My partner took this picture of a statue on the grounds of Aberdeen University when we were up there two weekends ago:

The statue is accompanied by a plaque giving credit to the artist and providing some context for interpretation. The last paragraph struck me as a beautiful notion, and my mind keeps returning to it.

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Today I got my stuff partly done. I declare this a triumph. (Self-employment is a form of sorcery fraught with demons.)

This evening I put tags on my money-tree for things I am glad of.

I keep learning about friend’s lives from forwarded Daily Mail articles. For those outside the UK, the Daily Mail is the lowest of the bottom-feeding tabloids. I can’t find attribution for the quote, but journalist Polly Toynbee said, “The Mail’s founder, Lord Northcliffe said his winning formula was to give his readers ‘a daily hate’ — and it does.” If you fear anything in this life — gays, immigrants, whatever — the Mail will give you the fuel to keep you feeling justified in your hatred (while remaining docile, inactive, and manipulable).

First, I learned about one of my best friends getting divorced (in which the muckrakers trawled up every irrelevant fact about him, his wife, and her family for inclusion in the piece). Then, yesterday, I learned about a friend’s suicide.

“Friend” is overstating it: we went to a movie once shortly after he’d moved here to start his life again after breaking up with a television celebrity. He was a nice guy going through a difficult time. He’d messaged me recently, saying he’d been to Africa to do some work there, and it sounded like he was finding his feet again. Apparently not: last week he left a grim message on Facebook and did away with himself.

This event leaves me thinking two things today:

1) Death is weird. You’re typing away in the office, or you’re at home having a meal, then suddenly a zebra prances through the room. What the hell? Stranger, though, is that we continue on as if we hadn’t seen it. Or we’re incapable of processing it (it doesn’t bleep in our barcode reader) so we have to just shake our heads, keep calm and carry on.

2) Gay life is hard. I encountered this guy on a gay dating site (“dating” might also be overstating it). The tabloids are telling one story, the one they’re interested in, about his marriage and divorce with the TV star, but a lot of us in this town have another in our heads, the story of his life since. Things between us were merely friendly, but as I spoke with friends at the time, it turned out he’d approached us all, desperate for contact, even abuse.

Maybe it’s not a gay thing — we all have the potential for periods of mental illness, even if we’re uncomfortable with the idea — but it doesn’t help to have media forms like the Mail fomenting hatred against you, and even within the gay “community” we’re particularly mercenary, dealing with each other as objects that are either useful or not. (Difference and lack of perfection are to be derided, so as to distance ourselves from them.)

I tried to always be empathetic and respectful in my exchanges with others, but, as in this case, the guy and I weren’t going anywhere, so despite our intending to meet again sometime for a friendly drink or a movie, we never did. Now I’m left in this situation, again, of wondering what I should have done, could have done.

Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving, and I am full of thanks that I’ve got my fella and am free to just be in my life and stay away from the scene. I’m grateful to be spared that loneliness, the trying. I’m also grateful for the friends and family who’ve supported me through the years, including a dark period I went through that, thanks to them, turned out differently from this story.

Of course, I’m also aware that at any moment the zebra could barge into the room and wreck the place. But what can you do?

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We need a term for the visual period we’re living in. There’s a definite style emerging, something we’ll recognise when it’s past (and possibly roll our eyes at, but hopefully not), but we don’t have a name for it.

Whatever the over-arching theme is, it has something to do with birds. (Owls and sparrow-y-type things seem to be most popular.)

Like this template for Apple’s Pages word-processor.

…the Twitter logo…

…every other thing for sale on Etsy…

…and shop signage.

Hand-lettered fonts and graphics are everywhere, too, like in the posters for Juno and Away We Go (both of which feature pregnancy; hmm).

I’m not complaining. I like the look of these things, because they look like people made them. In fact, I just redesigned this website ’cause I realised its main design message seemed to be “Look, Hame got a Mac!” I make books by hand, so I figured the site should reflect that hand-made experience better, so I changed it, the main difference being that all the if-you-buy-Mac-software-you’ve-seen-them buttons changed to hand-lettered text (based on the Dr Strangelove titles, actually).

