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  • TV Gold and imaginary friends

    Craig has this phrase, “TV Gold”, for television segments in which people cry. Since he introduced me to it, I can see it all over the place, especially whenever old people are interviewed. War veteran recounting his experiences, has to stop because he’s choked up? TV Gold!

    Sometimes, though, it works in reverse: we cry. TV Gold is cheap and bad when it’s manipulative, but sometimes your heartstrings can’t help but vibrate in sympathy with a truly genuine human moment.

    Or not human, as in the case of last night’s final episode of Africa. In the closing scenes, David Attenborough is down on the ground with a blind baby rhino that wildlife conservationists are trying to help so it can return to the wild. It seems that moment sent golden ripples as far as the BBC’s broadcast waves could reach.

    ~

    I’m hating the paper in this sketchbook, but it’s almost finished. (The innards of the next one are already sewn and glued.) For the longest time I’ve wanted to have an “artist’s journal” full of my work, but it always seemed such a huge amount of effort to fill a book with words and images for no purpose””can’t sell it or use it””which, I suppose, makes it an artist’s journal, both in the sense that it’s art (i.e. not for a commercial purpose) and a journal (for development and exploration).

    Now I’ve done one, I’m really happy with it, and I can see the value in the process””and in having someplace to record ideas and images. What’s it for? Well, that’s a good question, which brings me around to another bit of this morning’s thinking and journalling.

    I think I’ve mentioned here that I’ve got this cast of characters that I’ve doodled and carry around in a wee box who represent aspects of myself. So, essentially, I’ve drawn the voices in my head. (We all have ’em, yet we’re frightened by talk of other people’s!)

    This morning I talked to “Old Walt”, who represents””I’ve not really articulated this, but I guess it’s “writing for the right reasons.” Deep, soulful writing. So I had a chat with him. Crazy, perhaps, but it was really useful.

    Every time I do this I get exactly the direction I need. I highly recommend it!

  • Twitter tantra

    More entries for the 30-Day Drawing Challenge:


    Eighteen: Just a doodle. I could have just scribbled and got away with it, but I thought “Nah, this is supposed to be practice.” So I drew a secretary squid (most rare). I guess it’s actually an octopus, though the distinction is lost on me (cf: clowns and mimes).

    There’s a BBC series on right now about Africa, called””appropriately enough””Africa. They had a segment on octopi. Gosh, they’re a strange kind of creature, and far too intelligent to be battered, fried, and served in pubs.


    Nineteen: Something new. Er, okay.


    Twenty: Something orange. You can see the deep thought that went into this one:

    I suppose I could have tried harder, but I’m feeling the pressure to get a lot done today (so I guess this is a good demonstration of how increased pressure leads to lesser results: I like the first drawing, but the other two were throwaways). I’m also trying to muster my creative gumption.

    I’ve found lots of inspiration lately, but there’s a point where being inspired by other people’s work doesn’t get me any closer to doing my own. I either think “Gosh, they’re great,” and feel intimidated or set back (the Sufis say “Comparison is from the Devil”), or I get so caught up in researching and gathering that this activity replaces working.

    There’s also a twitch-reflex that Twitter-use inspires, the constant spinning around from life to go say something snappy about it in 140 characters or fewer. I like to make people laugh, but there’s no laughter there. Sometimes there’s a retweet, but… I dunno. It’s feeling like all that effort spent in trying to appear clever is diffusing my creative energy in not particularly productive ways.

    “Yes, but you get followers!” My experience is that followers seldom convert into readers or buyers, and those 1,300 strangers who tag along one by one don’t even say anything to me, so it’s not exactly a conversation, either. It’s a giant cocktail party where no one’s looking me in the eye except the friends I went in with.

    So I’ve signed off Twitter for a few weeks to move away from the endless searching, or becoming an idle fan of the work that others show off. And there is a lot of showing off to Twitter. I find myself feeling beholden to people there, like I need to justify their following me by producing””what? Things to inspire them?

    That leads to lots of little bursts of short-term work, things I know I can turn around quickly and add to my Twitter puppet show. I’ve been tiptoeing back into Lake Novel, filling out scene cards, consolidating my work, and reshaping the opening; that’s where I want to spend my time and energy””on projects like that.

