Author: hamishmacdonald

When I was little, my father was a parole officer; he taught me how to live in the freedom of adult life.

When I was little, my mother was a secretary; she taught me how to get the details right.

When my folks were here, Dad bought me a hacksaw.

It’s a corollary of that rule that you never mention liking something when you’re visiting your parents, or they’ll end up giving it to you; when they visit, they buy you things they think you need.

At the time I thought, “What the heck would I need a hacksaw for?” Now I know, and I’m grateful I had it, because over the past two days I’ve been able to make my own perfect-binding press.

I’ve owned two other presses, both of which were good in their own right, but each had little quirks that made me have to work differently to the way I wanted to.

The other morning, while the fella and I were at a youth hostel in Tongue (yeah, it’s a place called “Tongue” — Tonga in Gaelic, if that’s less silly), I woke up with the plans for a press in my mind. It hadn’t ever occurred to me before to make my own, but in that moment it made absolute sense that everything about my process should be DIY.

The other thought was that I could offer these to “DIY Book” listeners, and it would be considerably cheaper than the other two presses in both price and shipping charges. Figuring out this one and cutting all the bits with the hacksaw and a Dremel tool was a lot of work, so I’m not sure if that’s a viable plan. Maybe I can get better and faster at doing it, or maybe I should outsource it to someone who’s a good woodworker.

At any rate, I’m really pleased with the end result. It’s a little bit cute, it’s a little bit ugly, and it’s exactly what I want!

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My fan and internet friend Danny Bloom sent me a link to an interview he did about his latest passion: the difference between on-screen reading and reading from books.

Someone who works in technology wrote him and said he was fighting a losing battle, that paper is dead (though Danny isn’t saying we shouldn’t read on-screen, he’s just calling for someone, somewhere to give a proper scientific look and see if this affects our brains differently and whether we’re okay with this shift in cognition). Here’s what I wrote to Danny:

My partner watched An Inconvenient Truth last night. In it, Gore quotes someone as saying something along the lines of “It’s difficult to get a man to see sense when his income depends on him not seeing it.”

I’ve got a stack of e-books in my valise, printed out as real books, because I read real books differently — as more valuable, notable, lasting, and memorable than electronic information. Not to mention all those other factors like being able to feel your progress through the work and know how much is remaining, and it being so much easier on the eyes, and doing different things in the brain as you said in the article.

Sometimes I do feel a pang of guilt when I realise that the paper I’m using — even the recycled paper — had to come from somewhere, and putting the trimmings in the recycling doesn’t mean they magically turn into new paper with zero energy cost… But still… Books are nice. As that other article sent me said so beautifully, books are a perfect technology. Computer devices are still far from perfect.

I finished making these two books last night. What piece of electronic gear — even the iPad — will ever feel the same as opening a fresh new book? The iPad is a space already filled with demands, tentacles pulling you away to other people’s ideas and commercial intentions for you, whereas a blank book is your own, private, infinite imaginal space.

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The last few days, I’ve been finding that the constant twitch-muscle-type effect of constant information flow is making my brain feel restless, worried, and unable to focus on all the things I’m excited about working on.

This morning, the fella’s alarm went off, making its loveable sound like someone pressing a Dremel tool to my ear, and my brain was off to the races. Rather than rolling over and checking who said what on Twitter or whether I had any e-mails, I started thinking about a last-minute webinar invitation I had to write for my client today. All kinds of ideas tumbled out like a box of Slinkies down the stairs, and I had to get up.

So here it is, 9:23AM, and I’ve already done my work for the day. There’s more — there’s always more — but that was the piece I had to write. And there’s a boatload of other things I want to work on, learn, or read, so I’m tempted to keep ‘net access off today.

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Oh, the baby gulls who live on the chimney across the street can fly! I was wondering if they could yet, because they’re not little grey fluffballs anymore; they’re full-sized gulls, just mottled and mud-puddle coloured.

I also wondered if once they’d flown the nest if they would go back there — if birds retain a “home” — or if they’d go off somewhere else. For now, it looks like the neighbour’s chimney-pot is still home.

The gulls in Wick are a gang that rules the rooftops. When they see things happening down below, they all get excited at once, and that excitement is translated into screeches. I bet if I live here for a while those sounds will start to make sense. They don’t have a lot of ’em, and they’re all pretty noticeable!

