I signed up for Facebook at the suggestion of The Strategic Coach’s web programmer, who wanted me to check it out for a project we’re doing. It’s a “social networking” website — basically people chatting to groups of friends, based on a shared background. I’ve found ones for Dalhousie University’s theatre department, Charlottetown Rural High School, and even Forest Glade, my public school, which is still running and has a horrible circa-1997 website. Forest Glade, the subdivision (I really did grow up in “The Wonder Years”), also has a group of its own.

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Facebook started off as a college project, so the members tend to be young; I’ve not found anyone from Dal, the Rural, or Forest Glade of my generation yet. But in the subdivision’s group, someone posted pictures of the urban ruins of the old Easttown Plaza. This was where my family went grocery shopping at the N&D. The poster also included a picture of the abandoned Woolco.

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I remember going to that Woolco, and Mom buying me a treat one day because I’d been a good boy while we were shopping. It was a pivotal moment, actually, which several friends will recognise, because this has become a story in my life called “The Puppy Puzzle”. It goes like this:

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When I was about four, Mom (“Mommy” in those days) and I went out shopping. We were out for a long time, but I was quiet and well-behaved. So as we passed a display piled high with boxes of puzzles, Mom stopped and told me I could have any puzzle I wanted. Wow!

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I agonised over the decision — which one? I finally narrowed it down to two: One box featured a oil-painting illustration of a cartoon puppy, grey, with huge loving eyes (very Seventies, likely also the era of the “crying clown” paintings). The other box, though, had three puzzles in it. They were solid colours — red, yellow, blue — making up a sailboat, a drum, and a soldier. I decided that it made more sense to get the one with more puzzles in it.

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When we got home, I ran with my box of puzzles down to the “crawlspace” in our basement (a weird storage area that grown-ups would bump their heads in, but made for a great play-area for my brother and I, and was a frighteningly dark place for sleepovers). I sat on the old green patterned rug that was laid over the bumpy concrete, and I took out my puzzles. I opened the box, looked inside, and I cried: I wanted the puppy puzzle.

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This stuck with me, and I trust you to infer the lesson I took from it. I’m pretty convinced this experience has informed a lot of my subsequent decisions in life.

I went to a music cabaret tonight which was supposed to start at 7, and no one was there. I sat in the pub, read my book — the first few chapters of George Monbiot’s Heat, which states that our carbon emissions actually need to be reduced by 90% for us to avert the catastrophe caused by the “positive feedback” loop that a rise of just two degrees will likely trigger.

I had a pint.

After a while, the bartender turned the volume up on the football, making reading impossible, so I necked the pint, packed up, and went downstairs, where a few people were straggling in, but nothing was really set up.

I went back home.

I wasn’t going to sit with three or four people I didn’t know trying to ingratiate myself while they assembled their instruments, or sit in a corner trying not to look like a killer.

This afternoon I had a test-call with the assistant of someone I’m going to interview for a Strategic Coach article. I used SkypeOut to call her and it was utter rubbish. Normal Skype is about 85% successful when I talk to my mum or my editor, but this was just awful. As I wrote to Skype’s support desk, “I felt like Alexander Graham Bell calling to Mr Watson, except Watson was being filtered through ‘The Matrix’.” It was embarrassing.

These two experiences underscored something odd about me: I’m comfortable standing up in front of a large audience and presenting to them, but I get shy about making phone calls or showing up alone at other people’s events (which I normally do because my friends here generally aren’t into the stuff I am).

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Today I ordered a new OS for my [#$%ing] computer as well as office software. I now own a legal copy of almost everything I use. This has been important to me for a while, and I’m almost there.

I don’t normally do the meta-filter, hyperlink thing, but this is a scathing, wonderful article that rips the duodenum out of the tech industry.

It resonates with me, because I use a lot of tech in my daily life, and I follow what’s happening, particularly in mobile computing. I’m thrilled because a year later I don’t want to replace my Pocket PC. But a year is pathetic. The next OS is already out, and I know darn well there will be no upgrade path. I don’t care: this thing appeals to me more than the new models, which all have phones integrated into them, so they have teeny-tiny screens, because everyone’s thinking “phone-toy” rather than “computer you can do work on.”

