Author: hamishmacdonald

In this episode, we take a look at where you’ll get the ideas that will ultimately become your book. This involves training yourself to notice and capture ideas, as well as finding a way to store them and work with them that’s effective for you.

I wrote this in response to a post I saw called “Scottish Glossary for Novelists“:

As a writer who’s emigrated to Scotland and has been living here for a while, I feel the need to warn others that many of the things we associate with Scotland (such as, my apologies, many things on this list) are just not part of contemporary Scottish life.

What’s more, Scots are very canny when it comes to detecting “cod-Scots”, or attempts by outsiders to put on an accent, sell anything that’s covered in plaid, or romanticise some part of what, in reality, was a very difficult history.

This includes scenes like the soft-voiced lassie, striding across the glen with pails of milk, cradling her [baby term] in her arm to meet her [husband term] and return to their [dwelling term].

Oh, and terms for everyday things vary a lot from one part of Scotland to another, so you’ll want to make sure you’re not transposing Highland terminology to Edinburgh, say, or even thinking that people in Edinburgh and Glasgow speak the same way.

I’ve been here eight years, and every day I’m learning some new, different word for something that I would have got wrong. It’s a lot of work.

Happily, if you meet a Scot, you’ll find that they tend to have an interest in what makes them unique, including their language, and will be keen to discuss it.

There are also lots of online resources about the Scots language — which some argue is not just a dialect, but a separate language from English, so you’d no more pretend to speak Scots than you would French or German, just because they’re related.

Here are some starting points:

• BBC Voices
• Scots language poems
• The Wikipedia in Scots
• Scots Online: Pittin the mither tongue on the Wab
• Scots translator

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p>Lang may yer lum reek, fellow writers!

Yay! Now you can get the introductory episode directly in iTunes to my “DIY Book” podcast series — about writing, making, and selling your own books independently.

This introductory episode of “DIY Book” provides an overview of what’s to come in the series.

I’ve just finished posting the first of my “DIY Book” podcast series. This one’s an introduction, giving an overview of everything to follow. It’s taken a lot of thinking to get to this stage, and I know there’s a lot of work ahead, but I’m hopeful that this is going to be useful to lots of people, given the responses I’m still getting to the DIY Book Press article I wrote for the No Media Kings website, which is now several years old.

I’ve learned a lot about producing a book since then, and I’m going to include it in this series, along with what I know about getting your novel written in the first place and selling it on the web when it’s finished.

If this is something you’ve ever considered, check out the podcast — I hope you enjoy it.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes using this link. Right-click and copy it, then in iTunes go to Advanced/Subscribe to podcast, and paste the address there. From now on, new episodes will appear in iTunes automatically.

Over the weekend, I had a chance to make a few blank books:

A mod-ish one with rounded corners:

A wee notebook with a magnetic flap:

A mystical book of ‘numerography’ (with cogs from an automatic numbering machine):

I’ve redesigned the site — yes, once again!

This time around, you’ll find a few fun features like:
“¢ the first chapter of all my books, which you can flip through like a real book
“¢ podcasts of my stories
“¢ a feed of my Twitter posts (love it, hate it, I’m there)
“¢ the site reformats itself for the iPhone

There’s a section for the new “DIY Book” podcast workshops, which — now that I’ve finished the site — will start appearing soon.

And, yes, I’ve started blogging again!

Last night, Craig and I were on our way to meet a friend of his and her husband for dinner, and we saw a bundle of something in the street, or what looked like the cobbles dug up, except they were too high. Somehow I missed what happened next, but Craig saw a car hit the shape and bounce over it, and as we heard the loud noise we both looked and saw that it was a person.

Craig stopped the car and went to her side, trying to talk to her and assess what state she was in. I ran into the junction to keep any more cars from hitting her. As I passed her, I saw her face and thought she might have been dead — her elderly face looked like the blank faces of my grandparents at their wakes — but then I saw her eyes move like those of a mad, wild horse from a film, one that had been injured in a race. They were empty eyes, staring and moving almost mechanically.

