that follows), but my ‘university’ teaching came from John Vorhaus.
Vorhaus’s books on writing (Creativity Rules and The Comic Toolbox) place a lot of emphasis on story structure, because structure makes a story rewarding for an audience: “We started here, and we wound up here.” It means that there’s a point to why we’re hearing about this moment in the character’s life. The instructor of this course calls it “the liminal moment”. Joseph Campbell referred to it as “The Cosmogonic Round”.
Basically? “Beginning, middle, end.” So while cherry blossoms are essential, there’s got to be a context in order for them to matter.
So in addition to doing some work and making some books today (to fill orders — thank you!), I’ve also got this piece to rewrite and make into some sort of story.
Achoo!
Wednesday, May 10, 2006 , 11:56 AM
In a break from reworking a piece, I’ve been reading a page on MetaFilter about how to deal with close-talkers. Some people chimed in with a Hamishesque “Just communicate” (which I probably wouldn’t actually do in this instance), while others give descriptions of various body-fu moves to make it more difficult for a person to get closer. But then someone recommended a brilliant bit of “social engineering”:
Sneeze!
~
The launch on Friday was a hit. Well, according to Flatmate Geoff: I’d run myself down so much that by Friday night I was feeling pretty poorly and had come down with some kind of bug, so I wasn’t completely present. But lots of neat people came over, and they were great at striking up conversation with each other and keeping the party balloon in the air, so I’m taking Geoff’s estimation as the final word on the event.
Then I went through to Glasgow on Saturday for a weekend fling with someone charming and hot whom I’d met the previous weekend, and I learnt a few lessons:
A) Hamish can’t keep his yap shut and sometimes this costs him relationships.
B) Really, really, dating people significantly younger than me doesn’t work. Really. (Am I listening yet?)
C) While the above may be true, perhaps I don’t need the person I’m with to be like me. My personal expectations and the boundaries of my self don’t have to extend around a partner. Or do they? Are my ways becoming set?
~
Last night, I attended the first evening in a three-part writing workshop that’s part of the “Remember When” project, which is a public display about the history of queer folk in Edinburgh on at the City Arts Centre next to the train station.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the evening proved to be quite valuable. The instructor is an American who studied at the University of Edinburgh. He was on fire the whole night, burning with ideas about the history of queer writing, and about the importance of personal narrative.
I used to write every day, piles and piles of stuff, journalling away about whatever was going on in my life. When Cosgrove and I were first becoming friends (meeting through a poster I put up in a community centre about a writing group I wanted to start), I chided him about only writing for product, only when he had some purpose that he was writing a poem for. “You have to write about everything!” I said.
I don’t write like that anymore. I suppose blogging has kind of taken its place, but there’s lots I don’t say here. And I also dismiss a lot of personal writing as needless indulgence. There’s only so much time, and if all that writing’s not leading anywhere, what’s it for? But here it is time when I might be starting another book, and I find myself missing a thread of personal importance that would make me go with any one idea. Starting with product is working backwards, and inevitably leads to creative paralysis.
The instructor last night mentioned Augusto Boal, who did theatre work in South America with the politically oppressed to help them find new solutions. In PEI, I was invited to take part in a workshop based on Boal’s work, and in the course of that workshop, the instructor introduced me to Natalie Goldberg. And Goldberg was my entry-point to writing — writing about everything, capturing the raw material of my own experience and honouring it as “enough”.
But here I am these years later, and I’ve developed an identity and a body of work for myself as a writer. I’ve got a style, I suppose. But this session last night made me take a few steps back, looking both at the history of people who wrote from a perspective different than “normal”. I struggle with that, because I don’t want to be a “gay writer”; I think that’s needless ghettoisation, or even an implicit request for critical lieniency. On the other hand, though, there’s a point where all this blending in is a denial: This difference did make growing up difficult. My perspective today is still not the same as most people’s.
