• iNevitable

    Okay, I’ve been thinking about it, so I’ll post about it: this tablet dealio.

    I really don’t get it. I have a computer for creating content; I have an iPhone for keeping in touch and viewing media on the go. The iPad falls into an uncomfortable netherworld in-between that I guess I’m just not the target audience for… And the intended target audience seems to be “people with unlimited amounts of money for constantly buying stuff from Big Media”.

    I used to be one of those awful Apple zealots when I started computing, and I’d honestly never used a Windows machine. Now I’ve been in both camps, and I have to say I do like using Apple devices. They facilitate creative work (like making a podcast) that it had never occurred to me to do before. But ultimately, all these things are tools; what matters is what you do with them, not which object you’re seen with. (To quote Chuck Palahniuk, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive…”)

    I’m thrilled to find that, facing the unprecedented nuclear blast of iPad hype, I am unmoved, undesiring. It feels like a spiritual win.

    Seeing books on this thing makes me want to rush home and print out a real book. Confession: When I buy e-books, I often print and bind them. What Apple shows in their demo looks like a document, not a book. (That wide line-spacing, for starters, makes my eyes want to wander elsewhere.)

    I know the traditional publishers are looking at these things with $$s/££s in their eyes, and I don’t wish them any ill. If this is the chemo they need, fine. And if this drives more people to read more (and more diverse) fiction, wonderful!

    (And, phew!, they chose the e-book format I’ve already released my novels in.)

    But the art of making books will not go away, and the hospital-room fluorescence of these ‘pages’ can only underscore the pleasures of real paper and artful typography. I don’t think the skills or demand of book designers will be adversely affected by this development, as it’ll be some time yet before these devices rival the deliberate customisation of a typeset page — if ever they could.

    Computer-wise, I used to use Pocket PCs and a small “Ultra-Mobile PC”, so I know the pain of:

    • using stripped-down versions of programs
    • not being able to open files my client sends me while I’m on the road
    • having to maintain more than one computer, and discovering at the coffeeshop that the file I need is at home because I forgot to synchronise

    Nice work, but… I pass.

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  • DIY Book, Episode 13

    In this episode, we look at how to prepare the pages of your novel for printing as a book.

  • Wick

    Last week my partner was offered a job in the north Highlands, and we’ve decided to go. At the end of April, we’ll be moving to a town called Wick (well, technically a royal borough).

    It was a difficult choice to make, but it’s a great opportunity for him, and, aside from wanting to be wherever he is, we’ve had a look around Wick and the surrounding area, and I want to go on this adventure myself and with him. It’s one of those chances that’s more interesting than the alternative of just sticking with what’s known.

    (Talking to my mum this weekend, she asked, “With your brother in Dawson City and you in Wick, I’m starting to get the feeling my boys are trying to get as far away from us as possible!” It’s not true, though!)

    I’ve been a city person my whole adult life, but at this point I like the idea of a smaller place and a simpler life. (Oh, and it’ll be a lot cheaper to live there, which will be a relief.)

    Everyone we spoke to up there was friendly and open; even simple transactions were conversations. While I have lots of friends in Edinburgh (and moving from Canada taught me that you can move but keep your friends), I don’t actually have any ties to the city itself, which, after nine years, is a bit sad.

    It’s scary to contemplate living once more in a place where everyone knows your business — even moreso than growing up in Charlottetown, which is about seven times bigger than Wick — but maybe I’m ready to open my heart, to know and be known by the people around me, rather than slipping efficiently through a city. (Yet with fewer attractions and events taking place there, I also hope to have more time to pursue my creative activities.)

    Edinburgh’s wonderful, beautiful; I’m not knocking it. I just like change, and gaining a new source of input is an exciting idea (I did, after all, get a book out of moving to Embra).

    So, away we go… in a few months. In the meantime, I’m going to make the best of living in this great old city and being close to the friends I’ve made here. And we’ll be sure to have a guest room up there…

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  • On being sweary

    In-between other projects yesterday, I read some articles that were quite passionate.