    (I’ve cut a bunch of “gradually getting them into it” scenes for two secondary characters, which I realised were going to bog the book down for the reader””and for me! Nobody likes “We have to do this first before start” chapters.)

    My legs are still wobbly, though, and sometimes a stray thought sends the whole thing flying out the window. Cutting out some distractions and channeling my focus, though, is freeing up a lot of time and energy to do this work. It’s rewarding to do my own thing, yet it’s so easy to not risk it, to avoid it. What a weird principle of life.

    Now it’s time to write an e-mail newsletter article. I know I can do that. That’s about practice: I do this all the time. So there’s another lesson for me about practice.

    P.S. Yesterday I drove backwards. It was no biggie, just something I need to develop some more finesse at. It’s something you do slowly, versus all the high-speed dodge-’em forward driving stuff””though I did some of that, too, driving straight through town, across the roundabout and the busiest junction in town.

    I recognise that these tasks would be laughable to any experienced driver, but they were nightmarishly intimidating to me before, and now they’re just something to do. I get nervous, and I’m wiped out after a lesson or practice, but I can do them.

    P.P.S. Today is Craig’s birthday. I made him a couple of little things and I’m taking him out to dinner tonight. I wrestle with this feeling of what’s “enough”, but I tried to resist it, and when I did give in to the temptation to do more and give more, I made him things instead of buying things, except for his one ‘main’ gift: The one present he really wanted was a £5 lamp!

    P.P.P.S. [EDIT] Busted: One of the books I’m reading is Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within, in which, over lunch, I just read this line which rather nails what I’ve just done here: “…virtually any aspect of existence can be turned into a pair of (real or seemingly real) polar opposites. Sometimes we should be silent; sometimes we should speak; if we are not careful we can make one or the other into some kind of special virtue, simply because we want justification for keeping silent or for speaking up. We turn two aspects of existence into a duality and then call one nobler than the other to justify and excuse our behavior.”

    Okay, so I did that, and it’s something I do often, talk in absolutes when it’s probably more realistic and gentle to say “This is something I’m doing for now.” I’ll be back on Twitter ’cause I like inspiration and community, even if they’re not always as real as they seem. But for now I need to strengthen my ability to do my own thing.

  • More ticks off the doodle list


    Fourteen: Favourite fairy-tale. What use are fairy-tales to me? I don’t have a favourite, so I drew the first thing that came to mind: the wolf from “Little Red Riding-Hood”. I guess he appeals to me because he seems like the most interesting character in the story. Like the coyote in the Warner Brothers cartoons, I always wanted him to win over the others, who seemed awfully smug.


    Fifteen: Family picture. No mean feat, as I’ve always put myself in the “cartoonist” rather than “caricaturist” category. It’s like clowns and mimes: one of those distinctions that doesn’t mean anything to people outside the craft, but is very important for the practitioners.

    In this case, though, I’m satisfied that I captured something about each of the people in my immediate family. I stopped at the pencil stage, though, because I drew the picture very small and this paper is quite bleedy. The lines, no matter how fine, were sure to grow tendrils that would wreck the initial sketch. (This would be a good opportunity to use a lightbox, but this is just practice so I cannae be arsed””and I don’t have my lightbox at the pub, go figure.)

    Groups of people and scenes have never been my strong point, either. I’ve always tended to draw one lone character doing something. If I were ever to take drawing up in a more serious way, this is something I’d need to get better at.

    In the short term, though, I have gone back to that thing they always said to do in the books I read as a child: draw basic shapes and sketch out the anatomy first. The flaw with this was that at some stage actual talent had to come into the picture, and the instructions would skip over that part. Here’s an old graphic that’s been kicking around which illustrates this beautifully:


    Sixteen: Inspiration. Seriously? That’s a prompt? Make me do all the heavy lifting, why don’t you? I drew the stupid, endless drawing challenge list.


    Seventeen: Favourite plant. People have favourite plants? I had a nice orange-red flower in my office, a gerbera, but Craig forgot it was there over the holidays and didn’t water it. When I got home it was crispy and almost white.

    I drew our money-plant instead. It’s actually doing well.

    In related news, I found £7,000 the other day: I’d regularly socked a bunch of money away in ISA savings five and six years ago and then forgot about it. I know, eh?, how does that happen? I guess it’s not really lucky, since I set this up in the first place””but I’m awfully grateful to past-me for doing it!