Of course, this can move along a continuum over to the realm of victim politics. After reading pieces he’d cleverly wrangled us into writing without preparation or forethought, the instructor gave us writing assignments that would deepen what we’d written, or give us a different perspective on it. One of the lesbians in the room (so many angry piercings, like a bass after a lifetime of “catch and release”) had written a diatribe about gender this and inclusion that — all very articulate, with a composition style that crackled with its political precision. But that was the problem: it was so rehearsed, received, formulated, and filled with LGBT(XYZ…) jargon. The instructor’s assignment to her made me want to hug him: “Write a piece about someone who’s a stereotype, and write it without any anger.”
Of course, this hearkens back to theatre school, and acting a character from an honest place, not commenting on him. I suppose I’ll probably be familiar with most of what we do in this course. But so what? That’s not the same as actually doing the work and applying those ideas. This is what The Strategic Coach is all about: these entrepreneurs are already smart and successful. Yes, we give them ideas and tools packages in an original, clever way. But the thing they consistently thank us for most is providing them a space where they can think, because they’re usually too busy to have perspective on what they’re doing. Same thing here.
I was very careful throughout the evening to not play my “professional writer” card. It came out during the introductions, but I wasn’t there to challenge the instructor; I was there trying to get to Beginner’s Mind and learn something. I have nothing to prove, and even less desire to come across like an arrogant prat. I’ve worked too hard on this indie publishing thing to start going there.
This was part of my motivation for going to the event, to see who else on the Edinburgh scene considers themselves a writer, or wants to be. The workshop participants ranged in age across three generations and various styles of “gay” (or whatever), sitting at folding tables around a small white room with a projector connected to a laptop casting images of Whitman, Williams, Wilde, and all the other bent Ws on the wall. Some of the others said they were there just to explore an idea, but several said they hoped to be published. (And said it in exactly the way one would say “I hope someone asks me to the prom.”) So maybe I can offer something there.
My other motivation was to scrub away all the style and the expectation to produce, and get back to capturing original details, since that was what made me first fall in love with writing.
Sure enough, walking home after the event, I found myself looking through the pink cherry blossoms on Princes Street, up at the beige castle walls and the white moon beyond, feeling a gentleness in my soul, a patient satisfaction that this is enough.
Launch Day!
Friday, May 05, 2006 , 1:00 PM
Today is the official launch of Idea in Stone. For all the details, you can read or download the press release.
Several websites have been kind enough to give the book a mention, including these two, which have lots of great information for anyone looking to do something like this:
The DIY Publishing and DIY Poetry Web Ring
Especially meaningful are blog-features from my great friends Cosgrove and Liz (Liz’s even has an interview we did!):
Thanks everyone for all the support you’ve given me on this project. If you’re in Edinburgh, feel free to drop by my place tonight after 7PM for a little celebration.
Idea in Stone book release!
Monday, May 01, 2006 , 8:37 PM
My third novel, Idea in Stone is officially released this Friday, 5 May, 2006.
You don’t have to wait until then to download the free e-book or buy a hand-bound paperback copy!
And if you’re going to be in Edinburgh, come along to a wee shindig at my flat anytime after 7PM! No pressure to buy a book; it’s just a chance for me to share this achievement with the community of people I care about (if you’re reading this, that’s you). Friday is also the fifth anniversary of my arrival in Scotland!
Beltane 2006
, 7:48 PM
For the fourth year running, I attended Beltane, the fire festival atop Edinburgh’s Calton Hill that celebrates the end of winter and the coming of summer.
Due to its nature as an event with lots of glowy fire in lots of pitch-blackness, my pictures are rubbish. As an event, though, it was a great success: something of the people, for the people, that’s lots of fun. I love seeing an event of local culture getting stronger and better supported with each passing year.
P.S. Beltane is something of a fertility rite, so I caution that some of these pictures are not safe for work.
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p>Also, please note that the comments and the discussion on externally-linked sites are outwith my control, so read those at your own discretion.