    The first article was about a lesbian writer and the various publishing folk she’s fired through the years when they made bad suggestions to her, like “toning down” the same-sex content in her books. I thought that was brave, especially when a lot of writers would fall over themselves and do anything to get published.

    (One forum I follow is in the midst of a debate over whether a writer should participate in an anthology now that he knows it will contain work by another author who’s recently been public and vocal about his bigoted opinions on LGBT folk).

    The other article was about the need for environmentalists to give up on hope. The writer has a grim view of things — and, sadly, he wrote this four years ago. I fear we’ve thoroughly proved his point in the time since. But his message isn’t as dark as it sounds.

    In both cases, the writers were unflinching about getting quite sweary in their pieces — and I liked it! I’ve made an effort to not use cuss-words on my site ’cause I know it runs afoul of some people’s work-filters and can cause them trouble (whether adults should be monitored this way is another question, but it remains a fact for some).

    And after it was pointed out to me that doubleZero contained 24 instances of a particular word — none of which I’d really consciously thought about when I included them — I made it an exercise to not use any profanities in The Willies. It wasn’t because I think such words are bad or wrong, but because I was using them lazily, in a way I’d received from things I’d seen. For instance, in a movie scene in which characters go over a waterfall on a raft, they’re pretty much obliged to all say “Sheeeeee-iiiiit!” As much as I don’t want to simply re-write scenes I’ve seen in other forms, I also want to be as conscious and original as possible in my use of language.

    But there’s a time when “bad” words are necessary and good. On the flight home, I watched the political spoof In the Loop, and while I found the story a bit episodic, and I quickly tire of stories in which everyone acts hatefully toward everyone else, two of the characters — both played by Scots — were given such wonderfully clever sweary dialogue that the air just crackled with electricity in every one of their scenes. In real life, I’ve noticed that Scots either swear then immediately apologise or else do it with what I can only describe as a kind of grace.

    We are living through some strange days, witnessing such a nadir in leadership and general bad judgment that I’m happy when someone stands up and spouts a well-needed, unapologetic invective at the stupidity of it all.

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  • A more truthful airline seating plan

    A little something I did at my folks’ kitchen table at the thought of another trans-Atlantic flight. (Click to enlarge.)

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  • Chirp, chirp, gag: A lethal dose of indie arts and crafts?

    This trip to Toronto is falling together easily and naturally, and I’m getting to visit with lots of friends who are still in my life for very good reasons, I’m reminded, as I spend time with them.

    I’ve also been stocking up on bookbinding supplies — dangerous, but it’s raw material for creative work, the one thing in life I’m willing to spend the most on.

    Toronto’s a good place to get these supplies because the city has a very strong DIY culture. Last weekend I went to the One of a Kind fair, a national show that takes place here, along with another fair crammed into St Stephen’s church, and yesterday I made it to the City of Craft event. A lot of other fairs happened this weekend, too, but I couldn’t get to them.

    Funny, I like looking at this stuff, but I’m not inclined to buy it, partly because I wouldn’t know what to do with it, because I’m not the target audience (e.g. for stuffed animals, purses, hats, etc.), and because I don’t have unlimited funds “”yet, as I mentioned, I’ll spend anything on tools that will let me do crafty things.

    Wandering around these events, though, I can’t help but notice that it gets a bit samey after a while. I like it — the silkscreened prints and T-shirts, the handmade cards and books, the ugly-cute stuffed animals, the home-made clothes and accessories, but there’s a definite style to it, lots of it featuring 60s/70s-style mis-registered prints of birds and twigs — and my fear is it’s such a strong and definite style people will get sick of it and ultimately move away from this kind of work.

    That would be a shame, because this movement is the first effective and lasting reaction I’ve seen to a widely felt tiredness with mass commercial culture we have no say in or power over. Indie culture is locally relevant and anyone is allowed to do it. This is an important message, and it would be a shame if that got lost just because people were tired of the particular look it’s taken on.

    I had a great chat with my friend Bert this afternoon over so many coffees that when I met another friend later I realised I was acting completely high. Bert suggested that the current craft culture looks this way because of the craftspeople’s age: It looks like what was around during our childhoods. I’d go one further and suggest that most of us probably haven’t had this much creative permission and activity since then… until now.