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I didn’t really sleep the night before we were to go up Ben Nevis. By the time Craig and I got to bed, there were only about three hours available to sleep; in the afternoon, I went to the pub to plough through some work I needed to focus on, and, among the things I bought to pay for my long stay there were two coffees. So when it was time to sleep, I lay there the whole time with wild dreams going through my head — every real or imagined place in my life played out there, it seemed — but even though I was dreaming, my brain would just not give up the ghost, you might say.

Eventually, the alarm went off. We packed up all our stuff and went out into the square, where the neighbours were walking a relay around the park through the night. Someone had set up a marquee tent, bunting hung back and forth across the square, and smoke tumbled from a small drum with a fire in it. Our neighbour Lorna, the powerhouse organiser behind this whole event, met us in flannel pyjamas, housecoat, and curlers with an unlit cigarette hanging from her mouth — this was her costume, and it wasn’t too different from her husband David’s! She offered us cullen skink, but I’d just had cereal, because it seemed right to treat this as the start of the day rather than the middle of the night.

We met James and Ian, the other two neighbours who were making the climb with us, piled into Ian’s car, and drove off into the middle of the night. My usual ‘carcolepsy’ kicked in, and I slept for most of the four-hour drive.

The sky was beginning to lighten as we arrived, and Nevis loomed overhead. We parked at the visitors’ centre and loaded ourselves up. The morning was cool, so I bundled up in every layer I’d brought.

Pretty soon, I’d taken most of it off again, because the first part of the climb was a gruelling, seemingly endless walk up a trail that felt more like an inclined riverbed. I’d brought enough snacks to last the whole day, thinking that would make life easier, but at this point I had that cold, clammy, almost-nauseous feeling that comes with suddenly having a lot of exercise of a sort you’re not accustomed to. Craig and I stopped for a drink and a rest, not speaking it but sharing a doubt that we could keep this up all day. But there was no way we would stop, so we kept on.

Lorna and David had given us walking sticks, which I’d taken along even though I’d always thought they were a silly affectation. Now I understood how valuable they were! What a help it was, being able to use them to push myself up a rock with my arms rather than just having to do all the lifting with my legs.

Then the path suddenly got smooth and even, and the scenery opened up, too. We walked around a valley and looked out in awe over the Great Glen.

As difficult as this was, I was having fun — partly because I was determined to, and partly because the whole thing was, at this point, my choice to do. I had all these notions of what the climb would mean, and even made these little cards to remind me of the metaphoric stuff it was supposed to be about:

…But the day turned out to be just about what it was about, doing a thing and seeing some stuff. And that was plenty.

We continued on and reached a third section of the trail — which wasn’t simply a natural trail, but one that had been gritted and gravelled and paved with huge rocks. The work involved in that beggared belief, and I was grateful, yet I’m not really sure it made the climb easier. In this third bit, the path turned into a kind of huge, uneven stone staircase, like climbing the stairs of a Mayan ruin. It went on and on, providing better and better views of the hills and valleys around us, like a mossy crown with water in the middle.

But lifting my head was only an occasional indulgence, because every footstep had to be placed just right.

The weather was forecast to be wet and miserable all day, but thankfully that was wrong. (Since moving to the Highlands, I’ve come to expect that the weather forecast will always be wrong — besides which, it changes so often that describing a whole day as having one “weather” is wildly inadequate.)

Still, the higher we got, the colder it grew, and we had to put on more layers. As we reached the top, the ground turned to gravel, which made for another period of gruelling progress, as the shifting ground stole away most of our walking effort.

We switched back again and again on the way up (occasionally passed by mad army-folk who ran or walked briskly down with little gear, suggesting that they’d somehow ascended in the dark; I still don’t understand how that could be possible). Then cloud settled around us and we seemed to be in a grey netherworld. Piled-up cones of large rocks — cairns — added to the feeling that we’d entered a Celtic or Norse limbo.

I’d told myself beforehand that I wouldn’t bother with “Are we there yet?”-type thoughts, but would just take the climb moment by moment. I knew the cairns marked the top, but had been warned that the top isn’t where you think it is, it’s further. So, with my feet sliding on the gravel, I kept digging my poles in and walking until we all gathered at a plaque on a small plinth. But even that turned out to not be the official geographic top — that was slightly further along. So we clambered onto that and had our picture taken by some of the others who’d arrived.

By this point, more and more people were appearing at the top, many of them dressed completely inadequately for the frigid weather up there. Groups of these young people showed up, along with the odd weathered and fit sole climber wearing fitness gear, who promptly turned around and ran back off once they’d arrived.

