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I’m halfway through moving house, with all my worldly possessions piled up in a room of Craig’s flat. We leave for our new life this Sunday, and in the meantime everything’s been a bit in limbo — hence the lack of updates here.

We just had a holiday on the Scottish island of Arran — instead of going to Turkey, thanks to one particular volcano in Iceland. I’m more interested in exploring Scotland, though, than taking luxury holidays, so Plan B turned out to be a lovely treat. I’ve posted pictures here, if you’d like to see them.

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I wanted to post something fresh on this blog, so here’s a response I wrote today to a friend’s YouTube video link on Facebook. The video is called The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies, and makes a very strong case that women are generally absent from our culture’s biggest movies. I totally agree with the reviewer’s point, but I think it’s a bit easy to siphon out all our own power by crankily victimising ourselves instead of looking for ways to create our own solutions. So here’s what I wrote:

This test is brilliant, even if the results are sadly unsurprising.

The solution, however, isn’t for “Hollywood” to do something — it can’t change itself, being the very system that generated this situation in the first place.

A far more empowering and authentic solution would be for women with an interest in film to follow the advice of director Spike Lee or the late South African activist Steven Biko and do it yourself.

Why would a white person make movies about black people, Lee, asks, and how could they be truthful? White culture, Biko said, would only create an equality for “white black people”. Real change in power comes from people creating for themselves what they would like to see.

It’s like the horrible British National Party advert that was given airtime on the BBC last night: Nick Griffin wants to blame “them” for all his and his supporters’ failures in life, and people of colour are the easiest “them” to identify. If he really wants British culture to thrive, he should convince people to turn off American TV, stop shopping at multinational chain stores, and actively participate in their local communities. But no, it’s easier to blame someone else.

So, while the reviewer in the video makes a thoroughly convincing point, I would suggest that the solution lies in writing the screenplay she’d like to see instead, and for women to vote with their money at the box office, rather than waiting for commercial film studios to change (or any other huge, money-directed culture-generational engine). Sure, there likely won’t be big-budget blockbuster women-focused movies any time soon, but independent films get made all the time and win lots of respect. And tools are readily available for us to make our own cultural products and share them within our individual communities.

Off the top of my head, I recall Juno, Junebug, and Away We Go as films from the past few years that feature real, thinking, engaging female lead characters. And I’d urge anyone to see the beautiful Me, You, and Everyone We Know, written, directed by, and starring mesmerising performance artist Miranda July.

In this video episode, I demonstrate three ways to make a perfect-bound book.

I spent this Easter weekend with my darling in Paris.

I’ve been to Paris with my parents and with friends from work, both of which were fun, but this was my first time there with a love, and that was sweet. I have to admit, though, that it’s a relief to be home, ’cause visiting with friends of Craig’s, interacting with people in public, even going to a play involved a lot of French, and my French is caveman-bad. I felt so rude and inadequate.

Thank God Craig is so good with languages. He thought he was doing terribly, but he could actually understand people speaking at full speed with us and respond in kind. He’s a wonder!

Of course, in my defence, I haven’t studied French since school, and even then we were taught it in the most technical, non-practical way. The difference between conjugating verbs and speaking fluently is like the difference between looking at a veterinary textbook images of a dog’s innards and playing with a real dog. Plus I’ve been spending the intervening years since school learning to do lots of things other than speak French, and doing them fairly well, I feel, so it’s not like I’m an idiot.

But I felt like an idiot. A willful idiot.

Oh, and apparently there’s something wrong with the economy: the exchange on our British pounds to Euros was about 1:1. That meant dinner each night cost something like 30, 40, or even 50 quid. I’ve never paid that much for a meal in my life before, and I’ve had some pretty good meals. So this trip was one of those times when you have to just suck up a deep breath and figure it’ll all work out in the end.

I made a book for the trip, which we filled out with all the various things we did and saw, and made a note of the people we visited with.

That’ll suffice as our chronicle, and I’ve posted pictures on Facebook. It’s of no use to list all of what we did here, ’cause there’s something about “We went to Paris” that sounds insufferable. Even worse is throwing out place-names with casual familiarity, but for me to do that would be a lie: By the end, my tongue was tripping on every word like its shoelaces were tied together. This was not my place nor my language, just a nice escape for a weekend.

On our last night, we ate take-away food on the banks of the Seine near Notre Dame, then had a long walk that ended with us looking up at the Eiffel Tower from underneath (struggling to avoid the endless crap-merchants with their lit-up whirligigs and Tour-Eiffel keychains), then we crossed over to Trocadéro to look back at it all. I found a picture that shows the view; we stood in the spot where this guy, his pretty boyfriend, and his chauffeur are standing.