    Still, it means Toronto’s going through a very cool period in which a lot of people are stepping forward to take ownership over their local culture and their creative capabilities, and that makes this an exciting place to visit.

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  • Torrents of books

    I’ll soon be posting free, downloadable electronic versions of all my novels on this site. In advance of that, here’s a comment I wrote on indie author/publisher Zoe Winter‘s website (which I copyedited here, ’cause I can’t help myself).

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    I recently discovered that one of my novels had been bundled with a couple of others and made available for download as a bittorrent file.

    Three things:

    1) Quality control.
    Which version are they sending out? I’ve made corrections to my books, and have recently been going back to try and keep the formatting in the e-book versions.

    I submitted my books to a number of sites years ago that did their own conversions, and the prevalent thinking about e-books is “It’s all raw text!”, which isn’t true, completely ignores the informational aspect of typesetting (e.g. I use italics to denote internal monologue — lost in this type of conversion), and conversion often gets line-breaks wrong.

    So the end result looks a mess — and since the biggest criticism of indie work is quality control, I wish I could ensure that people got the best version of the book.

    I want to share my book through Smashwords, ’cause it’s the biggest and best model for e-book distribution going, but they insist that you convert your book through their site, and when I’ve tried with my books (in a variety of formats) it’s done a very, very bad job of it. So I’m not publishing through them until they fix that.

    2) Torrents feel dirty.
    Generally, we use torrents online to get content we’re not supposed to have. So having my content distributed that way just feels like having it stolen, even though I’m willing to give it away. I suppose people swap e-books back and forth, which is great, but torrents seem to commodify it.

    3) What’s it for?
    I’m not sure what my intention is in providing e-books anyway. I don’t write or publish for the money, but it does feel a bit weird to see the stats on my books and see that, wow, neat!, they’ve been downloaded thousands of times from various websites. But”¦ then what?

    I’m not looking for approval or validation or love or any of that. I have that in my life. I’m happy to write stories in a vacuum, but sharing them with others, knowing they’ve occupied that imaginative space with you, is really rewarding.

    Except it doesn’t translate into any kind of social or financial capital I can do anything with. I hear good things from the people who buy and read physical copies of my books, and they spread the word to others. This e-business, though — I can’t tell if it does anything.

    Then there’s the career aspect: As authors we’re constantly being exhorted to do more, pitch and market ourselves, get bigger (usually without any discussion whatsoever about what we’re meant to do with this new-found bigness). There’s an unspoken implication that writers are all supposed to be very driven, ambitious, even aggressive entrepreneurs, too, and that we all, of course, want one thing. But nobody names it, because “rich and famous” is ugly, infantile, and embarrassing.

    As with so many domains in life, it seems the only measures people understand as “success” are celebrity, numbers, and money. That’s not what writing is about — not when you’re in the moment of doing it or reading it — yet it’s how we assess it.

    I’ve recently bought Jeff Vandermeer’s book, Booklife, which I believe explores these questions. I’ll be interested to see where that line of questioning leads me.

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  • Verbal pedantry: Very, that, and actually

    Copywriting note: ‘That’, ‘very’, and ‘actually’ can almost always be cut. I think we say them just to give our speech better meter.

    Very.
    Natalie Goldberg first introduced me to the idea that superlatives are generally unnecessary. Most things in life are or are not a certain way; it’s binary. It’s stronger, she says, to just declare that a thing is [whatever] than to try too hard with emphasis and blow it.

    That.
    ‘That’ can clarify, but usually it just wastes space:

    • “He told me that he was leaving.”
    • “He told me he was leaving.”

    No different, and there’s one less wrinkle for your brain to process.

    Actually.
    Most people just use this word as a beat. Again, it’s the binary thing: Most events in life happen or don’t happen; most things are or are not. Reinforcing their reality doesn’t add anything meaningful.

    “She was actually very angry.”

    Wasn’t she just angry?

