Author: hamishmacdonald

I found a website called Kiva.org, which is storefront for a microcredit network. They find aspiring entrepreneurs in the developing world and give them interest-free loans toward their projects. The money comes from individuals who make donations through the website.

What’s fun about the way they’ve set this site up is that you can pick a project that interests you and give whatever you want. I’ve been saving up money for a while, for nothing in particular, and what strikes me about these projects is how easy it is to blow the whole outstanding balance for a project out of the water with one donation. And you get the money back. (Microcredit has a history of vastly higher successful repayment rates than commercial bank loans. Go figure: who do you care about, the bank that posted a 2.5 billion pound profit last year, or the group of people who helped you open a food market in your village?)

Here’s the pre-rolled message from their website, which says it all:

======

Hi!

I just made a loan to someone in the developing world using a revolutionary new website called Kiva.

You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business — like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent — and you get updates letting you know how the business is going. The best part is, when the entrepreneur pays back their loan you get your money back — and Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.

I just made a loan to an entrepreneur named Johnstone Mativo in Kenya. They still need another $50.00 to complete their loan request of $525.00 (you can loan as little as $25.00!). Help me get this business off the ground by clicking on the link below to make a loan to Johnstone Mativo too:

http://kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=9546&referralId=

It’s finally easy to actually do something about poverty — using Kiva I know exactly who my money is loaned to and what they’re using it for. And most of all, I know that I’m helping them build a sustainable business that will provide income to feed, clothe, house and educate their family long after my loan is paid back.

Join me in changing the world — one loan at a time.

Thanks!

Alistair Hamish MacDonald
———————————————————
What others are saying about www.Kiva.org:

‘Revolutionising how donors and lenders in the US are connecting with small entrepreneurs in developing countries.’
— BBC

‘If you’ve got 25 bucks, a PC and a PayPal account, you’ve now got the wherewithal to be an international financier.’
— CNN Money

‘Smaller investors can make loans of as little as $25 to specific individual entrepreneurs through a service launched last fall by Kiva.org.’
— The Wall Street Journal

‘An inexpensive feel-good investment opportunity…All loaned funds go directly to the applicants, and most loans are repaid in full.’
— Entrepreneur Magazine

I went up Calton Hill with the gang last night for Beltane. It was a perfect evening, with a huge pastel rainbow sunset above the expanse of old and new Edinburgh. The features on the hill seemed to stand in sharper relief than usual — Nelson’s tower like a big upended telescope, and the Folly’s Acropolis front looking like part of a giant stone playpen the city had violently outgrown.

Even though we’ve all been going to the event for the same number of years, Liz expertly led us from one station of the procession to another, finding corners that nobody else had noticed, so that when the singing, dancing, drumming red, blue, and white-painted people came around we were perfectly situated. (If our Friday Gang was a Japanimation robot, Liz would be the part that says “And I’ll form the head!”)

I had a plastic bottle of pre-mixed absinthe with me, which essentially served as my lobotomy for the evening. There seems to be a chemical truth to its romantic reputation as an arty drunk. My friends did that thing of looking at me with a smirk while taking care of me, leading me around. I was overwound (yet run-down), and they tended to me like excellent watchsmiths. This also goes for friends abroad, who know how to talk me out of my crazy tree.

I don’t know why, but I smell like meat this morning. Funny things happen at Beltane. I must shower when I’m finished this.

[EDIT: Liz’s pictures are up!]

~

(More pictures in the Pics section to the left. But they’re all out of order ’cause of the wonky uploader I used. And unfortunately, our friend Olivier, who was there with us for the first few days, doesn’t really make an appearance in them, ’cause a day’s photos got deleted from the camera — oops!)

Barcelona was lovely, but I have to admit that there were challenges. My folks and I saw great things and enjoyed each other’s company, but we also had some stresses to deal with.

I’m also not good at being in constant company; I’m an introvert — solitude gives me my energy back — so two weeks kinda made my batteries flat. I love my folks so much, and I’m so conscious of making all my time with them count that it actually makes me weird, like I can’t just take things as they are because I have this mental template of how special our time together is supposed to be. Cosgrove pointed this out to me in an instant message (I love how technology allows people to be in my life without having to be physically present). He said “…stop making yourself wrong for not always having a ‘FABULOUS GREAT TIME’, which occurs as somewhat fake and desperate anyway.” Patrick’s also been great, like some kind of boiler technician, letting out my steam.

What really turned up the pressure, though, was that I met someone just before I went away on this trip. This always happens: things take place just before I go away, usually to Canada for a month, then there’s nothing I can do about them but think and think and overthink.