We sat in the rubble-ruins of one of the buildings from the old observation post that was once at the peak, and we ransacked our rucksacks, eating sandwiches and granola bars and fruit, guzzling water and energy drinks.

Then we made our way back down. It was no easier, though we did it faster (3:15 up, 2:50 down). Again, the poles we indispensable, helping us gain surer footing and keep us from destroying our knees and shins.

The closer we got to the bottom, the more people were on their way up — which made for some awkward passing places, and also made us look at each other in disbelief at some of the outfits people had on for the climb, such as the couple who looked like young Italian models in their tight jeans, or the middle-aged couple in T-shirts and shorts who were both as round as teapots, the families with young children and dogs (the dogs were having no problem, though I wondered how the Jack Russell with the bad leg doing step, step, step, hop was going to make it up the giant Mayan stairs), and older couples in city clothes, her with her purse like they were just going out shopping. I wonder how many of those people actually made it to the top.

By the time I was back on level ground, I was knackered. As I teetered forward on two sticks, my legs were no longer able to move up and down, no matter how much I tried to will them forward. I had new sympathy for what it must be like for my dad when his Parkinson’s medication wears off.

We got back to the car, patched up our blisters and changed our damp clothing, then, in proper Scottish fashion, drove to the nearest pub.

On the way home, the car hit a boulder that had rolled out of a stone wall onto the road, which bounced one side of the car into the air, then we landed and bounced off the wall, decimating the wing-mirror, scraping the side of the car, and splitting and bending the front tyre. Thanks to Ian’s handling of the car, we were fine. After a wait for Roadside Assistance, we were headed home, driven along the swerving, calamitously steep coastal roads at crazy speed by a foul-mouthed, racist, older English man who hinted at having a sketchy past.

Finally, we arrived back in Argyle Square, just in time to join the walking relay for their final lap. It was torture, forcing my legs forward, but we made it, and all finished the event together.

That evening was also the opening of the Wick Gala, and, as happens each year, decorated floats passed through the square. We weren’t prepared, so one of the neighbours gave Craig and I a bag of 2-pence coppers to throw at the floats, which collected money for various projects around town (mostly the schools, it seemed).

Then we all retired to Lorna and David’s lush back garden, where we sat in a circle on folding lawn-chairs, chatting, having drinks, then eating Indian take-away when it arrived. Craig and I felt really welcomed by the whole group, and soon Lorna was cooking up plans for us all to go camping together.

I can see when Craig is starting to fade, and I knew I was tired, so after a while we excused ourselves to go home. I’d been having to move my legs manually all evening, since I couldn’t lift them, like some TV movie paraplegic, so getting out of my lawn-chair was a challenge. But oh, after a shower to clean off the sweat and grit, did it ever feel nice to slip into bed!

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Tomorrow night at 2AM, Craig and I set off with two of our neighbours to climb Ben Nevis as part of a neighbourhood park improvement fundraiser. Other neighbours will be doing a 24-hour relay walk around the park — in their pyjamas! That part was my idea… thank you, thank you. We, on the other hand, will be climbing a mountain.

I admit, when I first agreed to do the climb — and for a long time afterward — I was dreading it. A few people have told me it’s a dawdle, that there’s a tourist path that’s well-trodden and perfectly manageable. I’ve also read, however, that if the weather isn’t perfect, Ben Nevis is a crushingly difficult climb into the clouds where all climbers meet a certain doom. (Doom… DOOM!)

Except thousands of people do it every year. And some people even managed to take a piano up there. So it’s probably fine.

The biggest obstacle I was anticipating wasn’t actually the mountain, but me. I know when I have to do physical chores I don’t want to, I can get really cranky. I don’t want to climb this munro with my lover and two neighbours and be a complete prick the whole time, so I knew I had to shift where my head was at about this trek. I think I’ve done that.

First, there was the logistical matter of not having the right gear. Well, it would be stupid to do this climb that way, so I finally got some proper waterproof hiking boots, gloves, and a rucksack, and another neighbour loaned me his hiking jacket and gave us both some walking-sticks.

Then there’s the matter of exerting ourselves all day, so I stocked up on lots of little treats and energy-stuff so we’ll be able to snack like squirrels the whole way up. I know that will keep me happy.

