Getting geeky with the girls.
Monday, October 30, 2006 , 1:35 AM
There’s a trend here: My first “officially” published short story appeared in an anthology from a women’s reading series. (I co-curated a special men’s night for them.) Now I’ve got an article on Girls Gone Mobile, a website dedicated to “putting a friendlier face on mobility”. But really, I am a man!
If you know me, though, you’ll know that I am a big geek when it comes to mobile computing. I love being able to fit everything I need to work right in my jacket pockets, and that a big part of my work now relies on my being able to unpack and write anyplace I happen to be.
Most websites about Pocket PCs and other tech gear tend to focus on product announcements, developments, and — well, basically more things to buy. So I’m always eager to see articles that help people be more productive with the equipment they already have. Given the chance to add one more of these, I leapt at it, and wrote this.
You can’t make this $#1% up.
Monday, October 23, 2006 , 9:48 AM
Running a micropress is expensive.
Sunday, October 22, 2006 , 5:36 PM
I’ve had a lovely weekend, hanging out with NewFriendSmell Chris, who had a birthday, and spending time with the elder Robertshaws (Patrick‘s folks, who were up visiting). We had a lovely meal last night at The Scotsman, the old newspaper office on the North Bridge that’s now a hotel and restaurant.
I’ve also been making lots of books for swapping with others and just to make sure I’ve got spares. And I had some blank books to make, too, like one for Patrick to take on his trip to Australia, which happens very soon.
Unfortunately, my colour laser printer is misbehaving. Its printing has become patchy. It’s okay, but it’s not suitable anymore for producing the cover of a book.
It’s important both for me and for the point I’m trying to make that my products aren’t “good for something homemade”. I’d like them to just be good.
The replacement parts for this printer are expensive enough that it doesn’t make sense anymore to keep throwing money at it. (I’ve already spent so much on toner this year it’s sickening.) What I’ve done instead is buy a more economical black and white laser printer for producing the inside pages and a small inkjet printer for doing the colour covers. I’ve also ordered some waterproof paper, but hopefully the covers won’t run even on normal photo paper. We’ll see.
It’s all about refining the process, but ouch! the cost of learning. At least the pages and covers will be sharper-looking now, ’cause the colour printer was an older model, so there were compromises there from the get-go.
You can hear that I’m still in the rationalisation stage of having just barfed out a gob of money.
And now I have to figure out how to sell this big beige Volkswagen of a printer when the new ones arrive. There’s no storage room here at the cottage! If you’re in the area and want it, you can have it, cheap. The printing is fine, but not for big full-colour pages or at the ridiculous volume of sheets I’m running off. Or I’ll give it away, if anyone knows of a charity that’ll pick it up and give me a receipt.
Finding roots at the grocery store.
Thursday, October 19, 2006 , 8:04 PM
Tonight, as I was buying groceries at Real Foods, I was stopped at the checkout by an older man who’d been having a pointed discussion with the young woman at the till. He wanted my opinion, he said. Did I agree that supplements were a waste of money, that they just pass through you? Given that I had some in my basket — the first time I’d bought any in a while — I figured he was baiting me.
Okay, I thought, I’ll bite.
So we got into a mild round of “Are vitamins worthwhile?” What I’d bought was something to help me sleep, which is particularly challenging now that the baby next door seems to be trying to turn itself inside out each night by wailing, and its parents seem to be trying that tactic of not paying attention to it so it will learn to sleep through the night. It’s not working. I also bought some greens stuff and some vitamin C. The weather’s changing and I don’t want to get sick, and sometimes I eat a lot of the same thing, and could use to round out my diet a bit.
Of course, my accent is a conversation in itself, so we quickly got onto the “No, I’m Canadian” branch, which led to the matter of my name.
“Ah,” he said. “I’m Ranald Alasdair MacDonald, the 32nd chief of the MacDonalds of Keppoch.”
I’d recently read a piece about him, and the legal battle he’d gone through for over thirty years to stake this claim.