I won’t say more about this, except that I nearly wrecked it through this overthinking. I call this the Jack Russell Terrier Effect: I’m a smart little doggie, and if you leave me unattended for too long, I’ll tear up the furniture.

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p>Romance plays into a horrible confluence of my personality traits. In most situations in my life, these are good things, but in this domain, they’re dangerous. To whit, here are a few:

Characteristic	Elsewhere	Romance
Impatience	I get things done. I write books, I make things, I jump over deadlines like a border collie clears hurdles.	I exist in a kind of hummingbird time, in which the other person is occupied with regular life things, but I seem to have extra time to obsess.
Persistence	I start and finish projects. I can be relied on to do what I say I’m going to do.	When there’s no action to take, nothing I can do, my brain just won’t leave things alone, and goes into ‘hamster in a wheel’ mode. And then I make decisions or take action based on, well, stupidity.
Imagination	I draw, I write, I say funny things.	I make things up from scratch that have no basis in fact. I imagine that things have ended, which often precipitates making that happen in reality.
Communication	I express myself in detail, and find just the right words to say. I’m unreserved about saying everything I think.	I say too much, too early.

I hate to play the gay card, but when you grow up with a fear of people seeing who you really are and hating you for it, it’s hard to shake off that pattern of thought. What’s odd is that, happily, many of my gay friends don’t have this. Patrick, my closest example, is completely free of gay angst. What’s particularly annoying is that this old closet has been completely emptied out — the contents have been burned in the yard, and the monster I imagined was in there turned out to not be real. But that pattern of thinking is always there for me, waiting for a chance to reactivate itself. So, paradoxically, as an adult I can be a person who’s confident to the point of egotism, yet have this dread fear of having my worthlessness discovered — even though I don’t believe it’s true.

On the trip, both of my parents said things to me that were overwhelmingly acknowledging, telling me how proud they are of me, how much they like me as a person. I couldn’t help laughing inside, thinking, “Some people wait their whole lives for this stuff and never get it.” They give this to me over and over, and always have done. So you’d think I would pay attention to that interpretation instead of the made-up one. And most of the time I do.

Anyway, all this is to say that I’ve been driving myself crazy with hopes and fears about a situation that hasn’t even had a chance to play itself out. But then last night I had a phone conversation that made everything okay, and, while I have compassion for my humanity, I feel embarrassed about my behaviour (most of which, thankfully, happened offstage, in my head, and in conversation with Patrick).

I really wish I could wise up in this part of life. I doubt, though, that such root instincts can be schooled. I think we always remain about five years old emotionally, we just learn to put up blocks and filters and develop tactics for managing ourselves.

<

p>…Which underscores, I suppose, how relatively inexperienced I am in romance. It’s kind of ironic, when myself and my other gay friends have had exponentially more sex than our straight friends, yet I can count the number of successful, long-term relationships I’ve had — well, on my thumb.

…a massage and a lobotomy.

On Tuesday I’m heading off to Barcelona with my parents for a week. In case, for whatever reason, you need to reach me, you should be able to get me on my mobile: +447847183931 (011 44 7847 183 931 from North America).

The apartment we’ve let for the week is at Consell de Cent, 283, Barcelona (also known as Calle del Consejo de Ciento).

Yesterday, I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Bogombo Snuff Box. And yesterday he died. He’d retired from writing books, and from what he’s written about old age, I’m sure he was as ready as one can be for the experience. Still, he was a bright, clear glass lightbulb who burned strong for a long time, and they don’t make that kind anymore. There can’t be another Vonnegut any more than there can be another Hemingway or Dorothy Parker or whomever: we had that; now it’s our responsibility to be the next thing. But somehow it doesn’t feel like it’s possible to stand out like that now.

I picked up another collection of his today, which I’d planned to do anyway (I’m not a fanboy or a vulture, I swear). Bogombo was a collection of his earliest stories, which all took place in a rather normal, Modern (Fifties and Sixties) world. “Company men” and subdivisions and marriage issues only capture my imagination so much — and even he, in the coda, said that he regarded those stories (which he wrote in order to make money from periodicals) as “fake fossils” now. I’m looking forward to getting more of the fantastic in this other collection.

Ooh, and I had a massive writing session last night in which I mapped out everything I have of the novel so far. It’s really coming together now. Chapters will not be not far off.

~

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p>I’ve been making deliberate choices about the music I’m listening to lately: I’ve bought albums by a few people who are going completely independent, producing and selling their music on their own with no commercial intermediaries. I like that, so I’m supporting it. And it’s not like it’s a hair-shirt punishment, ’cause it’s so darned good. Here are my three recent finds:

• Kate Walsh, Tim’s House
• Jay Brannan, Unmastered
• Van Tramp, Wheels of Fortune

The latter is my friend Tim’s band, and the album is really strong. There are some better-than-radio-sh*te hits on it that have that “personal theme song of the summer” feel.