But the big, big impasse was “Why the hell am I doing this, anyway?” My parents kindly insisted on giving me sponsorship money, but, aside from a weak little message on Twitter and Facebook, I haven’t asked anyone for money because a) I don’t know people here, other than the neighbours, and b) I hate asking people for money.

For one, I’m weary of constantly being asked to sponsor this event or that online. Somebody’s always asking for something, and I don’t particularly like being on the receiving end of it.

Second, at least most people’s causes are a terribly sad disease. We want to fix up our park. It’s a nice park. It’s a historic park. But the first rule of copywriting is to step into your audience’s shoes and ask, “What’s in it for me?” I honestly can’t answer what’s in it for anyone else if my park gets fixed up.

And I’m fine with that. This is not something I’m terribly committed to getting better at. In my workshop days, whenever we resisted promoting their thing to everyone they’d ask, “Where else does this issue show up in your life?” I know I’m not great at charging for my stuff or promoting it (I’m in R&D on that), but at least in those cases I feel convinced that my books are good on the inside and out, and my copywriting clients think my work hits the bullseye pretty often. So the fundraising is not something I want to make an issue of.

I have to have something at stake, though. Just surviving this climb would be a sucky approach and make for a miserable day.

On the outside, it’s a chance to get to know some of the neighbours, and to do something pretty different with Craig.

On the inside, though… What is it? What could it be? I sat down with my journal, put on some ambient music, and put the question to myself. Here’s what I said (translated back from shorthand!):

I’m thinking about the climb of Ben Nevis we’re making tomorrow. Before I was dreading it, doing it just to be polite. Now I actually want to go. I have the right equipment, but more than that, I am approaching the experience as one big metaphor. After all, mountains are the ultimate metaphor for goals and achievement. So what is my relationship to goals and achievement?

I haven’t been setting big goals for a while and I think it’s because deep down I think it’s not actually possible to get what I want — even though I have a great life. I never became a famous actor. I didn’t get lucky with my books. So I guess I’ve kinda stopped trying for the big stuff. [It’s very uncomfortable even writing that, because these are the icky external motivations I look down at now, but perhaps it’s good to admit that at the beginning those were the stars in my eyes.]

In his youth, Dan Sullivan [president of the company I copywrite for], did an Outward Bound climb of the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. One day, he reached a point when he couldn’t go any further. His instructor went back to where he was sitting down.

“So this is where you stop, is it?” the instructor asked.

“What?” asked Dan.

“Well, everyone has a point where they stop. I guess this is yours.”

Dan hated that thought, so he got up and kept going, and finished the climb.

So if the results I got don’t look like traditional success, is this where I stop? Or, more to the point in my case, where I go instead of there?

So we’ll see what the mountain says. But I’m excited now. I know there’ll at least be good snacks!

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My friend Lisa wrote a post this morning about coming up with an elevator speech — a short description you can share in the time it takes to move between floors in a lift — to describe her work as an artist and creativity coach.

That’s funny: I’d just read another post that said we shouldn’t use elevator speeches. I found the anti-elevator-speech article while hopscotching from a link in a tweet that was a retweet then following a link on a site… one of those WWILF (“What Was I Looking For?”) episodes.

Okay, I have to admit that my first reaction was…

(My author photo sucks, so I shouldn’t talk.)

Then I read the piece and took the point he was making: We should have genuine conversations with people, because nobody likes giving or hearing a canned litany.

Still, people do ask us creative folk “What do you do?” and it can be difficult to give an answer. Despite the advice to the contrary, I think it does help to find a concise and compelling way to talk about it that saves us trying to convey the entirety of the work or give an experience of it on the spot, which is pretty much impossible to do in those situations.

The question I get the most is “What kind of books do you write?” And the answer 99% of people are expecting is a genre category, because that’s what the corporate marketplace has reduced literature to. The problem is, I don’t write “horror” or “romance” or any other potted type of story.

I’m overhauling my whole approach to self-promotion right now, and in the meantime, to spare myself the agony, and to give people a taste of “Oh, a tiny handmade thing; this is possible?”, I’ve created a little leave-behind catalogue and FAQ for my books:

The big challenge, I find, with most of the advice about marketing and promotion is that it’s aimed at people who sell a product or service. So we’re told: “What do you do? Who does it help, and how?”, or, “What do you sell? How is it useful? In what situation?”

Of course, if your answer is “A dance” or “A novel”, or “A painting”, it’s pretty difficult to quantify the magic of the received experience — particularly when only certain people will perceive and connect with that magic (get lost in your book, be moved by the dance, connect with the painting, &c).