Then, as we got on the Métro to go home, I realised I’d lost a little patch of my peripheral vision: A migraine was on its way. I hadn’t had one in a long time and was glad of it, but sure enough, I had one in a few hours. It felt like my head was a gun and my right eye was the bullet, suspended at the point of impact throughout the night. I was well cared-for, though, so by the time we headed out for our flight yesterday, I just had that bruisey old feeling in my skull.

I used to be unsympathetic about migraines, thinking of them as hypochondriacal excuses, but now that I’ve experienced several through the years, I have great empathy for people who suffer with them, and don’t know how they manage.

And I finally got to the Louvre. On our first try, we lined up with a majillion other people: it was the first Sunday of the month, when it’s free to get in. A museum official held up a card saying the wait from that point in the line was four hours, so we left and came back the next day, and got in right away.

We did a whistlestop tour of the place, and I kept thinking of my parents: They joke about our tendency to visit places and just walk around, taking in the street-level life of them but missing the headline tourist sights you’re supposed to see. (While travelling to and from Paris this time, I read about psychogeography and the image of the wandering flâneur, which resonated with the members of my family seem to enjoy travelling most.)

But walking around the museum for several hours, I felt fairly disconnected from the things I saw. All the cherubs and overly flattering portraits, the melodramatically posed mythical figures… These classical commissions to the unimaginably wealthy left me cold. I was more interested in the live people sitting with pensive expressions on their faces or clambering for whatever reason to record their interaction with these iconic pieces of art. I guess I’m not a classical art guy; I remember the Musée d’Orsay feeling much more alive.

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So now I’m back, sitting in the coffeeshop, wearing my red trainers instead of my big boots, which were torturing my feet by the end of the weekend. (What are heels for — especially when you’re already a tall man? It’s like wearing a block of wood on the back of your feet, and gets horribly uncomfortable pretty quickly on a long trip.)

I just had a great chat with one of the nice staff-members here. She’s studying architecture, here from the States with her husband. I love that moment of spark that happens in a conversation with other creative folk, when you both get all lit up because you’re inspired by something the other says or because you can relate to their journey.

The talk started with her asking about the move. This is what’s next: figuring out how to move my stuff. Then I can think about our trip to Turkey later this month. Then the move itself.

It’s a busy time. But good.

In this first video episode, I’ll show you how to print and bind two types of simple books.

I wrote a little while ago about the book The Now Habit, and how it was helping me organise my work and get it done with less stress. That’s still true, but as with everything in life, it takes practice to keep this system in place. Old habits are always ready to slip back into place, and then there’s the imagined ease of just not being conscious about it, floating along instead of doing that “plan your work, work your plan” thing.

It’s what they said in the workshops I took years ago: The things you say, commit to, or create come into existence, and in the next moment start going out of existence. If you want them to carry into the future, you need “structures for existence” to keep them alive.

As you might have noticed if you’ve been following, I like to make up little systems for myself then, after a while, break them and make up new ones. I suppose this is partly because I enjoy making the physical forms these things take (the nicer they look, the more inclined I am to use them), and it’s also partly because my livelihood depends on them: As a freelance copywriter on a retainer, I need to keep producing work if I’m going to keep getting paid.

I enjoy what I do, so it doesn’t exactly take discipline to do it — ‘discipline’ implies that the task is somehow distasteful or a burden, and I’m grateful for my work — but as with any creative work, it’s easy to avoid it. It’s easier to do nothing than to create, even if that nothingness isn’t ultimately satisfying.

Equally unsatisfying, though, is that with the kind of work I’m doing — either copywriting or doing book-stuff like podcasts or promotion — there’s no end to it. With no end, it’s easy to feel like you’re a hamster on a wheel, like you’re not getting anywhere because, look, there’s so much more to do!

My latest experiment is to take my work and make it as much of a game as possible. I’m inspired by the notion of Alternate Reality Games, in which, rather than using play as a way to escape from life, we use it to enhancing our experiences and abilities in the real world. Others, like ARG pioneer Jane McGonical, do a better job of imagining and describing these games and the impact they can have — which can range from finding new ways to play in your city to saving the world. In my case, I’m just trying to come up with a game that gives me a sense of progress about my various projects — more than just ticking them off in my project planning software to fall into a memory-hole.