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p>It would be fun to try just listening to music by real people I know.

I sold a book today. In person.

On my way to the library to work, I went into a local shop that sells design books. It’s a neat little independent store full of slick mags of snazzy styles and books with raggedy type and mashed-up pictures — the latest of what’s happening in design. And they had ‘zines! ‘Zines are such a non-thing here that I was excited to see a whole shelf devoted to them.

I mulled around for a while, thinking about buying a book featuring ideas for promotional materials, then changing my mind (I’ve bought so many books lately, and I have to stop).

Finally, I got up the gumption to talk to the shop’s owner. I told him what I’ve been doing with my micropress, and he expressed interest in seeing the finished product. Because I’ve strong-armed myself into being a prepared publisher, I had a copy with me, and pulled it out to show him.

“I’m really impressed,” he said, flipping through the pages, looking at the flyleaf, then at the rough cover underneath. “It’s not what we sell, fiction,” he said, “but I’d be interested in taking a copy for myself.”

Yeah, it’s just five quid, and it’s really not about the money or selling an object. It’s about reaching across my shyness and my hesitation about — whatever my trepidation about selling is about — and connecting with someone who was into what I’m doing.

I’ve run into a familiar principle from theatre school in my novel-writing and my copywriting work: I was taught that the best way for an actor to tell a story is from “a point of innocence”. That is, you don’t want to ‘telegraph’ the ending of the story, but reveal it as a surprise at the end for the maximum impact.

A few months back, my editor pointed out that I kept doing this in our Strategic Coach articles. Most of our articles are about one of the concepts, strategies, or tools we teach entrepreneurs in our program, so my approach to this was to sneak up on it — present a threatening problem then wallop it on the head with a solution I had hidden behind my back. (Well, ‘I’ — I’m a ghostwriter, so it’s whatever disembodied official voice speaks for the company.)

The way that Dan, owner of the company, speaks in person, though, is much more like an ad-man (because this is his background): “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” I suppose he’s simply confident enough from seeing his ideas work for thirty years or so that he keeps his hat on and just hands people the rabbit. The magic, for him, isn’t in the trick, but in the way the idea works in practical application for the entrepreneurs.

But I still like telling stories. And it’s fun to surprise people.

I woke up with a head full of ideas about the year 2050. All this stuff I’ve been reading about, that’s being talked about in the news — it’s already happened then. So I’m figuring out how that world works.

And pretty soon I’ve got to stop talking about this, because talking about writing isn’t writing.

~

Oh, okay, just one more thing before I shut up and get to work: suffering. Suffering is boring.

Last night, I watched a bit of Battlestar Galactica with Patrick and Anita over dinner (a wonderful lasagne that ‘Nite mate). The program is just so many orders of magnitude greater a thing than the crap 1970s show. Still, though, we’re into the third season and the characters have been hunted down for years, lived through a prison camp, and now they’re all suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — or something — because they’re all acting horribly toward each other. I watch the show, and I’m tired.

Payoffs are very big for me. If I’m going to watch something or read something — and this goes for when I write something, too — I want the people in the story to experience some big payoffs to justify why I’ve spent this time with them. I want them to be transformed by the experience. I want there to be movement. I feel that if I’m going to ask people to follow me through the woods of my imagination, the crumbs I leave for them had better taste good. In fact, I should leave some loaves for them from time to time (like at the end of every chapter). Likewise for the characters: yes, the job of the author is to keep applying pressure, to make things worse and worse for this person, but still, they have to get a few moments of fun in the story, some respites of joy. Or else it’s just a story about someone suffering, and who wants to give over their free time to that? I think we romanticise suffering far too much. Who cultivates that but a dedicated loser?

Last night in bed, I sat with a little fluorescent book-light thing (reminiscent of the old “flashlight-in-bed” trick) and tucked into a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s early short stories called Bagombo Snuff Box. Vonnegut is one of those writers I’d like to be when I grow up — and I took great comfort reading in that he was 47 before he had commercial success. I didn’t get past his introduction, because I found eight rules for writing fiction there that I loved. They validated a number of things I’ve come to feel are very important. I just wanted to roll in them like a dog rolls in something dead. Here they are:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), pp 9-10.

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p>

EEK! Today I reached an exciting and a frightening stage in working on my novel: it’s coming together into a story.