Oscar Wilde said that art must be useless; if it’s bent to a purpose, it’s no longer art. Yet we artists live in a market-driven world and have to justify our place in it. I suppose this stops us from crawling completely into our own navels — though I think anyone who’s worried about being too self-absorbed probably shouldn’t be worrying. In fact, most of us could probably go further and be more daring.

I dunno. I’m still going to advise authors to come up with an elevator speech, because having one helps keep the book focused while we’re writing it, and afterward helps potential readers find a starting place in understanding the book and whether it’s for them.

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I just replied to an e-mail from someone who follows DIY Book, and, I have to say, has really run with the idea. I’m touched, kinda proud, and am impressed with what he’s making. (He’s got a shop on Etsy.)

He asked me about promotion — an issue that’s standing right in the middle of the road in front of me. After a wonderful visit with my folks, I’m trying to gather my energies and figure out what’s next, and that all came out in my reply to him — which I’m sharing here, ’cause the letter finally gave me a chance to articulate this for myself:

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Marketing is my great bugbear. Oh yeah, I can make the stuff available and present it well — I’m happy about those skills. But communicating about it, having conversations in which I close the sale, doing successful promotion on the web — that’s where I suck.

I’m actually in a space, though, where I’m going headlong into this stuff ’cause I want to beat it. No, not “beat”, transform. There’s no enemy out there or anyone holding me back; it’s about 87% just stuff in my head that holds me back. I don’t want to be gross, I don’t want to pretend that my work is for everyone ’cause it’s got some gay in it, and it’s all imaginative and stuff, and they’re not serious. (Just sent a tweet out asking people if they actually care about that.)

So I’ve bought an online course about “non-icky promotion” and another one about writing articles, and I’m really going into this question, trying to figure out what my approach is — and, on a deeper level, figure out exactly what I’m doing in writing fiction and being creative in the first place, what my intention is. (Though I suspect that it’s because it’s in my DNA, my constitution, so it’s not like it’s a choice.)

In the meantime, I created a tiny catalogue with order/contact information that I can leave with people when we have The Conversation (“Oh, what kind of books do you write?”) That way they get a taste of what I do, and I get to dodge the gross sales stuff. (Though I do understand the value of actually putting the question to someone and asking them to buy — closing the sale — because without that they will happily drift off without buying anything in most cases.)

So that’s one idea for the book you’re talking about, creating a small, throwaway promotional thing, ’cause experience has taught me that review copies are a waste of time and energy. Even indie people, friends of friends who said they’d read it and write something, people who know you made it yourself, still don’t ever get around to reading them. Magazines, newspapers, agent — same thing. Total waste. Better to focus on readers.

The other piece of advice, albeit bog-standard advice, would be — if the book has a specific angle to it, something a particular group of people are interested or involved in — to target them online, at meetings about that subject, and so on.

Oh, and a third thing: Readings and in-person events are where I’ve sold the most stuff. There’s something about the force of someone’s presence that gets past the hesitation to buy. On the next step down are situations where people can actually handle the book, and the bottom is online, where they’re trying to make a decision based on a JPEG and some copy.

So that’s what I know now.

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A special interview with indie publisher and Amazon queen Zoe Winters (zoewinters.org)

I’m loving living with my partner. He’s my pal, my fan, and my co-adventurer.

Last night after work, he suggested we go someplace, so we went for a walk to The Whaligoe Steps and The Cairn of Get.

The Whaligoe Steps were 365 steps (now 330 and a few) up from an inlet where fishing boats moored. Women would walk up and down those steps all day long carrying creels (small baskets). Just making the climb once got me winded! (I better start training, ’cause we’ve agreed to walk up and down Ben Nevis later this summer as a neighbourhood fundraiser.)

After we got back up, a nice fella came out from the houses near the car-park, holding a picture of what the steps used to look like. He told us all about the place, chatting without any sense of the time, sharing everything he knew with total generosity — like all people in Caithness seem to do! (You don’t want to try to have any quicky big-city-type transactions here.)

Unfortunately, I had trouble concentrating on what he was saying because the midges were out in abundance. Clouds of the tiny, biting specks hovered around us, and my basic mammalian instinct to wave and dance and try to get away from them made me look like a madman.

From there, we went to The Cairn of Get, an ancient burial site.

This stuff is just lying around here, within ten minutes’ drive of our house!

Here’s the full photo set.

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