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.
~
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
<
p>
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:
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.
<
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:
I’m happy for him, as they’re doing quite well, getting all that good band-karma like recordings with the BBC and having their tunes used in adverts. Kristof decided to create an online art project with creative folk from other disciplines, and as part of that asked me to write a short story. It’s on this page under ‘Messages‘ (the name of the song I was to respond to). I also recorded a wee podcast of the story, but apparently Kristof thought it sounded too happy. ‘Happy’ is not exactly The Unbending Trees’ ethos.
<
p>
I’m working on a software project with a programmer in Indonesia, and he just told me he’ll be taking a few days off to celebrate Eid ul-Fitr. I’ve not heard of this festival before, but it sounds like a cousin to Rosh Hashana, which is also happening now. Both represent the breaking of a fast, but Eid ul-Fitr — as my friend described it — also has an element of asking for forgiveness. During this time, I’m told, God forgives us, but only we can make up the wrongs we’ve done to each other. The programmer very earnestly asked my forgiveness for delays in the project (which is our own invention anyway, so doesn’t really need to happen by a particular date).
What a lovely change from the attitude I’ve encountered in many British businesses and government agencies, which I now recognise as the inspiration for Douglas Adams’s ‘Vogon‘ aliens, whose culture is ruled by mind-numbing bureaucracy. That said, there are lots of exceptions — individuals working in a large organisations who strive to make my problems go away, do it nicely, and give my day a lift in the process, like the nice attendant on the railway this morning who saw me looking quizzically at the timetable and went out of his way to help me find which train I needed to take. (I’m working across the Forth in Dunfermline this afternoon.) So, in the spirit of Eid ul-Fitr, I beg your forgiveness…
— If I have ever broken my word with you
— If I have ever hurt you or acted unthinkingly or unkindly
— If I have ever neglected a duty to you, or simply not shown up for you the way we both know I should have
After my birthday celebration the other night, I’m feeling especially blessed for the friends, family, and life I have. I often think my good relationships are due more to others’ efforts than my own, so the converse of asking forgiveness is saying thank you for being part of my life, in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading my words and sharing in our ongoing conversation.
<
p>
I learned a new word today: etiolate — which means “to grow pale and drawn due to lack of sunlight”. In other words, “to be Scottish”. I’ve been spending time lately — in addition to writing copy, of course — adapting to working on a new computer. For the most part, it’s been a joy, as I have to admit the applications available for the Mac are generally pretty as well as useful. Where before I was forcing generic apps into service for my projects, now I’m finding all kinds of programs already tailored specifically to the things I do.
For instance:
Project management
If my life works (and I’m pretty happy with it), it’s because I’ve learned how to work with projects and goals. I’m loving an application called Things because it allows me to use Getting Things Done-style organisation, but it isn’t overly rigid. It works the way I think.
I’m using Things to capture all my various projects and to-dos and get them out of my head, ’cause juggling all that stuff up there without any kind of dates or prioritisation just leads to stress. (Which leads to anger, which leads to the Dark Side, which leads to bad prequels.)
Writing software
I was also thrilled to find out that there’s software for organising a novel — a few packages, actually, but one in particular caught my eye. It’s called Scrivener, and it’s likely what my parents are buying me for my birthday, because I couldn’t find a shirt I liked.
For Finitude, I used Microsoft’s OneNote, which is an excellent clipping program, but I gathered endless web pages about climate change which then got commingled with my character notes and story ideas, making the whole thing a giant, fairly unmanageable swamp of information.
When I moved to the Mac, I was able to import everything into the cross-platform clipping program EverNote, which is brilliant, and adds the feature of storing all your notes in a ‘cloud’ so they’re available everywhere. But it suffers from the same kind of generalist approach OneNote did as a novel-writing tool. So I’ll see how Scrivener works for me.
As an aside, I believe that outlining is the key to the successful completion of a novel, and that lack of an outline — a map of where they’re going — is why most people never finish their first book.
Word processing/page layoutI’ve been using Apple’s Pages, part of their iWork suite, for my writing work, and it’s good, matching Word feature-for-feature, but topping it by having that general Apple pleasantness. I swore I wouldn’t become one of those zombie Apple fanboy/apologists, but the general experience of using this stuff is just nice. The one nuisance, though, is that you can’t just save to Word’s .DOC format (which my clients use), you have to export it — and remember to do that, not send them a .pages file!
But where this thing really comes out ahead is that I can not only use it to write copy and do the typography for my pages, I can also design my covers in it. I have a legal copy of QuarkXPress through work, but it can be a total bee-yatch when it comes to printing on a home printer, ’cause it’s made for commercial printing — newspapers, magazines, and other jobs done on industrial production equipment. Transferring my Quark licence to the new machine was shockingly easy (given how expensive, cranky, and troublemaking they used to be to deal with), but still, I’m happy to have a friendlier alternative to using a clunky PostScript layout program at home.
Page impostion
I’ve got a table at a book fair this weekend…
…so I figured I’d make a few more books in preparation for that. (I promise that, before long, I’m going to make a brand new bookbinding tutorial, ’cause my other one is pretty long in the tooth and doesn’t entirely reflect how I do it now.) For years I’ve been swearing by a program called ClickBook for doing imposition; “imposition” is the process of rearranging pages so they come out in the right order for binding (page four is on the back of page one, page three on the back of page two, etc). It’s pretty much impossible for a mortal to do without the aid of software, and most of the packages available for doing it cost an arm and a leg (like, thousands of dollars or pounds).