Ideas have been forming in my mind like bubbles in champagne, but now they’re bumping into each other, joining, forming something larger — which is the story. This afternoon I used my writing session to commit to mapping out these half-ideas and asking myself just what sort of story this is. I haven’t got the plot yet, but I’m getting a real sense of the arc of it, who’s in it, and the overall tone.

Stephen King said that “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.” This feels true: you find the story inside yourself (or out in the world). But there’s another component to it, which is commitment: there’s a point in the process where you have to commit to what’s emerging, make choices about it. ‘This’ not ‘that’. What’s uncomfortable is that, in committing, the story goes from being all possible books to being one book.

My “to read” pile has gone from two feet high to just three little books. (Though one of them is another dense, overwrought read.) I’ve got one more that should be arriving in a few days, but, really, the period of “stocking the pond” is coming to a visible end.

I’ve finished my background reading on climate chaos, and have been delving into squooshy books about the stuff that can get in the way of creativity. It’s been a number of years since I’ve gone through the novel-writing process, and between then and now, before I started the micropress, was been another round of manuscript submissions that lasted about two years. That’s a personally costly activity, so before starting this next book, I want to erase as much of the emotional plaque that accrues when interacting with the market that way.

One book I just finished was all about that inner voice of self-judgment. The book was overly long, and by the end of it I wanted to yell at the sample-people Roger and Mary, “Oh, would you just shut the f* up already!” I was tired of their constant whingeing and narcissistic preoccupation with their precious inner states.

On the one hand, I think this reflects the fact that I live in Britain. True, the country’s bureaucracies and individuals are starting to take on this work and enjoying its inherent lingo, drama, and permission to be self-absorbed. But there’s still a pervasive sense of “Ach, why don’t ye just go tae they pub an’ huv a pint?” I’ve absorbed some of that latter quality, and I think that’s been good for me.

On t’other, this impatience kinda feels like something I picked up in my childhood from my parents. They were caring and sensitive, but didn’t have a lot of time for snivelling. They made me angry on many occasions by tricking me into laughing when I really wanted to be upset.

I suppose I have a beef with these books, and psychology in general, for their preoccupation with the past, and blaming your parents for everything. From the perspective of the present, it’s pretty irrelevant who did or didn’t do what. Though, having read this book, I also recognise that my upbringing had a hint of the martial to it, with rules for everything, and I see that I can be heavy-handed with myself when it comes to getting my work done. And there’s a lot of strength and energy in me that I haven’t used because it’s been tied up in this constant self-regulatory chatter.

“Yes, but isn’t that a good thing, because your work gets done?” To a degree, definitely. I’m happy that I learned how to order and structure my world. But work that’s produced out of bloodyminded determination has a particular quality to it, and it’s not a fun one. Also, egregious self-discipline doesn’t really work, since that monkey part of myself will do everything it can to sneak around it and cheat.

What really gets the work done is just… sitting down and doing the work. Which is work, but it’s fun work. This may not make sense, but in being a writer, there must also be periods of doing being a writer. Inventing people, exploring imaginary places, and discovering the intricate threads of a plot — that’s a joy.

This evening I read a book about what gets in the way of that (namely resistance) called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I enjoyed it as a good reminder of how resistance shows up, though it could only go so far in talking about how to step around it and sit down to do the work. Well, that’s not entirely true: I have very distinct activities (how I schedule a writing session, how I prepare for it, how I start) that get me to that working place.

So, again, I’m reading things which remind me that I already know what to do. Still, it feels helpful — and encouraging — to have that reassurance.

One odd side-effect of all this mental decluttering is that I feel very close to a younger version of myself. I was a creative kid, and I got so much pleasure out of doing things — cartooning, playing, making things — purely for their own sake. While I’ve had lots of formal tuition since then, taught myself a lot more, and had lots of experience, it’s really clear to me that this work is going to come from exactly that place I was in when I was in my single digits, playing away.

I keep thinking of playing for hours in that crawlspace, drawing cartoons endlessly with my friend Karl, camping trips in which I’d fill a whole spiral-bound scribbler with doodles and make painted rock ladybugs and monsters with glued-on googly-eyes, writing stories in grade school, and getting to design the bulletin boards in my classroom. I had a lot of reinforcement from my mom, my dad, my teachers, and my classmates for the idea that I was “creative”. My parents never pushed my brother or I in any particular direction, just made sure we knew the rules and let us do our own thing, become our own people.

Okay, blah blah blah, Hamish. That’s very nice. (See, there’s that inner judge: “Get to the point. Don’t bore people. Don’t be vulnerable, it looks bad.” But I know we actually like other people’s messes.)

Anyway, the point of all this is…

***I need readers!***

In about two months, I should be starting to write chapters for Finity. As I did with the other three novels, I want to serialise this story as I write it. As a reader of my blog, you’re invited to read my next book as I write it.