Over the next half hour, he took me through the entire history of my race. He went so quickly I could barely keep up, as we Celts swept across continents and influenced this and that. Gaelic words spiced his descriptions, and he was dismayed that I didn’t have the Gaelic at all. (I tried to teach myself from a book in high school, but it’s just not one of those languages. I got as far as basics like “the black dog” — cu dubh — but had no idea if I was speaking any of it correctly.)
It was all fascinating, and under other circumstances than standing outside the whole foods grocery store in the rain I would have liked to take notes.
Then the talk turned to how the Celts delivered Christianity westward. “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” asked the chief.
“Neither,” I replied.
And the next bit of conversation almost ruined what had gone before. I managed to keep my defenses lowered until he said something about having a closed mind toward Christ, and I had to say, “I’m not an unintelligent person. That’s not why I don’t follow it.” He apologised, and said that he didn’t mean to imply that. And set back in on his reasoning for being a Christian and why I had to see the fact of it.
I just kept my mouth shut and let the chieftain speak, and there was no turning in my mind, nor in his, because that’s not how these conversations go. I learned that one from the Mormons, actually: Where there is contention there will never be understanding. I’ve found that to be true.
Eventually, he made a joke of it, punctuated with a pat on my chest (he’d been doing this throughout the conversation), telling me about his daughter marrying a Muslim man. “She converted for you, and that’s fine,” he told the husband. “And you can raise your children as you see fit. Just don’t try to convert me, because I imagine that you’re the same: you’d rather jump out that window than be converted.” With that, he smiled at me, held out a thumbs-up, and walked away into the rain.
Pass the parcel.
Monday, October 16, 2006 , 1:31 PM
Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion with three other self-publishing authors about “DIY Culture” — that is, culture that people generate for themselves, from scratch, often in opposition to, or just completely outside the provided culture of mass commerce.
It takes more effort to do this, and the rewards are sometimes hard to quantify, but I have a conviction that people are hungry for it, that it’s much more satisfying to engage with a world we’ve had a hand in creating than just endlessly buying things that we’ve been convinced we need by businesses, being sold the idea that our experience isn’t as good as something out there, that there’s always something wrong, something missing, and we have to pay to get the answer. Taking both approaches to an extreme, I believe one can save us while the other could kill us.
In the specific instance of publishing, this means that instead of whingeing about the state of the book publishing industry (slush piles, takeovers, editors being replaced with marketers), you just go ahead and do your own thing. There are lots of people to tell you how to try to woo the industry, and lots of people bitching about how difficult that is, but it felt great to stand up and say “Ignore all that! Don’t wait for someone to give you permission to do what you want to do!” And then we went on to show that doing it is well within most people’s reach.
The other speakers were:
Gavin Inglis, a good and funny writer I’ve heard present work at the Writers Bloc performance evenings and have wanted to meet for a while. Turns out he’s also into open-source software, which has redoubled my determination to learn Scribus, a free package for designing books — particularly after fighting with InDesign for days and days, trying to get our Dunderheid ‘zine printed before the fair. In the end, I failed, which is not something I’m accustomed to, and do not enjoy.
Helen Moore, a self-styled “eco-poet”, who treads that fine line between polemic and poesy, managing to strike a beautiful, connected, incisive balance between them. (She’s also the 8th Bard of Bath!)
Nine, who produces a good old-fashioned ‘zine using found images, very good hand-lettering, a Pritt stick, and a photocopier. Within those pages she writes with an honest, immediate force that really impressed me. Personal narrative can often come off like the blubberings of a drunk who’s sat next to you at a bar, unbidden, and has decided to tell you their troubles. But the copy she gave me is full of the strong, quiet reflections of someone who’s trying to make sense of big personal experiences, and has broken through to something universal.
The talk was about who we are, why we decided to self-publish, what we believe DIY culture is, why it’s important, and a practical description of our (quite diverse) methods of self-publishing.
I was honoured to share the platform with those three, and happy to meet like-minded people who were up to something great. With Helen I know I’ve rekindled a friendship that meant a lot to me, and I hope to stay in touch with Gavin and Nine, too.