Still, I was up late last night fixing the notification queue in the registry on my device because alarms weren’t going off. That’s pathetic in a machine whose first purpose is being an organiser.

I feel bad even criticising this thing, first because it’s generally so useful (I’m able to write this blog entry in bed), but also because I’ve been duped into this stupid machismo about having the best system, where any flaw in our gear is parlayed out into a failing of our identity, and conversations about the machines we own become indecipherable from ad hominem attacks.

I find myself drifting back to pen and paper lately, like the book I made for planning the novel. But sometimes the gadgets are indispensible tools, like when I woke up just now with four Very Big Ideas about the book, and could just record them into this in the darkm or last night, when I was able to produce a copy of my novel at home in my bedroom. I’ll also be listening to music on this later while I do my morning focusing (’cause the Shuffle is full of random loud “walkin’ choons”, so I keep my trippy pre-sleep/morning music on a separate device).

I’m going to go finish reading that article now. The writer’s tone strikes me as a bit ungratefully vicious, but I get that he feels burned by how much of his time and attention these things have consumed. And there’s something refreshing about someone telling his truth, consequences be damned.

So I’ve been bingeing on Internet TV in my spare time. The latest indulgence has been Heroes, a superheroey drama-thing.

I’m mostly really enjoying it. One thing that’s starting to get under my skin with television shows with an objective — you know, not the “genie back in the bottle” sitcom plots, but the programs with a long story arc — is the sheer amount of stalling. It’s like there’s a two-hour movie in there that’s been cereal-fillered out to a full season. (I’ve never even tried Lost because I’ve heard too much about the creators making it up as they go along, which requires constantly redefining things and playing tricks on what’s been established.)

I guess that’s why I’m drawn to writing novels — single, stand-alone novels — and not television writing. God forbid I should ever write something then have to bring the characters back onstage for an encore. I’m laughing as I write this, sitting on my bed, thinking about bringing back Fix and Julie, Hugh and Simon, or Stefan. I’d love to see them again, I really would. But it wouldn’t be right.

I just bought carbon credits to offset the trip my folks and I are taking to Barcelona in April. Now, I know that doesn’t actually undo the air travel, but I felt compelled to do something. Just saying “Ah, f**ckit” isn’t sufficient anymore.

Yesterday, I finished The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. That was a chewy read — the most chemistry and biology I’ve encountered since high school. And even though most of it washed over me, I do find that I’m better able to understand the issues in each day’s news items about climate change.

This is the trick: how does one get active without getting all activist? In a world geared to the cult of individual freedom, where the word “enough” is anathema, almost unpatriotic, what do I do with this compulsion to do right? I feel it driving me, like it’s ingrained. My parents must have hammered this message in from an early age, about being good and thinking of others, ’cause it just doesn’t switch off. I can’t just do what I want if I know it’ll have an impact on other people — and these days it’s impossible not to be aware of the effects of every little action.

Guilt is a crappy motivator. It may work for short spells, but people will inevitably react against such heaviness, because we just want to live, not be forever negotiating our every move. And it’s not like this change has to be difficult; what I read yesterday convinced me that it can be painless and ultimately profitable, but there’s just so much inertia and vested interest at the personal, corporate, and political levels making it difficult. Whatever entrepreneuring person gets in there and makes this cool, fun, and compelling has a big future ahead of him or her — like my friend Fidel, who has been negotiating with the organisers of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, showing them how smart buildings made with environmentally-sound materials can be safer for the construction workers, less expensive to build and maintain, and be the paragon of aesthetic appeal — in other words, no compromises, so no excuses other than habit for avoiding the opportunity.

And hopefully “cool” will be why we change these things, not because shorelines and countries get washed away or completely dessicated as we move into a state of emergency.

I really, really don’t want my book to be annoying. Where is the funny in this?

Since when was “dude” an appropriate honourific to use in business communication? Okay, the “business communication” I’m referring to here is spam, so perhaps I’m being too picky. But before someone insults my genitals, offers me a mortgage in the U.S., or tells me how I can get rich by having a university degree*, I want him to call me “Sir”.

*But I have a university degree. Why am I not rich? The last time I got one of those “a degree will get you $30-40,000 extra a year” messages, I forwarded it to Magda in payroll. She laughed.

