In doing the rounds today of my various bookmarked RSS feeds, I came across one post in which gave a “happiness quote from Virginia Woolf”.

Virginia Woolf? As in “walked into a river with stones in her pockets to drown herself” Virginia Woolf? She would not my first choice of sources for happiness quotations!

What’s next? Marksmanship with Hemingway? Cooking with Plath?

This brings me round to the topic of blogging. Having joined the vast hordes of sheeple who own iPhones, I’ve now got a half-dozen different ways to stay connected to friends and strangers around the globe. I’m “Hamish MacDonald” on Facebook, “hamishmacdonald” on Twitter, and so on.

But what to say? It turns out that the minutiae of others’ lives are actually rather compelling. It’s nice to know what my friends are up to and where they’re up to it. Personally, I spent the weekend indoors, making books for the small press fair on the 27th, getting little chores done, and generally trying to stanch the flow of money from the financial sucking chest wound that was August. (But fun, unlike a sucking chest wound.) So my GPS co-ordinates really didn’t change much. And how much “I’m eating popcorn” and “I’m eating popcorn again” do you need?

Time to get out more!

Yesterday I went to my optician’s. I’ve been getting notices telling me it’s time to have my eyes tested, and I know very well it’s just a ploy to tempt me into buying new glasses, but I like mine. So I just booked an eye test, and while I was there I asked one of the assistants there if she could look at my specs, maybe straighten them out, since they sometimes sit funny and make me feel cross-eyed.

The assistant went away, fiddled with them for a bit, then came back and handed them to me. She’d tweaked the frames but also replaced the hard plastic nose-rests with silicone ones. Ahhh! So much more comfortable, and now they don’t slip down my nose. (I’d got into the habit of constantly giving the world the finger as I made that geeky gesture to push them back up). Thank you, Glasses Lady!

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In other news, I’ve got a Big Birthday this month — I’m turning 40 — and I also want to properly launch my new novel, Finitude. So stay tuned for details about both events

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If you’re a Facebook user, check out the Facebook group I just created for Finitude. I’ve posted a link there (and only there) to the first chapter of the book.

My first goal for the book is to have ten fans. Wanna join the group and be my Number One Fan? This will mean that later you can strap me to a bed and break my ankles.

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“¦across the hall. Patrick and I are switching rooms: he’s very good at sleeping, I’m rubbish at it, and the neighbours are running some kind of hyperactive/hypercranky toddler experimental farm in their living room these days.

My contact details will remain the same

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Meanwhile, I’m working on this website in dribs and drabs. It’s mostly-functional, but there are still some tweaks to do.

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Quote of the Day:
“Without art we are just talking meat.”
— artist Bob and Roberta Smith

The ‘Zine and Small Press Fair this weekend was a big success. I met lots of fun and talented people, and I managed to sell out of the copies of my new book that I’d made for the event.

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ISBN, get it? My ISBNs came in today, so I could finalise my interim cover design and print out a bunch of copies of the new book.

I’ve been working like a dog this week, doing work-work, finishing a freelance gig, and producing things to show at the Edinburgh ‘Zine and Small Press Fair, which is tomorrow from 12-5 at the Forest Cafe, here.

Here’s the pile o’ swag I made this week or had on hand:

Funny, one of my goals last year was to show a table full of stuff. Goals have a way of getting achieved without always consciously trying for them.

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In a bookshop today I saw a new section: Yes, “Painful Lives” is now a category of biographical books, because apparently schadenfreude is the fuel on which our culture now runs. I guess reading a book about a boy named “Thing” who grew up in a cupboard (and didn’t become a boy wizard, but instead managed to snag a literary agent) offers some sick kind of comfort.

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I’m feeling mildly better now. I’ve got this ‘zine and small press fair that I’m getting ready for, and yesterday not only did I not have a bunch of elements I need (like a cover for my new book), I was also not happy with how the binding of my old books was turning out.

I wanted to have plenty of copies on-hand, but I’m out of practice with that kind of perfect-binding. The pages were coming out crooked, the glue was leaking over the edges or not covering the whole spine, and in one book I’d glued in a section upside-down, so the whole thing was waste (even as a novelty; it would not be fun to try and read it that way).

I made another copy of the last book , not ’cause I needed to for numbers, but because I needed to for myself. I just finished it, and it turned out perfectly. Phew.

I also wandered around town this afternoon looking for ideas for the cover of Finitude. I ended up buying a book about handwritten typefaces because I like that look and it’s what I want to use for this project. I’m just not practiced at doing them, and am still not entirely clear what I want to convey with this cover. Something like “Yeah, disaster story, but quirky disaster story that doesn’t take itself too seriously”. So I want handwriting that’s chunky, squirrelly, squiggly. I picked up some type-B calligraphy nibs to practice with. I haven’t used those since I was a kid!