    The only place it’s useful is in stating an objection, reversing the idea in question, as in: “Actually, it’s not okay for you to bite me there.”

    Or, I suppose, if you’re expressing disbelief — but, again, I think you can leave the effect up to the reader to interpret.

    “He was four years old. He tied his own shoes.”

    That does the job without us having to underscore that this is exceptional.

    Okay, time to get back to work.

    I’m even copy-editing this silly thing: I just changed “Natalie Goldberg was the one who first introduced me” to “Natalie Goldberg first introduced me”.

    This is the kind of bonsai writing I spent my day doing. I’m grateful to be involved in copywriting, because it’s taught me a great deal about writing — especially the marketing copy, in which you have to question every bit of mental work you ask the reader to do.

    It’s like watching Casablanca versus a modern film: Casablanca sounds like a stage-play that ran for ten years, with every word specially chosen and polished before it made it to the screenplay. Most modern films sound like a couple of people ate pizza, drank beer, said a bunch of stuff back and forth, and just wrote that down.

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  • DIY Book, Episode 12

    A look at the four main publishing options available for getting your book out into the world.

  • The Now Habit

    I have work, but I don’t have a work-day, per se, where I go into an office and sit at a desk for eight hours then go home. I’m a self-employed copywriter with one main client, so I have an editor I video-conference with once a week, sometimes twice, and from time to time I have phone calls with the company’s head of marketing. I love and respect these people, and they seem to really like what I do for them.

    I do my writing for them — which I quite enjoy, since I respect what the company is about, I can work wherever I like, and then I’m free to record my podcast, write and make books, go out and play… It’s a perfect set-up, really.

    But sometimes it’s hard. The work is great, but getting to the work can really put my head into the walnut-crusher. If a day goes by and I haven’t produced anything, I feel guilty about it, which wrecks my free time.

    My tactic up until now has been to make up all kinds of rules for myself, to bully myself into getting stuff done — and that’s often just as fun as it sounds.

    Looking in from the outside at all the stuff I do, I don’t imagine many people would call me a procrastinator, but my tactics for getting work out of myself have often led me to a lot of avoidance and wasted time. I don’t even get to enjoy that time, ’cause I know there’s something else I should be doing.

    Fed up with this crazy cycle, I ordered a book. That’s what I do when I want to learn something: I get a book. (I’ve been buying a lot of books lately; I feel a bout of creative output is coming on, and I think I’m stocking the pond for that.) So after reading reviews about several books on procrastination, I ordered The Now Habit by Neil Fiore.

    As someone who’s a writer, I don’t particularly like my approach as a reader: I read books to get something. With fiction, I want to see how someone does something stylistically. In non-fiction, I usually choose instructional books: I want to be able to understand or do something after reading them. These books usually turn out to be one small idea wrapped up in a lot of pages — sometimes the title alone gives you the whole idea. (I’ve never read Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway because… y’know, I got it.)

    The Now Habit was a pleasant surprise. Not only did it contain a lot of different angles on procrastination and give lots of practical strategies for dealing with it, more importantly, it shifted the whole topic for me. Before I even did a thing, my whole experience of work was transformed.

    My approach to work this past week was entirely different. It was fun!I’m getting more done, but not because I should or I have to, but because I want to and I got a real sense of accomplishment out of it. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve also found great pockets of truly free time that I’m allowed to fully enjoy — like now, hanging out on a Friday afternoon with no guilt, nothing hanging over my head, and with a big project now behind me.

    I won’t try to summarise it here, because others have already done an excellent job of it. I recommend reading the book, though. These summaries are helpful as a reminder, but I don’t think you’d really get the whole impact of the book from them.

    I love making progress, and I love finding things that work. This book is a win on both counts, and I’m grateful for the difference it’s making to my experience of daily work. Today, for instance, was a five-star day. That’ll only make sense to me, but it’s a really good thing and makes me feel like a champ.

    Admittedly, The Now Habit has an awful cover that makes it look like a cross between a generic business book and a hot dog slathered in ketchup and mustard. But it’s good. If you’re in charge of motivating yourself to produce work, I tell you that this book will make a difference for the better.

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