A good game, I figure, will give me a way to:

• stay on track
• be productive
• explore new ideas
• have fun
• improve my skills

I’ve still got a lot to do to figure out what this system will be, but I figure it needs to work in the field if it’s going to be useful in a lasting way, so I’ve just jumped in and started.

So far, I’ve got a notepad for today’s tasks, a little book of sheets for tracking my daily “score”, and an envelope for collecting the score-sheets. I’m measuring my work in little, approachable sprints of 25 minutes (sometimes called “Pomodoros“), and for task I complete, I get a star.

Yeah, I know: it’s all a bit kindergarten. But do we ever really progress past the needs we had at five years old? Sure, we get more skilled at being ourselves and relating to others, but I know that I still need acknowledgement, praise, and rewards for my efforts. So, since I’m my own grown-up now, it’s my responsibility to provide those for myself if I’m not going to drive my editor crazy!

My system needs a lot more to it, though: As these stars accumulate, they have to contribute to growing, visible progress, and I want to be able to trade them in for rewards. I never played Dungeons and Dragons because that was for geeks and losers (or because my brother wouldn’t let me play, you choose), but I see “progress” as analogous to collecting “experience points” and the rewards as “levelling up”.

One of the contributors to McSweeney’s, Christopher Monks, wrote a book that’s pretty close to this idea: The Ultimate Game Guide To Your Life: Or, The Video Game As Existential Metaphor. I don’t see myself buying it, though, because — like so much of the McSweeney’s content, it’s occasionally funny, but overall it comes across as glib, smug, and a bit pointless (here’s a sample; judge for yourself). The idea’s in there, just not in a workable form.

On the other end of the spectrum is a gorgeous work of form over function, the $2,100 “Personal Paradigm” game:

Now that’s what I need to do: come up with a nice papercraft product out of this that would be useful to other people, too. There’s a nice-looking kit for novel-writers out there (which I can’t find again now), but it fails where many products for writers do: it’s too prescriptive, supplying a deck of idea-cards, which binds the author’s imagination to a limited set of someone else’s notions rather than helping them create something truly new, completely of themselves — which is my beef with the bulk of indie fiction: it’s far too heavily based in pre-existing stories. I know, I know: There are no new stories. But some retreads feel especially un-new and I agree with Neil Gaiman: they need a cultural rest.

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p>Okay, I’m stopping here ’cause I’ve got some copywriting stars to collect today. If you’ve made it this far and have any ideas for how to add to this game, or how you could adapt it to your work, please let me know!

Here’s how the 1999 Lonely Planet: Scotland guide describes the town I’m moving to:

In this episode, you’ll learn how to create an e-book from your manuscript, and how to use software to do the “imposition” of your book’s pages so they can be printed out, folded, and stacked into a book.

I just read a Guardian piece about film director Kevin Smith getting removed from a flight for being overweight. Apparently he ‘tweeted’ about the event, and his 1.64 million followers went into a lather on his behalf, forcing the airline to make an awkward apology.

The weight issue aside… 1.64 million followers?! Wow, I’m overwhelmed at having over 800 on Twitter. I’m grateful that so many people can put up with my smatterings of thought and my show-and-tell moments with creative projects, and I hope they get something halfway useful out of it in return, if only some entertainment.

…And I’m hyper-conscious of how I use outlets like Twitter, so I try to stick to some fundamental rules:

• Don’t stray too far off-topic from writing, bookbinding, and publishing. If it’s likely to offend people (like complaining about the Pope’s upcoming trip to the UK, a recent temptation) keep your yap shut. That’s not what people follow me to hear.
• Be nice/don’t be mean. Yeah, I might get in a clever wise-crack, but ultimately I’m the one who winds up looking like a dick.
• Don’t recycle too much of other people’s content. If something’s really fascinating or would be missed, sure, I’ll repost/retweet/rewhatever it, but I know I ‘unfollow’ people who do nothing but root through others’ bins and reuse what they find.
• Don’t be too self-promotional. For every piece of content that asks people to do something for me (like read about me or my work, look at something I’ve made, or consider buying something I’ve made), I have to provide three more that are entertaining just in themselves, or that provide something useful to them.
• Be human/don’t be a show-off. It’s great to have an outlet for cheering about my wins, but I realise from my own experience that the most compelling posts are often those in which someone admits a limitation or a mistake. If all someone ever does is crow about their greatness — well, they don’t really need my attention, because they seem to be able to give themselves plenty. But when we share the whole process, there’s room to learn from each other, and to feel more empathy.

So those are my rules (which, until this moment, have been mostly unconscious), and they seem to be working to keep people interested in what I’m up to, and keep me from annoying them too much.

