Author: hamishmacdonald

I don’t understand self-publishing websites that keep posting articles by literary agents and other tied-to-the-industry people who, of course, don’t want to think about self-publishing as “real”.

Fine, whatever, but some of us are busy trying to do it, so I don’t see what’s helpful when people who claim to also be involved in this keep forwarding the bilious insults to our professionalism, intent, and talent — or else keep engaging in endless blather back and forth about whether it’s legitimate.

Whatever! I’m more interested in engaging with people who are taking their own work as far as it can go, sharing ideas and insights, inspiring each other — making something! This other stuff is pointless.

Indie publishers engaging in the “is self-publishing real?” online spitting contest are like a jilted lover sending a constant stream of e-mails to an ex. It’s not happening — do something else, or you’re a loser!

The industry is like an abusive ex, and our readers are the true love of our life. Which do you want to pay attention to?

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No, I’m not. Strangely, more people have asked me this lately than have when I have been working on a book.

Just yesterday, it occurred to me that it’s about a year, maybe more, since I put out Finitude. I felt funny about it — you know, that old immediate response of “Uh-oh, something’s wrong!”

But nothing’s wrong. I’ve just been catching up on life-stuff, then started the DIY Book podcast. That project is the size and scope of writing a novel, except instead of using my usual process to write content, I’m using the process to write out the process. Kinda odd.

I’ve had the fourth episode of the podcast ready to record for a while, but being away in Canada for the last month I haven’t had a chance to do it. Last night was my first regularly-scheduled writing session since then, and I was feeling hesitant about it: “Who am I to be talking about this when I’m not doing it myself?”

Of course, I knew this was just mental babble, so I had a nap (always a great way to change your state of mind, rather than bloodymindedly ploughing on — as long as it’s a short, timed nap), and while I was lying there I thought, “Okay, just to prove to yourself that you can write something anytime you like, come up with an idea.”

I let my mind go, and I found myself following this young girl around a little town. She had a nasty habit of tattling on everyone and was causing holy hell, wrecking lives hither and yon. The effect was pure evil, but she did it out of a righteous concern for them, or just unconsciously. But then something happened in her life and she needed a secret of her own kept…

So there it was, beginning, middle, end, just as I was going to talk about in this podcast episode on plotting out the acts of your book. I got up, went into my little office-oubliette, and spent the next few hours recording it.

Like I say, “If you’re stuck, it’s always because there’s a question you’ve forgotten to ask or answer.”

Still, I feel the urge to start another book, but nothing is demanding my attention. I’ll know when it’s time.

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In this episode, you’ll get to work defining what particular story you’re telling, and starting to map it out.

Okay, that’s pathetic: I haven’t updated this since May. Let me explain.

See, I got into a relationship in October, and it felt weird to post about it here. He doesn’t get what all this social media stuff is for, so understandably felt unsure about everyone, everywhere being instantly aware of what we were up to. But he never said “Don’t do it.”

I took the blog down anyway… until I reworked the site and thought it would be good to have someplace off the front page to babble. So, in addition to all the new stuff like the “DIY Book” section, I put the blog back — and proceeded to leave it blank. Hey, I was busy living!

I also wasn’t sure what to say. I’d liked the idea of a “business only” site — talk to the hanging sign — and couldn’t get my head back into the idea of sharing personal stuff. Now I was thinking, “What’s that for?”

While I was away on holidays this summer, I read Natalie Goldberg’s new book, Old Friend from Far Away, about memoir-writing. She’s the one who first inspired me to write, and while I have no intention to write my memoirs, her book reminded me how beautiful and magnetic real-world details are.

As a fiction writer, particularly once you start putting your work out into a hostile world, it’s easy to become too slick, to make everything a bit too glib and Teflon-y. A lot of beginning writers fall into what I call “validating your pain”, putting all their hurts and angst into their work, which, sorry, I find boring. As personal growth author John Bradshaw was once devastatingly told by his therapist, “John, your suffering is ordinary.”

But this is different. When Natalie Goldberg talks about a friend’s cooking, or the landscape of New Mexico, I am absolutely with her. The world tells you to stick with the plot, grab ’em with the first paragraph, make sure they don’t get a chance to be bored. Yet my editor once told me she liked my blog posts better than my books: there was an extra dose of me in them.

How do you strike a balance between vanity, catharsis, self-exploration, and the holy original details of daily human life?

I don’t know, but I’m back, and I am inspired to risk boring you by having the courage to experiment, not just put out slick finished works.

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This episode contains several exercises to help you define the characters who will populate your novel.

We take a look at the way ideas begin to connect after you’ve been gathering them for a while, the major story archetypes, and some ways to prepare for the task ahead.

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.