  • Morning doodlage

    This morning I’m easing into work by doing some drawing, since I’m getting to do more and more of it for work and want to step up my abilities. I’m not finding “The 30-Day Drawing Challenge” list to be quite right for me, as it’s not especially evocative of things that chime with my imagination, but I’ve started it and I’m just that bloody-minded that I’m going to finish it!

    So here are numbers 11, 12, and 13.

    Eleven: “A turning point in your life.”

    That would have to be auditioning for theatre school. But before you get any images of ‘Rachel’ from “Glee” belting out a Streisand show-stopper for a full auditorium, let me paint this picture instead: An impossibly nervous and gangly 17-year-old singing without accompaniment in a tiny closet of a room tucked away in a far corner of Dalhousie University for a solitary, squat figure hunched in a chair with a slight reek of booze emanating from him.

    I sang the Maurice Chevalier song “Louise”, which, now that I look back, seems incredibly hokey and passionless, but I was going on the advice of the vocal coach back home””a quaint little church lady.

    My monologues were””oh God””the balcony speech from Romeo and Juliet, because I had something unique to add to that which 300 years of actors had missed. Then there was a modern piece from some non-descript, unheard-of play, which was at least somewhat age-appropriate, if, again, emotionally flat. I’d had coaching on these from a local theatre director, Ron Irving, who later ended up hiring me for a succession of professional jobs, and has contributed a lot to the theatre scene in Charlottetown over the years.

    Still, I got in, and that set the stage, if you will, for everything that came after.

    Twelve: Most recent accomplishment.

    I saw an audiologist at the hospital last week, who tested my hearing again The results were not great, but not that bad, so she gave me a present to use in the meantime: a machine that plays sounds to mask out tinnitus so you can sleep, along with two wee speakers to slip under my pillow.

    It does actually help a lot to have something outside my head to pay attention to””both to alleviate the annoyance of the tinnitus, but also because I think too much when I should be resting. The only problem with the speakers, though, is that they slipped around as I moved my pillow (which I hug and adjust and wrestle with in my sleep). It’s like putting a bolo under your head and hoping it doesn’t wind up around your neck.

    So I got an idea: Sew a sleeve with little elastics to hold the speakers, a cover for the speakers and wire held shut with velcro, and non-slip placemat material on the back to keep it all in place on the bed.

    Like all my sewing projects so far, it’s not the prettiest thing (despite being made from the nice owl fabric Craig gave me for our cotton anniversary), but it worked last night. Plus it’s yet another bit of DIY in my world, which just makes me feel great. I get immense pleasure from interacting day-to-day with things I’ve made.

    Thirteen: A comic.

    Now, I’m assuming here they mean a comic strip, but, despite having doodled all my life, I’ve never been a comic strip or graphic novel reader. So the first thing that popped into my mind was Roy “Chubby” Brown, a so-called comedian who’s coming to Wick soon.

    It saddens me that he still gets bookings and has fans, because he’s an odious personality whose “comedy”, as much as I’ve seen it, is a bin-bag of racism, misogyny, and other bits of toxic waste. His die-hard fans seem to be those who read the red-top tabloids and complain that “It’s PC gone mad” whenever someone pulls them up for delivering hate speech in a joke’s clothing.

    So there we are. It’s time to get another coffee and start working on a vector graphic for my client’s blog. It’s a beautiful, sunny morning, which is a nice break from the battering of sea-winds and pelting of rain we’ve been getting. I can’t complain, since most of the people I’m in touch with are buried under snow, but this is still a nice change.

    Crossing over the harbour bridge this morning (I’ve driven ’round the roundabout there several times!), I saw two men down on the riverbank, mortoring up the wall. Apparently there was lots of damage and some flooding here while I was away.

    Right, I’m talking about the weather. Time to move along. Regards to you.

  • DIY Book, Episode 27

    Finale, The Power of Completion

  • What the clutch?

    Saturday’s driving practice was mostly good, with just one rather scary moment: I turned into a street, heading uphill, but had to pull behind a parked car because the little streets in Wick were made for horses and everyone parks on either side of the road, which makes the whole experience feel an awful lot like this:

    My beloved tried to say helpful things, but his tension prompted me to freak out and stall, and even though I managed to get out of the situation, I wound up feeling shaken, scared, and like I really wanted to quit driving.