But I still haven’t received my ISBNs, so I can’t finish the inside or the cover of the book anyway.

I’m also going to nuke this website and start over. Watch this space.

Since starting to use WordPress to power my blog, I’ve realised it’s the perfect engine to create a website to which I can dynamically add content, but that means moving the whole thing out of the Blog folder and up to the top level. Starting over, in other words.

The one big roadblock was not wanting to re-do my webstore, ’cause that was a pain in the butt. But I found a commercial add-in for WordPress that’ll let me post new store items just like blog posts, and do payments through PayPal just as before. Yay!

Much as I want to redo the site now, I’m not ready. For one, I don’t have a design. I’m going to use a template this time and just customise it a little, ’cause putting my buttons and other page elements into WordPress was brain surgery.

I also want to get new pictures done (in a studio, with a neutral background and lighting that won’t give me a Klingon forehead, culminating in a standard all-purpose author-shot). But I don’t know where to get that done, especially given the fact that I want to re-use the picture all over the place. I’m open to referrals here.

Basically, I’ve had this panic-attack feeling because in my world I have to do all this, like, today. It’s false pressure, and I need to stop it.

I’ve actually contacted people about my photos and about a front cover illustration; now I just have to wait and see if they respond, and come up with interim designs.

After writing articles aimed at entrepreneurs for years, telling them about the virtues of delegation, not doing everything yourself, and using others’ talents to augment your own, I still find myself being what Strategic Coach calls a “Rugged Individualist”.

I suppose as a creative person who can do a lot of things, I feel like I’m failing if I don’t do everything. But I really have no ambitions about some of this stuff, and I know other people are better at them. It’s just difficult to know whose talents would be the right fit and where to find them. Oh yeah, and then there’s the matter of not being able to demand stuff right now. Paying people actually doesn’t bother me. I spend money on worse things. In fact, I think there’s nothing I’d rather spend money on than talent. Way better than Pringles!

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Okay, I wasn’t aiming to launch Finitude until September. Life had other plans.

I just discovered that this coming Saturday (26 July) is the Edinburgh ‘Zine and Small Press Fair at The Forest Cafe. I’ve booked a table, and I’ll be there with my blank books, novels, and preview copies of Finitude!

You can read more about the event on the Forest website, or join the Facebook group for the event.

Okay, it wasn’t Nessie. It was an emu.

Let me explain.

I went to Inverness this weekend with my mate Mark to visit his old choir friend Pamela and her partner Neil. It’s no big surprise when friends of friends strike you as people you’d be happy to be friends with, too. Still, it’s always nice when it happens, and this weekend was a great example of it. Much fun! I took a few pictures, which are posted here (I don’t make an appearance):

I like going to touristy things here with native Scots. This weekend’s plans fell together spontaneously — the best kind of plans — and one of our stops was at the Loch Ness Monster information centre. It’s well-presented, and by the time you’ve gone through it, you’d be an idiot to still believe that there’s any possibility of a plesiosaur living in that lake. Of course, they finish with the words “But you be the judge”, then you exit into the gift shop, where you’re welcome buy as much Nessie paraphernalia as you can carry. The presentation is a bit like having a Richard Dawkins centre in the middle of Vatican City.

One of our other stops (before the de rigeur trip to the Black Isle Brewery) was to a petting zoo. Of course, it was my idea, and of course I got to see some goats. They had lots of other animals there, like deer, meercats, raccoons, bunnies, llamas, wallabies, birds of all sorts, and”¦ emus.

Vicious attack emus!

Neil bought us bags of generic animal feed (beige pellets, raisin-ish lumps, and corn flake bits), which, strangely, everything in the place liked to eat (except the wallabies, who were very standoffish).

I wasn’t sure how to feed the emus — their heads rose up and down just like the marionette one I had as a child, but they featured all-too-real dinosaurish beaks. I didn’t want one of those anywhere near my hand. So I moved my hand this way and that, trying to figure out how to hold it, but then one of the giant birds thrust its head forward, right into the paper bag of feed and through the other side, where it bit my finger. I’m told the whole bag went up into the air and I caught it again before it spilled. That was reflexes, ’cause I was focused on the fact that I’d just been nipped by something that looked like it should be extinct.

Still, the weekend was a braw Highland fling, as Mark and I called the road trip. Now I’m back home, into my work, which this evening involves setting out my next steps for the book.

I’ve had some really sweet comments from people lately who’ve said they got something from the self-publishing experiences I’ve shared here and elsewhere, so I’ve decided to show my homework as I learn and try new things with this book.

Step One: I just filled out an application form for a string of ten ISBN numbers and dropped it in the postbox! In the UK, this is where to get your ISBNs — the product catalogue numbers which allow retailers to find and order books.

I like the idea of having nine other books to write.

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