Author: hamishmacdonald

…plus a lovely card from my folks.

I’m grateful for my many blessings. If you’re reading this, you’re one of them. Thank you!

I’ve been practising by drawing loose, rough cartoons, focusing on saying what’s going on (trying to have that be something other than “Life is running out! What should I be working on?!”).

Here are a couple:

This weekend we stayed with Craig’s cousins and aunt at their cottage in Algonquin Park. The tall, skinny pines, the birds, the sound of rain on the roof: I don’t know if it’s echoes from childhood camping trips or just a personal affinity, but the Ontario woods just do something wonderful for my soul.

And here’s the outhouse:

I drew all kinds of stuff over the past few weeks, but I’m still not sure what’s fit for public consumption and what’s best left under the (sketchbook) covers.

Meanwhile, back to a topic you surely must be tired of hearing from me, but it keeps coming up:

On Saturday, I went to the initial meeting for the third anthology of Toronto Comix, where writers pitched three of their story ideas and everyone voted on which one they liked best. I got to see how this process works, or at least their version of it.

I had to shove down a tsunami of shyness to go into the back room of the coffeeshop and involve myself in the meeting, but I’m so glad I did. It’s really important to me to surround myself here with people for whom creating comics is just a normal, natural thing, who have processes for doing it. And this was definitely that!

At the end, the lead editor, with whom I’d connected with on Twitter, told me he liked my work and asked if I’d like to be involved as a writer or an illustrator. EEK! My intention in going to the meeting was really just to observe and learn, but I found myself saying “If my style fits any of the stories, I’d like to illustrate!” As I thought about it afterwards, I felt like this was exactly why I’m here and what I should be doing.

As I reviewed my A3 sheet of 2015 goals this morning, I discovered that this meeting ticked one of them: “Participate in an event for cartoonists”. (And I saw I’d also achieved several other of the goals, too!)

You’ve just got to put it out there:

I just had a keek at Banksy’s latest work, “Dismaland“. It’s a dark parody of a theme park, and to me it underscores a mindset that I feel I’m finally crawling out from under, largely thanks to working closely with Strategic Coach’s Dan Sullivan on the books we’ve been creating.

The fake park features police vans, boatloads of immigrant-statues trying to dock, rotting carousel horses, and so on.

Sure, these images underscore real problems in the world, but what I take issue with is this appropriation of suffering, like nobody’s allowed to be happy as long as somebody out there is unhappy.

This struck me as Craig read out descriptions of theatre festival shows last week: All of them sounded like petulant actings-out against wrongs the creators went looking for.

(Plus most of them involved audience participation, or an unformed, experimental format, and I’m too tired from work these days to spend my evening completing somebody’s unfinished tantrum of a production. A lot of them sounded like things I would have enjoyed being part of when I was in theatre school, but now I think about the audience. “That’s nice for you, but what about me?”)

I’m not saying we shouldn’t make conscious choices and try to make the world a better place, but it strikes me as a massive blind-spot to be condescendingly upset by other people’s happiness, or to presume to use other people’s troubles to validate our art. And the whole effort seems fueled by a need to validate an unquestioned premise: “The world is bad”.

Maybe, just maybe, joy and pain don’t cancel each other out.

Maybe it’d be better to make little pockets of what we want to see in the world.

Going to Walt Disney World when I was very young felt like being transfigured into heaven. Years later, I went back for a work conference and found the whole thing fake and distasteful; so, yeah, I’m not the target audience anymore. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist, or that I’m superior for not wanting it.

That’s a shift. I did feel that way for a long time.

(And if they do create a life-sized Star Wars world to visit, I may just have to revise this whole position.)

As I cast about for what I want to create, I want it to come from the place of abundance and appreciation that Dan’s shown me, not the spiteful, scornful position that happiness is stupid. Anybody who’s figured out how to happy in this life has got a good thing going.

Toronto is braw! I just finished, moments ago, illustrating my third book for Strategic Coach, and it’s all going really well. On my 21-minute walk to work this morning, I checked in with myself and discovered I was… happy. Really happy. I guess I’m a lot about getting creative work done, and I feel like – even though there’s much more I’d like to be doing – I’m accomplishing a lot, and it’s much easier to do from on-site, and that I keep meeting people who are doing things I want to learn about and do myself (comics people, and a former Coach workmate introduced me to her neighbours… who run an animation studio).

So, yeah, it’s nice to be someplace that’s so happening. That costs, of course, so the money is really scary, with only me earning anything right now, and our savings – oh nooo, our savings! – dwindling away. But last Friday we went to Niagara Falls, where we crossed a bridge into the States, then turned right around and went through Canadian customs, and they validated Craig’s Permanent Residency. It all came together remarkably quickly. The immigration website said to expect a 14-month wait, which we only saw when we were leaving Scotland, and freaked out about. But then we got lucky or something.

And now it turns out our stuff is arriving in 10 days! We were told to expect a crossing of six to twelve weeks, which would have our possessions returning to us in October. But, again, not so. More luck… or whatever.

We’re off to visit my folks at the end of the month, so that was the last piece of the puzzle, actually spending time with my parents, which was supposed to be the point of moving over here.