    Nevertheless, I had a lesson scheduled for late this afternoon and was ready for it. I thought it might be cancelled, because we scheduled it for a different time and the sky was growing dark (surely night-time driving would be a whole other set of lessons). But no, we went ahead as planned.

    Somehow, under my instructor’s patient direction, I was shifting up and down and turning corners, and everything started going smoothly again. It was even kind of fun””though my heart was still racing. Evidently I seemed fine to my instructor, because we stopped and reviewed roundabouts for a bit, then he had me drive through every one of them in town””from several directions! (Okay, there are two of them, and they’re “mini-roundabouts”, but the people of this town use them like particle accelerators.)

    It’s just this clutch business: it’s so very Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang to be that involved with the workings of a machine in 2013. If I can get this, though, I can get anything. I’m just not used to doing frightening things that I’m no good at. I can’t wait until shifting becomes so natural that I can move up the Maslovian pyramid of responsibilities and start paying proper attention to all the other things my instructor keeps stressing, like people and stuff.

  • Thoughts for 2013

    (The following is a transcription of the above.)

    Today Craig and I are going to the nice new café at John O’Groats to have a planning day, but before we go there, it’s important for me to finish this page, to know what’s important for me this year, and in the years ahead.

    Thinking about this in bed this morning, a few things came to mind:

    1) I want to go deep: I want to read and to write and to draw, to discover what’s inside me and bring that out, rather than watch TV or distract myself with the internet.

    2) I want to focus on what I can do, what I want to do, what I do well””and not bitch about the other stuff, like political and financial injustices, which I really have no intention of working on.

    Lance Armstrong doesn’t owe me an apology! I don’t care about him, even though there is a whole industry devoted to trying to get me outraged about him and entertain myself to death.

    3) I want to stay calm and centred: I get wound up about work and getting things done, and it doesn’t get any more done, and is probably what would kill me. Why take care over my health and eat all these special foods if I’m not going to take care of that?

    4) [This one’s kinda personal; the gist is that we need to make some decisions about family.]

    5) And then there’s the question of where do we want to live, in terms of our quality of life.

    These aren’t easy questions, and built into even asking them is the expectation that there are answers to these. Some answers may be incompatible. But we still have to ask the questions!

    Like being calm, though, like being centred, it’s important for us to remember that these are our answers, our choices, and that we are allowed to do what we want. There are no right answers out there, and it’s a matter of choosing rather than deciding between pros and cons. And life is going to happen even if we avoid the questions, so we might as well be the ones making the choice.

  • Happy New Year!

  • More drawing challenges

    It’s New Year’s Eve-day and the family have no plans, so we’re all doing our own thing. I decided to doodle, picking up the 30-Day Drawing Challenge (though Lord knows how long ago I started it).

    Here’s what I came up with:

    1. Favourite book character; can’t be a movie. Well, I don’t have one of these, so I just chose the lead character from the most recent book I finished, Now Is the Hour, by Tom Spanbauer. Chuck Palahniuk says Spanbauer is the man who taught him how to write, so I figured it was worth a try. I liked it and thought it had real life to it, though the territory (midwest US farm boy comes of age) is extremely well-trod.
    2. Favourite word. Enantiodromia refers to the tendency for things to find a balance. Jung used the word (as I understand it) to describe how suppressed desires will come out more even strongly in other, possibly inappropriate areas of life. (cf: homo-hating Republicans who get caught in public restrooms with male prostitutes.)
    3. Favourite animated character. I don’t have one now, but when I was a kid I yearned to be Mickey Mouse, and pretended with a Method-actor intensity that I was him. Now, though, I think the Disney corporation is a vile peddler of imagination-ruining nonsense. (Girls, there are only about three available princess jobs in the world, and princesses tend to become very, very unhappy. Or dead.)
    4. Favourite TV show. Craig and I enjoyed a show this year called “Getting On” by UK comedian Jo Brand. It was a clever, dry-as-gin, yet engaging look inside the crushing and ridiculous bureaucracy of the National Health Service. I thought it might be no fun for Craig to watch on TV more of what he has to deal with every day, but there’s a lot of cathartic joy in seeing someone articulate””with humour and insight””exactly what your situation is like, and that’s exactly what this show did.