And these are the operant words for me: what I’m up to.

Facebook is truly social media: for me, it’s about real-world relationships. Twitter is about people who are involved in the same things I am, who are way out in front with them, or who are just starting to learn about them. It’s a “community of interest”.

One of the great features of Twitter is that it breaks down so many barriers: if there’s someone in your field you admire, there’s a good chance they’re on it.

But this is where it gets dicey: When you’ve got 1.64 million followers, you’re not in a conversation anymore, you’re in a star/fanclub arrangement. There are people on Twitter whose work I like, and some of them write very funny or clever things on there, but whenever I’ve wavered and added them, I soon end up unfollowing them, because I find myself in one of those icky, non-reciprocal situations. You know you’ve fallen down that hole when you reply to one of the star’s messages, hoping to catch their attention and feeling miffed when you never get a response (yet another silly Internet waste of emotion I’m better off without, like message board arguments).

So my big, ultimate rule with social media is that I’m only interested in two-way conversations. By that same token, I want to be available to the 800 people who’ve been so generous as to give me their attention. (I just can’t believe they actually stay with it; even odder to me is that so many remain silent.)

Maybe there’s a point of diminishing returns where you can’t actually keep up with it (say, 1.63 million followers). So what then? Do you leave? I’m not sure.

It’s not that I think those people shouldn’t be on Twitter, but… well, I think celebrity entertainment is spiritually radioactive, so I guess I’ll never understand what people get out of it. At that point on Twitter, you’re not conversing, you’re broadcasting.

Hey, it’s wonderful that a broadcast platform is now available to anyone with a computer. And that platform can grow without limits, whether because of empty famousness or meritorious content. As AJ Leibling said, “Freedom of the press is only guaranteed to those who own one.” Well, AJ, now we all own one. But I’m much more interested in the power of the ‘net to deliver real, accessible experiences and conversations than yet more closed, hyper-mediated ones.

There’s a lot of pressure on creative people these days to be a “brand” and to use social media as a marketing tool. We get tons of advice about how to constantly work the system in the hopes of selling more books (or whatever tchotchkes we’re hucking on our sites or Etsy or wherever). On the one hand, it’s brilliant to be able to reach your audience directly. It closes that loop of being understood and appreciated for our work, yet it can become such an obsessive time-sink that we end up spending every moment desperately trying to keep that beach ball of attention in the air — so much so that we neglect to create new work.

It’s a tricky balance, and I haven’t figured it out yet. Case in point: it’s time to turn off the computer and go make dinner… Just as soon as I post a link to this on Twitter.

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I’m a bookbinder, not a scrapbooker, got it?

I’m half-joking here. I rail on scrapbookers because I hate all the lobotomised cutesy-wootsey, yummy mummy stuff that goes along with the production of scrapbooks — some of which are the most Gawd-awful-looking piles of glitter and ribbons and plastic you’ve ever seen in your life.

I don’t want to be mean, but it’s this type of thing: “I stamped with a HEDGEHOG stamp!!! Yes, ME!! I know, IT’S CRAZY!!!!“ that makes me wonder if some folks have fallen off the top of Maslow’s pyramid into some sparkly pink hole of having too much time and nothing important to do.

I call most scrapbook products “creativity for the non-creative” — packaged-up kits you assemble into exactly the thing in the picture on the front of the package. And the sheer amount of stuff you can buy is staggering. On the show Glee, they make fun of the lead character’s wife having a room full of scrapbooking paraphernalia, but then you tune into the shopping channel and see women fawning over acres of these preassembled bits and pieces, referring to each one by its precious name (“The Kidizzlix Flapdazzler”). And if you’re really serious you can get a container for it all about the size of a fridge.

I, on the other hand, am a bookbinder. This is a venerable trade extending back to the beginnings of modern thought and democracy. I craft each book from first principles, stitching, cutting and…

Oh, who am I kidding?

In every art, there’s some phony division between one camp and another, which to outsiders must seem completely arbitrary and capricious.

I’m reminded of the Grade-D-yet-brilliant movie Shakes the Clown, about an alcoholic clown who’s constantly getting into fistfights with mimes: Mimes are just pretentious fakers, you see.

I’ve collected an embarrassing array of scrapbooking tools in my search to create visually compelling books. A stamp to create an interesting text pattern here, a deckle-edge ripper to make torn pages there… And I’m happy with the results…

…But it’s such a slippery slope into that pre-fab creativity.

I suppose it’s like using a computer: it’s just a tool, until you start identifying with the thing, thinking it’s “cool” or better than another machine, or loans you any personal qualities, or that you need the next and the next one to preserve that halo of new wonderfulness. Instead, you remember all the creative possibilities the tool makes possible, then focus on that instead of acquiring the next bit of tat. The tools are a vehicle for content; it’s only vulgar or pointless when the the tools themselves become the focus of the activity.

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This guest post appears here as part of the Drollerie Press Blog Tour.

Who I Am and What I Do
by John B. Rosenman

Hi, I’m John Rosenman. I’m sixty-eight years old, an English professor at Norfolk State University, and I’ve been writing almost my entire life. Altogether, I’ve published fourteen books, with more to follow, plus over 300 short stories in places like Galaxy, Weird Tales, Fangoria (online), Whitley Strieber’s Aliens, Hot Blood, etc. (Check out my site at www.johnrosenman.com). I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and dabble in related areas. My first published novel (The Best Laugh Last, McPherson & Co.) was mainstream and cost me two jobs because of its sensitive racial subject matter. It will be republished in a year or so. My other novels are action-adventure science fiction mixed with romance, bizarre (and I hope fascinating) aliens, and a few cosmic mind-benders. Beyond Those Distant Stars, to take one example, is about a cyborg female who saves humanity from seemingly invincible aliens while trying to find love with an unfaithful pilot. Published by Mundania Press, it just won AllBooks Review Editor’s Choice Award.

I’m a child of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (the 1950s), and in my novels, I try to capture the awesome, mind-stretching wonders of the universe. So in some ways, my SF novels are a bit retro. A common plot is that the main character travels to a distant world and has amazing adventures, often getting involved in an intense romance. In A Senseless Act of Beauty (Blade Publishing), Aaron Okonkwo journeys to a distant, African-type world and gets seduced by a beautiful green alien gal. And that’s only the beginning of his problems.

What I like best about writing is the high I get from it, which is basically indescribable. When it’s clicking, and I’m writing better than ever before, I feel blessed and grateful for what I’m doing and able to do. Another great thing about writing is to find editors and readers who are moved by my vision and actually like my work and what I’m trying to accomplish in it.

But writing isn’t all joy and fulfillment. Sometimes it’s frustrating and demoralizing. Some of my worst experiences with works in progress involve the fact that they fail. No matter how hard I revise, the story just never works. Sometimes it even gets sicker, with more things going wrong with it. This is especially painful when I’m really excited about the premise or concept or make a really good start. The story has promise but for some reason can’t fulfill it. Or to be more honest, I can’t fulfill the story’s promise. Sometimes it’s all just a mystery, as with my short story, “The Great Gumball Machine.” It’s based on memories of my childhood and is steeped in nostalgia. The story should work but disintegrates in mysterious ways about halfway through.

Another bad experience involved my novel, Dax Rigby, War Correspondent. It’s SF on a distant world, and involves a young, charismatic hero. You can find a trailer for it on YouTube and elsewhere, including my website. I work with a writers group and was halfway through the novel when the group grew more critical and my inspiration flagged. There soon came a point where I didn’t know where to take the story plot-wise and otherwise. So I put the novel in mothballs for five months. Fortunately, when I returned to it, the book was reborn, and I (not too modestly) think it’s quite a success.

As for great experiences, I’ve had many. “Rounded With a Sleep,” a story which appeared in Galaxy in Sept./Oct 1994, had a rocky history that was strangely satisfying. It started off as a 3000 word story, swelled to five and six thousand words as I put in more background and local color, then went on a diet from its bloated state and ended at about 3000 words again. But it was much, much better, and to this day, I find its difficult evolution satisfying.

I’ll mention one other great experience. I wrote Inspector of the Cross 22 years ago before I had a computer. It’s about a 3000-year-old elite agent who travels on missions to distant worlds in a state of suspended animation. So everyone ages except him. When I finished the novel, I sent it around. Some publishers came close to accepting it, including Donald A. Wollheim, who critiqued it in a letter. Last summer, I dug the letter and the manuscript out and just started to retype the whole thing into my computer without even reading what I wrote way back when. I find the whole experience liberating and exciting. As I write, new possibilities have occurred to me, new dimensions and plot twists. I can hardly wait to see what I will write tomorrow, and what will occur to me on the next page that I didn’t think of when I was a much younger man.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Inspector of the Cross will be my best book. Even if it’s not, the excitement I get from revisiting old characters and adventures has reminded me of why I started to write in the first place.

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