DIY culture is on the rise, and this aesthetic just helps make it look approachable and fun. Is this a movement a response to the glut of consumption foisted on us, that we’re not only sick of but whose consequences we’re now legitimately afraid of?

A few years ago, a Finnish design student named Ulla-Maaria Mutanen beautifully articulated the attractions and benefits of this movement in her Draft Craft Manifesto.

Whatever the motivation, I love that people are hungry for a culture other real people have made, and they’re allowed to make, too.

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I was carrying around a calendar I’d printed out as part of my “get back to paper” scheme, but it was too big to fit in my pocket. I knew it would take some work to create a smaller alternative, so I kept putting it off. Last night, I finally did it, and I’m really happy with the result.

It’s silly to spend an hour making a book like this when I could buy a pocket diary anywhere for £1 or less, but that’s not the point. This calendar is truly mine. Picking it up makes me happy, and as a result I feel compelled to use it.

I’m even tentatively entering some events in shorthand — which I seem to have developed a mania for. But it’s hard to find time to practice properly.

I love my job and the people I work with, but I could make really good use of a paid sabbatical right about now. I would:

• Write the two novels I have in mind.
• Learn all the shorthand “brief forms” and the proper way to form the strokes.
• Do some painting.
• Teach a DIY Book course that would give participants a finished copy of their book, along with the skills to make as many more as they like, a string of ISBNs for their titles, and an e-commerce-capable website.

…And probably a lot of other stuff.

This is probably touchy territory, but I would like maternity leave. There are seven billion of us on the planet and a resources crisis imminent, so I’d like to have paid time off to better myself, as opposed to having a baby.

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The Scottish Poetry Library book fair on Saturday was great. I’m encouraged that there’s such a strong tide of independent publishing finally arriving here, and the art-books I saw displayed there were stunning, too.

The talk I gave seemed to be popular, and hopefully left the audience with a sense of possibility and some practical ideas for “What’s next?” if they want to do this themselves.

I tried not to come across as bitter, ’cause that’s really not how I feel these days as an indie publisher, but there is a lot of bad news to deliver when people start asking questions about publishing from a hopeful position, thinking about themselves and their dreams without having considered the market realities in which publishers operate and think.

Meanwhile, these new possibilities make it truly simple to create a book and get it into the world. All the other considerations about marketing, sales, fame, and all that other industry bumpf is for much later. People make a mistake, I believe, when they put that stuff first, because surely all the satisfaction and stamina we need for our writing careers will come from focusing on what we’re doing and who we’re doing it for rather than what we want to get out of doing it.

It struck me today that, in terms of selling books, this event is less like a farmer’s market and more like a petting zoo. At least people wanted to touch, feel, and look at my books a lot — especially a teeny-tiny one the size of a thumbnail I made for the occasion. Everyone loved that, even though it’s just about useless!

Yesterday my partner Craig took me for a drive to a place called Little Sparta. It’s the garden and home of the late poet and sculptor Ian Hamilton Findlay, who filled the grounds around his home with all kinds of stones and paths, all marked out with beautifully carved words and phrases. The weather was overcast, and the walk up to the house along a road through sheep-fields was quite ‘whiffy’, but it was still a lovely day out.

I’m going out for dinner on Tuesday with Craig, then we’re doing something or another on Friday, ’cause it’s — *gasp!* — our anniversary. Now I’ve seen everything.

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At last, your beloved novel is finished! Here are a few final touches to add before you go on.

I have beside me the 1949 edition of the Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. It has that great, musty smell of an old book.

I’m touch-typing as I write this, which I’m quite proud of. It’s a skill I’ve long wished I had, but until recently assumed I couldn’t pick up at this point in life. “In high school” I’d say, “if you were smart you could were allowed to take Band instead of Typing, so I took Band. Shame then, that as a writer I don’t exactly need to play the clarinet every day, but typing…”

It’s an old story, and now it’s no longer true. Oh, sure, I’m stumbling over my fingers, having to remember to put them on the home-keys, but I’ve picked up a new skill.