I was equally honoured that people came out to hear what we had to say, especially because what drove them to get up and come down to The Drill Hall on a Sunday morning was likely an inner prompting about a projectthey wanted to create.
Following the talk, I gave a bookbinding demonstration. I was surprised that more than twice as many people as I’d planned came out for it, so I was short on materials. But people doubled up and, as my good friend Wendy pointed out, helped to teach each other, because they all kind of took off at their own speed. I thought things would go in a much more orderly fashion, but because I’d provided them with a handbook (which you can download a PDF of here), they just raced ahead — four tables full of people stacking and stitching, cutting and binding, with paper, glue, and thread everywhere. Before I knew it, people were showing me the books they’d made — and they were great! (Much better than my first book!)
Even more exciting was the joy on their faces as they told me all the plans they had for this new-found skill. Wow.
The Radical Book Fair is organised each year by Elaine and Tarlochen at Word*Power Bookshop. Unlike thatother book festival, the events cost nothing.
Now, I have to confess that I’ve often been scared away from Word*Power events in the past because they tend to be political. But what really impressed me about all the presenters I saw over the weekend was how positive and powerful they seemed. These were people coming back from their various fields to say, yes, the situation is bad, but they weren’t there just to complain or play the victim. They were there to rally the intelligence and passion of the attendees, and did it in a practical way.
The whole thing started off really well for me, with a talk from Chris Johnstone, who pointed out that a lot of us shut off about issues simply because we can’t process the way they make us feel. We immediately jump from thewhat the issue is, he says, to the how — trying to sort out a solution. Since that’s often not immediately possible, we shut down, turn away, or make fun of it.
I guess what I found valuable about his talk, what helped me be there for the rest of the weekend and participate in more than just my little bit, was his message of “It’s okay to be overwhelmed. It’s okay to not know what your part in this is.” As a result, I had a fascinating, engaging weekend that filled me with ideas.
I also got to hear and meet Alastair McIntosh, whose book Soil and Soul I read earlier this year and found immensely inspiring. He’s got this loopy mind that manages to tie together sociology, science, history, theology, and likely a hundred other strains of thought. Listening to him present his poems, which were essentially the stuff stuff he left out of Soil and Soul to make it more generally palatable, I thought “When I grow up, I want to be that guy.” Not doing his work (on land reform, crofting, and the like — essential to the survival of Scotland’s landscape and heritage), but just to have that ability to synthesise divergent ways of thinking.
~
I did a lot of work in the lead-up to this event, and now I need a break. It’s time to digest what I got from the experience, to relax for a bit, and to just live.
N.B.: Change of phone number.
Friday, October 06, 2006 , 6:01 PM
My mobile phone was breaking down, so I’ve got a new phone, and, with it, a new telephone number.
So please note that my number is now 07847 183 931.
Flying solo.
Thursday, October 05, 2006 , 10:55 PM
I’m single again. It’s okay: no nasty surprises, and it was done with affection and respect on both sides.
So there you go. Another chapter.
I’m good.
~
My work for The Radical Book Fair continues. I’m making lots of books, both novels and blank books, trying to find ways to package everything I’ve learnt as well as some creative content so I can share it with other people.
Yesterday’s breakthrough was learning to do this map-fold. But ultimately I didn’t learn it from the linked article. I had to stop and work it out from first principles — but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go start making paper crickets and fish and junk. I like working with paper, but I don’t like things that are anthropomorphised. Paper is amazing because it’s a package for ideas, a telepathic gift from nature. No need to turn it into a frog.
Bet you didn’t even know I was gone.
Sunday, October 01, 2006 , 8:14 PM
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p>I just got back from a trip to the Highlands. I met some of my mates and stayed in a cottage/cabin/chalet in a lovely place called Tomich. It was a nice break, with lots of time spent doing nothing, or taking walks through the Scottish autumn landscape with all its shades of brown and green. I even finally got around to trying to teach myself to watercolour:
