A quick video demonstration of “fan-binding” the pages of a paperback book.

The last few days I’ve been stopping to catch my inner monologue and replace it with something less driven, more compassionate, more useful, more fun. What a joy! And why not? Why does the other monologue feel “realistic”, like I somehow have a responsibility to run that tape of wearying, demanding voices?

This afternoon, having cooked dinner and made pudding for my brother & his family while they drive up from Inverness, I sat on the couch. I lay down and napped for a while. I straightened up and read for a bit. Then”¦ I stopped. And looked.

It felt like waking up a second time. I looked at the plant winding its way up in the corner of the living room””three charmed, skinny wooden snakes with leafy headdresses, and I sunk even deeper into the moment.

This is the other thing I’m remembering in these moments of moments: the feeling of living twice by observing things through the filter of How would I write that?

As I transfer all my notes from last year (in my Gregg shorthand of the time””ack!), typing them out onto 3×5 cards, I look at the task ahead in writing this novel and I know that what I need to succeed at this again (can I say that?) is interiority. I want my inner life back. My attention. My original “Wild Mind”, as Natalie Goldberg calls it””she whose book of the same name first got me started on this writing path.

In that place, writing becomes something completely different. A line from Rumi comes to mind””which I think Natalie quotes in the book:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

It feels like a religious calling, a coming back to faith, because writing is the best thing I’ve found for helping me fully experience this world and feel like I’m engaged in a practice that takes me closer to whatever it’s about.

I’m on a break between deadlinedeadlinewriteitnow! copywriting assignments I’m trying to finish before my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew arrive, and, lost in some web-browsing, I was about to post the following in the comments for a blog article called “Holding self-publishers to account for quality”.

As my cursor hovered over the “Submit” button, I realized I really don’t want to get into any debates on the internet. I hate them, they do nobody good, and long, hard experience has taught me to steer away from that moment where something in me gets hooked and wants to pick a fight. So I closed the tab.

“¦but I did save the text to my clipboard. I might as well bleat my point here on my own little hill where it hurts nobody. (You can infer from the title the gist of the original poster’s thesis.)

You’re judging all self-published work here by a single bad experience. You’re not alone in doing that””it’s the default position: “Self-published work is shoddy.” Yet every traditionally published book I’ve read this year has contained typos””so, as they say, that dog don’t hunt. The argument may once have held, but now it seems to be the nasty refuge of writers with a hope-horse in the traditional publishing race.

What’s apparently being left out of the process on both sides is good editing; perhaps that’s because this is a human skill that hasn’t been””can’t be””commodified the way print production has. With a shrunken budget in either case, it gets skipped.

That said, editing is something I want to invest in for this next book. The price is generally ghastly, which I can understand, given how time-consuming it is, but later down the line I’ll be searching to see if editorial services are turning up in the wake of the indie publishing armada.

Suggestions welcome!

Yesterday my hubby gave a patient back his voice (using a little piece of plastic to attach to a tracheostomy tube, which cost £50 and the NHS fought him about buying). The same day, a young patient of his died unexpectedly.

I’m busy with my copywriting work right now, trying to work on the novel, to learn shorthand, and a do a bunch of other things. It all seems pretty minor in comparison, though. Not unimportant“”this is my calling””but the games we play have very different stakes.

Tonight I finished the research for my fifth novel. Phew!

In a sense, that was the easy part, because there’s no personal risk in doing research. And yet, there’s always this sense of needing to earn the right to write about the topic, which just gets deeper and deeper the more details you discover.

That notion is garbage, though, creatively speaking, because at a certain point — the point I’m at now — I have to take a leap and just make something up.

I’ve started over, and am learning Evans shorthand after spending about two years learning Gregg shorthand.

It’s a lot of work, taking new shapes for sounds and pasting them into my head over old ones, but the groundwork I did in learning Gregg has been extremely helpful. My mum sent me a scan of a page in her Pitman book, and I could immediately spot the similarities and differences: all of these systems are trying to do the same thing.

What I like about Evans, why I’m ultimately choosing it over other systems, is that it’s compact. Here’s a sentence in Gregg, then in Evans:

This vitally important piece of communication is “Do not meddle with the hot metal.”

My handwriting has always been small and controlled, and when I make notes I tend toward what’s called “sketchnoting“. My frustration with Gregg is that it’s so big and loopy that, to my hand, it felt like going down stairs on roller skates. And it didn’t fit into call-out boxes beside illustrations; it wanted to escape off to the other side of the page.

So hello, Evans, and thank you.

The thing I find most confusing about it so far is that Gregg was rigidly phonetic (with diphthongs spelled out in full”””white” becoming “oo-i-te”””tedious!) whereas this sometimes switches and honours the double sounds of Roman letters, so C can be a K-sound or an S-sound. To my Gregg-conditioned mind, that’s heretical. But it has Xs and Ws and Ys, for which I am very grateful.

/end of shorthand geekery. Thank you for your patience.

EDIT: Mom sent me the same phrase in Pitman’s:

Interview with Gregory Crawford, who used the DIY Book process and Kickstarter funding to produce his novel Fall Apart Park.

The reason we went to Inverness this weekend was to buy a car.

Old Car, thank you for not killing us. I tried to drive you, but you were a bugger. Still, you showed us lots of nice stuff.

New Car, welcome to the family. Please don’t kill us. I hope we have lots of nice times together. Because I was there when we got you, somehow I feel more like you belong to me, and am inclined to learn how to ride you.

I still wish there was a better alternative to everyone owning a car and endlessly burning up petrol. But this was a necessity for Craig’s work, because the old car could barely crawl up the 13% incline of the Berridale Brae, which he travels a few times a week, and it had trouble overtaking tractors and such quickly, which is important on our tiny, deadly roads.

Cars, mortgages… this husband is dragging me into western adulthood!

Okay, fine, laugh at me.

In the spirit of Whitman (“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes”), I’ve just bought an e-reader. I picked it up on Amazon, cheap-ish, because I must admit that I’m finding it a strain to read the teeny-tiny type produced when I publish some PDFs as books.

Plus there’s this:

I can’t really be bothered with doing all that binding work over and over, nor trying to carry a few of these in my bag.

We’ll see how I like it when it arrives. I bought the Nook because it can apparently be “rooted” — made into a plain Android device rather than being a dedicated purchasing conduit for one particular shop (in the States).

But I want to stay human and use it as a way to take ideas along with me, not to have a toy that I’ve constantly got my nose in. I struggle enough with that on my computer.

Speaking of which, the haar is lifting, and the fella and I are going for a drive, so I must get a move-on.

A friend e-mailed me last night, telling me of her misgivings about the writers’ retreat she’s committed herself to, especially now that one of its leaders has mentioned she’s looking forward to being a “midwifeâ€.

Stories aren’t precious gossamer things sneezed out by fairies. I think that’s how we start making the work difficult and unapproachable for ourselves.

I’m reading an excellent guide to sitcom writing right now* that does a great job of identifying all the elements of a good comedy. I’m struck by two things:

1. The authors make it all sound really fun, like you just can’t wait to try it. So that’s nothing like having to “birth” something, which is a process that seems more likely to create another generation of self-destructive, alcoholic, self-obsessed writers.
2. I’m reading ‘cause I want to make this book a comedy rather than the Very Serious Thing it could be. Seeing a story as a new-born human life… that’s way too precious to be enjoyable for the reader.

*I had to buy the guide as a stupid Kindle book to get it, but I don’t have a Kindle. I seriously considered getting one because of all the PDFs I’m dealing with lately, but, once again, I decided I really don’t want to try and read from a thing that contains all kinds of books at once that I could flip between — I just want a book to be a single-purpose focusing device. More importantly, I can’t stand the way the screen on these things inverts as it flashes from page to page. Real books don’t flash at you!

I’m not just being a cranky digitalphobe about this. Staring into a piece of tech has a particular effect on my brain that I don’t like, and isn’t compatible with what I want reading to be.

The solution? I spent far too much time figuring out how to crack the file (which I bought but is locked up in digital protection) so I could print it out as a real book. The most difficult thing about it was that the formatting of the e-book is unforgivably dreadful:

No matter how hard I tried, there was just no find-and-replace way to fix it. So I just printed it as-is.

Still, at least I can hold the resulting book in my hands, read it, and focus on it. I would return the Kindle mess on principle because of the careless way this commercial product was made, except that hardly seems fair to do that when I’ve got the benefit of the content; I don’t want to deprive the authors of their deserved income. So I’ll “keep†it.

EDIT: I mentioned the formatting in my Amazon review, and one of the book’s authors contacted me. I offered to help fix the book, and he took me up on it. I do really enjoy that aspect of modern digital living: everyone in the global village lives on the same street, and sometimes you get to talk to some really interesting neighbours.