Author: hamishmacdonald

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into my account on the HMRC website, and I’m glad I did: I discovered an underpayment of £350 and that my address was outdated.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.

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.

<

p>

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.

<

p>

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 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”.

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.

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.”

<

p>

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:

<

p>

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.

<

p>

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

Big moments, little inanities, a history.

<

p>

Conclusion of the DIY Book Process: Finding the people who love to read the things you write.

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.

<

p>