This came out of a conversation with my partner’s cousin, in which she said she could type and do shorthand and that this was a real advantage at work. Classic steno-pool skills — how I’d love to have them, I said. I scribbled a little note for myself to look into typing and shorthand, and followed up on it the next day.

I bought a program called KAZ: Keyboard A-Z. It’s unbelievably ugly, and operates like a CD-ROM from about 1996. Its mascot is a horrible cartoon bird. As someone who’s doodled for years, I can’t describe all the reasons I hate this thing, so I’ll provide a picture:

But the program says it can teach you to type in 90 minutes, and it did. I’ve actually got to go back and finish it, ’cause after a certain point I was just typing. (Of course, I forced myself to type properly in my everyday work, which helped a lot, or I’d still be doing that lobster-claw manoeuvre with my right hand.)

So with that success under my belt, I moved on to shorthand. That’s significantly harder, but I am gradually getting it. It’s kind of a weird, antiquated skill to pursue, but there are lots of times when it would be a huge help (taking creative briefs from a phone call, transcribing an interview).

My experience with smelly old books is that they’re wonderful and charming, but if they’re instructive, they’re always a bit “Oh yeah, we’ve learned something better than that since then.” But with these books — which are so cheap to buy online, ’cause there are piles of them just sitting around from the time when these courses were common — contained in them is a neat ability from the past that we’ve lost. Working through the exercises, I wonder why we don’t all write like that instead of in this tedious, convoluted way (which I never thought I’d say, being one of those people who rails against Internet arguments for lazy spelling).

The books I’ve picked up have this wartime and just-post-war feel to them, and learning from them (with drills like “The French will take the trench”) kinda puts you right in that period. I don’t want to naïvely glamourise an unthinkably difficult period in history, but I wonder if I’m not the only person who yearns a bit for that “Make do or mend” philosophy over the present glut of commercial and celebrity culture.

And reading through the sample paragraphs written in shorthand — even re-reading what I’ve written — is such a slow torture that I’m being driven back, back, to sit beside myself at four or five years old. Oh right, there was a time when I didn’t know how to read. That was hard.

I remember it being just as hard later on as I tried to put my thoughts into sentences. It was like trying to walk inside a rubber ball.

It’s kinda nice, though, spending time in my mind with me-at-five, having sense-memory unlock lost little moments from kindergarten and Grade One.

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My folks were here for a visit a few weeks ago. We had a great time together, with the fella driving us all over creation, the parents meeting the parents, and all that. It was a wonderful, beautiful visit, even with some uncomfortable reminders that the years are creeping up on us. I’m trying my damnedest to appreciate my parents for the good, honest, loving, and fun people they are now, to live that second chance the first time around.

For some reason all this ephemerality, the wabi-sabi of it, makes me want to get married. And the fella seems okay with that. Of course, the thought of the logistics of actually doing such a thing knocks the notion squarely back into the “Someday” closet

So I’ve neglected my blog for a while. Big deal, eh? Living has kept me busy, along with making preparations for my participation in the Scottish Poetry Library’s small press fair, “By Leaves We Live”. If you’re in Edinburgh, please come by on Saturday, say hi, and have a look over the stuff I create. I’ll also be giving a talk about indie publishing.

I still have another DIY Book episode to produce, and then the first section of the three-part process will be complete. At long f*ing last, I’ve managed to getthe podcast up on iTunes properly so all the episodes are shown and can be downloaded. It’s been a frustrating process, and all the “It’s here… now it’s there… now it’s broken” has surely shaken off some listeners, which I regret.

The real momentum behind the thing will probably come when the whole process (write, make, and sell your book) is outlined in however many episodes that takes. That’ll be a while, but it’s neat to look back and realise that I’ve nearly completed the first part, and I didn’t know how I was going to do that.

Progress is most encouraging.

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The main intention of this entry was just to start writing here again, to take the blog off the “Obligation” shelf and do it just for fun. I realise shorthand, typing, and the transitory nature of life probably don’t come across sounding all that fun. Ah well.

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Serialise Like the Dickens. Your novel is underway, and sharing your work in progress can be a great way to keep it alive. But beware the lurking murderers!

In this episode, we look at ways to outsmart mental obstacles and get down to writing your novel.