I called 999 and tried to keep my wits, looking at the street names, trying to get the overly calm emergency services person to the point where he would send out an ambulance. I couldn’t remember my phone number. He gave me instructions, but a first aider and a doctor were both on the scene, taking charge. Any first aid training I’d had went completely out of my brain, because it never occurred to me that those plastic dolls might represent real people who didn’t just need their breathing and circulation checked out but were very badly hurt in ways I couldn’t see. Her mouth gawped like a goldfish’s out of water.

The ambulance eventually came, and they shifted her onto a stretcher, one arm dropping, her thin legs rolling back and forth in ways they shouldn’t. We stood in the cold for ages, being questioned by the police, watching the ambulance, waiting for it to leave, speculating about why she’d collapsed in the street (someone said she’d collapsed on the sidewalk and inexplicably crawled out there). I shivered, and eventually we went on to dinner, forgetting for a while what we’d seen, enjoying the evening’s company. Back home in bed, we lay there in the dark, talking quietly through what we’d seen, sharing our confused and sad feelings. We both felt sick to our stomachs.

This morning I made pancakes for us to eat with lots of maple syrup, and we enjoyed that, getting back to normal life and savouring each other’s company. Where the night before it felt like we’d been relating to each other through a pane of glass, now we seemed to be taking special care to appreciate each other.

Then the police called Craig and arranged to come around and get our full statements. We sat in separate rooms, him talking to the female constable, me to the male — who turned out to have aspirations about writing a screenplay. We talked about that a bit, then he asked me all his questions, then we got back to talking about writing. But I had to ask him what happened to the woman. He told me: She died.

I don’t know what to feel. That was a sad and wrong end for her to meet. No one should go like that, battered beyond survival, lying on the cobbles surrounded by people but alone. To forget is callous, to keep revisiting the thought ghoulish and upsetting. Every woman I saw on the street today had her face; every car that whooshed or bumped past on the street seemed like a killer metal dragon.

When Craig and I parted company I sent a text telling him I love him, because I do and I know it, there’s no time to wait with these things; he replied in kind.

I made sure to cross only at the lights as I went to two birthday parties with friends, partly being with them and loving them, partly wanting to go home and be by myself. Now that I’m home, I feel scared: that deathly door was opened so close to me and I can still feel the cold. Everything in the world is made of the thinnest glass.

Tomorrow I’m off to the northwest coast with the Friday Gang for a week’s holiday. This is probably for the best.

I went to the theatre last night with The Fella, and we had our own box! I’ve never sat in one before, and always wondered what those people had done to get those seats; apparently the trick is to not pay attention when clicking through the online ordering. Unfortunately, I’d also not paid attention while rushing to make something for us to eat before the show, and left the hob lit under a pot. When the flatmate got home an hour later, he found the contents carbonised and fused to the pot, and the plastic ladle on fire. Oops. As he said later, “Oh well, if you’re going to attempt to burn the house down, ‘nearly‘ is the way to do it.” “But how was the show, Mrs Lincoln?” We went to see Something Wicked This Way Comes at the Lyceum Theatre, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel.

Here’s what I wrote to a friend:
My impression of the show is mixed: the acting was way, way over the top. The two young male leads were doing a weird “I’m young!” shouty-shouty acting thing, and a few of the older cast members chewed up the scenery, too, making me think it was some kind of directorial decision — and a bad one, in my opinion. That said, the production was visually and auditorially incredible. They truly wrought magic on that stage last night and showed just what the medium is capable of. They suggested elements — the carousel, the storm, the hall of mirrors — in ways that can only be described as poetic. A friend of mine — he tended bar and presided over the late-night lock-ins after my chorus sessions earlier this year — was the musical director, and created an incredible soundscape of music that extended the play into another dimension. Much of the sound was produced with a strange, forgotten instrument called a “harmonium”, a black box with a keyboard on one side and a bellows on the other. The sounds he wrought from it — from carnival music to a looming, creepy, disembodied presence — were unlike anything I’d heard. So, despite my misgivings with the way the actors produced their lines, I’d still say it’s one to catch.