I’m in hibernation mode lately, hair growing out of my face, not wanting to leave the house because I feel like I should be working constantly on the book. But you know, there are some things you feel in your gut you should do — not social obligations, but paths that you know are the right ones to take, the avoidance of which will mean an irretrievable loss (loss of the chance to do good, loss of an opportunity, etc.). I’m learning that I should follow these instincts.

This evening was such an occasion. I worked late into the afternoon (having fun writing a Coach article at a café), then had a rushed dinner and had to take a cab, but I knew that bailing out was not an option.

The event was a talk by two presenters, Bob Cant and Ann Marriot, as part of the LGBT History Month here in Scotland, sponsored by Word*Power Bookshop. I was compelled by stories they shared from both the personal and political realms about the evolution of rights for same-sex-o-philes in this country.

None of the other audience members seemed to want to speak afterwards, so I jumped in to ask questions of the presenters. They asked me what I did, so who was I not to tell them? And that led to some interest in what I do, and talk about publishing, blah blah blah. (Like my dear mither, I was conscious of not wanting to dominate the conversation, but neither was I going to give up the opportunity to connect with like-minded people just to be polite.)

So afterward I gave Ms Marriott my book (because I always carry a copy now), gave an audience member my e-mail address because he said he was looking for something to read (oh, how I love those words), then talked with Elaine, the bookshop’s owner about doing some workshops in her new space. (She’s just expanded into the building next door.)

Yay me! Being a public persona does not come naturally to me, but I’m finding find there are ways to get into it that feel authentic and non-icky.

Tonight was Writing Night, and my task was to read three chapters of The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery. In what I’ve read so far, Flannery went back to the beginning of life on Earth and explained how the great airy ocean that is the atmosphere has changed radically, often killing off as much as 90% of the species living at the time. We have the pleasure of living in the Holocene Era, culminating in “The Long Summer” over the past 150 years. Apparently we’ve had it uncommonly good for a long time, and that might be about to change because of the amount of carbon our species has released into the atmosphere over the last 8,000 years, first by burning trees, then coal, then hydrocarbons.

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In describing all this, Flannery explains a lot of science related to the atmosphere and chemistry. He does it well, but… Zzzzz. Phytoplankton — I mean, how can you get excited about those? Okay, they’re why we have petrol, but still, there’s no story there.

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I’ve got a niggling feeling that I should be writing, or at least outlining, but my ‘over-sense’ of the project is the knowledge that it’s really not time for that. I need to do my homework on the topic and find which part of it resonates and would make for a good story. What’s fun is that I’ve already ‘met’ two of the characters. I’m happy that the lead in this one is different to Fix, Hugh, and Stefan. He’s a bit of a smart-arse, and less nice. His best friend (though neither of them likes the other) is a pill, too — hopefully in a fun way. (I hate stories in which characters do nothing but suffer.) She’s my cipher for that annoying tone that often goes along with discussion of climate change.

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So I read my three chapters of The Weather Makers. I was also supposed to come up with one solid story element, which turned out to be an idea of where the character is from and where he’s living now. With this book, I’m not setting it in a specific place. That frees me from attempting to understand and express Scotland while wrangling with this huge topic. And I get to make up stuff, which is ultimately what this is about.

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I don’t know where I get this idea, but there’s supposed to be something secret about writing a book. Still, it’s nice to share the raw rudiments of this thing, even if they’re not so pretty.

I just finished making a book for myself. It’s the workbook I’m going to use to outline my next novel.

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p>I’m a big fan of processes, and as I mentioned, this time around I’m documenting everything I’m doing so that others can use it as a template for doing it themselves:

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p>The funny thing here being, of course, that at this early stage I’m worrying that the story isn’t ever going to come together. But that’s just worry, which is stupid.

So here I am, eating leftover chilli, watching Battlestar Galactica over the ‘net, and suddenly ‘Boomer’ is talking to my old theatre school classmate Eileen:

(*shakes head to clear the cognitive dissonance*)

(*giggles*)

Much of the women’s time in theatre school was spent learning how to wear period dresses and carry themselves with peerless deportment. And now Eileen’s toting a laser rifle on a remote planet.

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p>Life is fun.