With the other books, I sent out Word files as I went, but since then the technology has jumped forward, and I’m wondering about posting it online. (Though I do tend to edit and re-edit as I go, and am not sure I want to keep the website updated with those constant changes, too.)

So, a question (which you can answer in a comment): If you were to participate in this exercise, how would you prefer to receive each new chapter in the story?

The feedback I’m looking for isn’t about literary criticism (“Maybe you should rewrite it in the first person from the perspective of the cat”, “I liked The Willies more”, or “This won’t sell”) but your reaction as a reader, as if you were reading a paperback you bought from the bookshop. I’d want to know if anything didn’t make sense or felt inconsistent, things like “But in the last chapter his name was ‘Foreman’ and now he’s called ‘Tamara’” or “How did we get from the Hoover Dam to the New York Public Library?” or even “Francoise would never do that!”

And, of course, if you’re simply inspired to say “I’m loving it! What happens next? Send me the next chapter, you bastard!”, that’s also more than fine. Knowing people are out there expecting the next installment is a great way for me to keep the momentum of the project going.

So:

1. Let me know if you would be interested in being an advance reader, and
2. If so, tell me how you’d like to read the serialised version of the story.

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p>

Today’s doodle is a cheat: I drew something for our grammar goddess at work, Myrna, who asked me for suggestions about her next instructional message to the general e-mail conference. This one is about proper use of exclamation points, so I suggested calling it “WHAT ARE YOU, CRAZY?!!!!!” because whenever people use a lot of them in a row, I picture them looking something like this:

Okay, and what am I grateful for today? (When will this end?! Oh, in two days.)

1. Parsley. I love it so. Am about to have some in my evening goop.
2. Ideas. I’ve got lots of books on the go, and there’s something irresistable for me about the idea of collecting new ideas, getting better and better at thinking about life. More on this in a second.
3. Unplanned time. I’ve nothing planned tonight. Okay, it’s 7PM and I’m just finished working, and I haven’t made dinner yet, but still — it’s open before me like a promise. I am my word, and will always follow through on what I say I’ll do (like this stupid list!), so when I find ‘unspoken’ bits, I enjoy them.

Further to the ideas thing: One of the books in my pile that I was really looking forward to reading was one called The Enchantment of Modernity, by Jane Bennett. I’d read the introduction, which put forward an idea I would paraphrase like this:

People often speak about the world as if there was once a time in which it was enchanted, and now, in the modern era, enchantment has gone out of the world. Some look back on the old world as a place of tribes and superstition and consider this a good thing. Others lament the loss of meaning in a mechanised age of isolation. There’s a third path available, though, an “alter-tale”, which considers the modern world as still having the power to enchant — to arrest us in a moment of wonder — without needing that enchantment to be tied into any “divine” purpose.

Why is this enchantment necessary? As Bennett says so beautifully, “I tell my alter-tale because it seems to me that presumptive generosity, as well as the will to social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence, and that it is too hard to love a disenchanted world.”

As I’m working on a book about climate crisis, you can see how this would relate. Also, I’m one of those human beings who prefers to see the world as more than mere mechanism. But that goes beyond what Bennett is asking, or would likely approve of.

My problem is the rest of the book after the introduction. The whole thing becomes this laborious exercise in adademia-speak, where plain English is completely lost, and every other clause contains a reference to some dead white guy and a neologism I have to read three times. For instance:

Kant began with the idea that the ground of thought is the categories of the mind and then, when he inquired into the ground of that ground, he referred to the infinite, the inscrutable, the noumena, the supersensible realm. Deleuze begins with the idea that the force behind thinking is sense and then, when he inquires into the force behind that force, he refers to an indeterminate immanent field of differences-in-intensity. (p54)

Blargh! It reminds me of my attempts to read Heidegger — but at least, in his defense, he was being translated from German!

As I flip through the book, her ideas pop out one by one like little goldfish. I get them. It’s just the whole that’s mystifying, convoluted, like that same fish worked into an Escher drawing. As someone who works hard each day to write business copy that’s free of business bullsh*t, I’m not happy wading through academic bullsh*t. If your idea is a good one, you can say it plainly. Instead, the worthy ideas in this book are spun off into abstractions.

I’ll probably go back and dip into it from time to time, but reading it all at once is like trying to make a meal of hors d’oeuvres.

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p>But why did I need to read this book in the first place? I had the idea as soon as I read the introduction. Or even before — that’s what led me to seek out this book. Did I really need the book to validate my thinking? I need to have faith in my own mind — particularly for the task ahead.