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My friend Lisa asked me to pass this along: her a-frickin’-mazing gal-band Dirty Dishes are doing another bake sale jamboree thingy. If you’re in Toronto, do go, ’cause I guarantee that it’ll be a bang-up show and a fun evening. Here are the details:

The Second Annual Jamboree and Bake Sale!! It’ll be at Buddies in Bad Times on Thursday, October 30th. The doors will open at 7:30 and the show will begin at 8:00 SHARP! And Check this out. WE HAVE A CONTEST FOR YOU!! Go to our website and win FREE tickets to the show”¦. Tickets for the Jamboree are available in ADVANCE through the Buddies Box Office All tickets will be $12 but you’d better buy early. You don’t want to miss out! Sweet TARTS and SWEET tarts!! That’s what we’re talking about! Dirty Dishes www.dirty-dishes.ca

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As my birthday approached a few weeks ago, people asked me in an ominous tone, “So how are you feeling about it?” The implication, of course, is that turning forty necessarily comes with vain attempts to stave off a total psychological collapse at the horror of it all. I smugly shook my head when asked. “It’s great. I have everything.” Freud was once asked the formula to a happy life, and he replied, “Love and work.” Well, I love my work. I love my friends. I love my family. Okay, I wasn’t in a relationship, but I really wasn’t missing it. I was whole and complete unto myself. Two days later I met someone, and now I’m head over heels. Life has a good sense of humour. And if I’m being a rubbish friend, vanishing for days on end and not updating my blog, this is why. He and I keep wandering spontaneously into fun moments:

• Standing atop Calton Hill, looking out at a blazing sunset over the spires of Edinburgh that poke up like a bear-trap. Then a celebration surrounded us, complete with a pipe band, women in ornate saris, and burning, fireworking effigies of Hindu characters.
• Meeting for dinner at The Filmhouse and getting press-ganged into the screening of a movie by a wildly bubbly woman from my writing workshop at the insurance firm earlier this year — she of the pink writing pen with the fuzzy pink troll hair, also the star of this amateur film, which was another product of the “Arts at Work” program that supported my workshop.
• Lying on a sofa-bed in Glasgow this weekend as the moon shone through the window on us, moving almost perceptibly from left to right. Then going the next morning to a naturist swim at Glasgow’s old Victorian baths, with steaming marble rooms, a pool under an arched roof with ornate turquoise iron gables and hanging trapeze bars and rings for swinging from end to end, people of all ages and sizes relaxing there, just being whatever shape they were.

Anyway, that’s all I’m saying. I’m not gloating and I don’t want to talk too much about something new and unformed, but… a lot of things have lined up nicely here. I wasn’t looking. I didn’t need it. And now it’s here, I have to admit that life is sweeter. I’ve met some really great people in the past, but there were always breaks in important areas that made it not work. This works. I’m all too aware it could vanish at any time, which makes it a challenge to let go and enjoy it, but… I’m managing! I’m reminded of a friend of mine who was prone to fits of imaginary struggle, angst, and drama, who’s now married to one of the most down-to-earth people you could ever meet. Because of this connection, now she can just watch when those instincts arise, when the crazy ghosts whirl around her head, and she can stay disengaged from them and know they’re not real because they so obviously have nothing to do with the real person she’s involved with. I can see myself doing that, injecting meaning when there are long gaps between text messages, or worrying about what this meant or that meant. All that self-doubt uses other people as characters in a puppet-drama about how worthless I am — and I hate how these pointless, hateful scripts have made me behave toward people, and how they steal the joy from situations I should be enjoying. But when I’m walking along the street and this guy takes my hand, my insides grow still, the noise goes quiet, and I smile. We sat down the other night and drew up a timeline of where we’ve been and when, and it’s almost surprising we haven’t met before now. But now is a good time.

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p>Today’s Thanksgiving in Canada, so I have the day off. And lots to be thankful for. I’m trying to catch up on some random tasks, and I just bought new towels and bedding. I can subject myself to the old, grey, scratchy, polyester stuff, but not someone else. I’m away next week with the Friday Gang, going to the north-west coast of Scotland. This is unusual, me taking a stretch of free time where I won’t be at home and I won’t be gallivanting around a foreign city, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to use the time to figure out what I’m doing next with the book and plan some other creative projects. It’ll be hard to be away from [himself], but this trip has been planned for a long time. Speaking of creative projects, I’m going to do another bookbinding workshop soon. Let me know if:

• You’d like to attend.
• There’s anything in particular you’d like to learn.
• You have any preferences about where and when.