    By contrast to Getting On is the TV I’ve been seeing here in Canada: the Canadian news strikes me as extremely good, but the adverts are just shockinglybad. The voice-over actors are all doing what sounds””to my UK-conditioned ears””like a berserk level of over-emoting up and down the scale from the women, and way, way too much of that gravelly fake-manlymanly extreeeeeeme voice from the men.

    Then there are all the pharmaceutical and “Rah! Rah! Support the troops!” ads from the States. Presumably there’s a target-marketed type of individual on the other end who responds to these messages. The thought frightens me.

    The Canadian ads go for a more folksy, funny, “Aren’t we quirky?” angle, but they still ring a really fake note to my ear.

  • A Raconte de Stuff in Boxes

    My mum asked me to crawl out under the eaves and retrieve some boxes of my old stuff.

    Fast-forward about eight hours, and I’ve now relived my life from grade school through high school, on to theatre school/university, then through my days of striving and struggling in Toronto — pictures, letters, newspaper reviews, theatre programmes and posters, and a bag full of journals and notes documenting all my trysts, brainstorms, and the working notes of my play and first two novels. I even found a plaster mask of that younger self buried in that mountain of paper.

    I can’t help wondering what he would have thought of the 44-year-old me. I didn’t get famous, but I found a good way in the world. After years of wrestling with myself and going through heartbreaks, I reached a real peace by my 40th birthday and met my husband three days later. Plus I just spent a few weeks working from my client’s office, where the team and he company’s owners gave my self-esteem such a boost (once again) that it feels like I’ve got a million bucks in the bank. I was even given a mansion to stay in for my last week there.

    So, yeah, it’s not what the young me pictured, but it’s damned good, and he was a little stupid anyway.

    Yet, as I got pulled into all those journals and show-notes again, I couldn’t help but also be a little impressed. Theatre was such a brilliant thing to study. Movie-stars and celebrities, yeah, make fun of them all you like, but working in theatre is real art. Or science, even, since that’s about making a stroke of luck repeatable. I can’t think of any better education I could have had in art and life all at once.

    Studying acting was a deep, weird, gut-wrenching couple of years. Then and after, I was always falling in love with someone, too, which both fed the work and got in the way (it’s hard to be honest with an audience of hundreds when you can’t be honest with your one self). But there’s a kind of fondness to the melancholy ache of those memories. “You were young, you were sexy, you were free!”

    Yeah, but not really. I didn’t know things would work out. I was dirt-poor. Those hand-made greeting cards I found in the bag? I came up with those when I quit my awful waiting job, because it was that or go to the welfare office. (Well, I did go there, and the interview was such a demeaning violation that I left it saying, “Forget it. I’ll find another way.” Slowly, gradually, I did.)

    Everything I do now, you can see the roots of it in my earliest primary school journals (pages of creative writing sprinkled with cartoons). But the path between there and here seems so tenuous. Letters from a great aunt in Scotland, a Scottish postcard from my grandmother, and now I live in “the Old Country”. I guess it’s all there, Chekov’s guns lying all over the place to give clues about what would happen in later acts. But they could have backfired so badly.

    My pal James and I went to a house party while I was in Toronto. He called a limo service to take us there. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “it won’t be some douchebag SUV.” Honk-honk: guess what picked us up. When we arrived and walked away from the shiny black treehouse on wheels, I said to him, “Look at us: Who knew we would make it? When we were first friends, going to nightclubs, we were broke most of the time and perpetually single.” Now, well, we’re not that. (Though my lifestyle and income are — ahem — more modest than his. Power to the entrepreneurs.)

    And what about all those shows, all that artistic effort? The posters, he scripts, the cards — it all seems a bit pointless. The shows closed, some of those people I worked with are dead now. And yet, I aspire to staying as deeply creative as that awkward young me strove to be. The understanding those experiences gave me seems like the only thing I can actually hold onto.

    What to do with all those books, though, the lines and lines of angst and questioning?

    For now, the paper avalanche has been sifted through and reduced to one bag… which I’m going to take to the basement. At some point I’ll figure out how to use it all, but for now it’s just reassuring — if a bit emotionally wrenching — to feel like my past has all been relived, bundled together, and added to my present self. I think everyone feels compelled to validate their own experience, but I tend to find art that does that a bit tedious. I’m more interested in using my imagination to look ahead.