This fifty-buck program has been doing the trick for me for years. There’s a Macintosh version available, so I bought that, and figured “Bob’s your uncle!” Bob, it turns out, is not my uncle: My laser printer kept fainting part-way through printing — after just a few pages, actually. Not only was I wasting paper, this meant — gasp! “” I couldn’t print my own books at home anymore! This was a major deal.
Happily, there are other alternatives for the Mac. There’s a freeware program available, but it wasn’t up to the task and didn’t work for me. But another program, Cheap Impostor, makes imposition easy, and you can even adjust the size and position of your pages visually. It’s lovely, it’s free, or you can upgrade to the full feature set for just $35 (which I highly recommend), and its developer is friendly and very quick to respond to e-mails.
There’s just one catch: I print my books on A4 sheets, but four-up — that is, two sheets across the top of the page and two sheets across the bottom. It makes for nice, wee, easy-to-hold novels, and means I can make a cover for them out of A4 paper. ClickBook can print four-up (or eight-up, spanning a dozen sheets, whatever), but Cheap Impostor is focused simply on printing two facing pages on a sheet of paper. Would I have to lay out my books all over again? Re-do all the typesetting and redesign the covers? In time for the book fair? I really didn’t want to. And I like my books as they are.
Late, late at night, I managed to look at the problem from a different angle: don’t change the printout, change the paper. Cheap Impostor lets you choose any page size to print to, so I chose A5, cutting the pages in half then putting them into my laser printer (as opposed to printing them double-up then chopping them — I know, it was confusing to me at the time, too). It worked! Well, the A5 sheets have a tendency to jam in the printer, which isn’t great. But I can keep running my press, which is the main thing. And the developer is open to the idea of adding additional layouts to his program in the future.
~
Phew. I seem to like doing this: breaking all my systems and structures right when they’re working and starting all over. Note to self, though: Don’t do this when you’re facing deadlines! I’m off to Gleneagles tomorrow in Perthshire; it turns out the owner of the company I’m on retainer to is doing a speaking engagement there. (Which makes sense, ’cause a lot of our clients are in financials, and Edinburgh is a major financial centre in the UK — though closer to here would have been handier!) He’s a good man, and I admire him, even though we have very different ideas on some subjects. I’m sure it’ll be a great meal, and when the boss comes to town and requests your presence, you get to chuck all your deadlines oot the windae!
<
p>
From poet Sandra Alland’s blog:
Speaking of the End Of The World As We Know It, I’m reading a book by an amazing micropress publisher who hand-makes all his (gorgeous!) books. He’s Edinburgh’s Hamish MacDonald, and the book is Finitude. It’s not really the kind of book I’d normally read… speculative fiction, sci-fi, end-times kind of thing. But the confession is — I’m really digging it. The world is ending because of humanity’s environmental abuses. But our anti-hero — a gay salesman who just wants to save his own ass — makes it superfascinating and not preachy. MacDonald knows how to tell a story well, and has an imagination on par with some of the most famous science fiction writers out there. The characters are well-painted and the action is downright filmic. Thumbs up for making me read something out of my normal range… and like it.
<
p>Yay!
I’ve forestalled Laundry Day for a little bit by buying some new pants and socks. This label inside the pants, though…
“Keep away from fire.” Yeah, that’s generally the idea I had in mind.
Next time I won’t get the cheap ones, and I’ll have the confidence of knowing my pants are fireproof. (Assuming that other pants without this tag are.)
<
p>
Funny how the Large Hadron Collider is capturing our imaginations, even though few of us really understand quantum theory, or what a Higgs boson is. And even though it’s theoretically impossible for anything to go seriously wrong with it — I’ve read that the chance of it producing a black hole is roughly equivalent to the chance of me spontaneously evaporating while shaving in the morning — we can’t help imagining it.
I’m guilty of this in my fiction, constantly asking “What if?” about the worst possible outcomes of current trends. “Story is conflict” they say, and what could be a bigger conflict than The End? I suppose it’s what Freud said (as I understand him), that we’re constantly bouncing between eros, passion for the things of this world, and thanatos, the death wish.
We all have to die, yet culturally we do everything we can to put our fingers in our ears and sing “La la la”, which leaves us with this curiosity about the dark and serious matter waiting out there in our future. When an opportunity like this comes along, to imagine not just sighing our last in a home somewhere but vanishing in a glorious subatomic apocalypse, who can resist?
This morning, I dreamt about it myself:
I was on vacation somewhere up north and visited a community centre/hospital. I spoke to one of the workers, whom I knew from working together somewhere in the past; we blethered about his patients, catching up. We felt a rumble beneath our feet and turned to look out the waiting room window. A dusty beige cloud was rising from the horizon, rolling toward us, blocking off the sky. “The collider,” said my friend. The final test was today. Something was very wrong in Switzerland; in fact, we knew there was no more Switzerland, and soon we would be gone, too. There was no shelter to be had from this, no escape. We could only wait.
The cloud tumbled closer and closer; the earth shuddered violently. The window burst and the cloud engulfed us. I felt myself lifted, pulled, torn asunder…
And I woke up.
Now I’m supposed to concentrate on copywriting?
<
p>
