My fan and internet friend Danny Bloom sent me a link to an interview he did about his latest passion: the difference between on-screen reading and reading from books.

Someone who works in technology wrote him and said he was fighting a losing battle, that paper is dead (though Danny isn't saying we shouldn't read on-screen, he's just calling for someone, somewhere to give a proper scientific look and see if this affects our brains differently and whether we're okay with this shift in cognition). Here's what I wrote to Danny:

My partner watched An Inconvenient Truth last night. In it, Gore quotes someone as saying something along the lines of "It's difficult to get a man to see sense when his income depends on him not seeing it."

I've got a stack of e-books in my valise, printed out as real books, because I read real books differently — as more valuable, notable, lasting, and memorable than electronic information. Not to mention all those other factors like being able to feel your progress through the work and know how much is remaining, and it being so much easier on the eyes, and doing different things in the brain as you said in the article.

Sometimes I do feel a pang of guilt when I realise that the paper I'm using — even the recycled paper — had to come from somewhere, and putting the trimmings in the recycling doesn't mean they magically turn into new paper with zero energy cost... But still... Books are nice. As that other article sent me said so beautifully, books are a perfect technology. Computer devices are still far from perfect.

I finished making these two books last night. What piece of electronic gear — even the iPad — will ever feel the same as opening a fresh new book? The iPad is a space already filled with demands, tentacles pulling you away to other people's ideas and commercial intentions for you, whereas a blank book is your own, private, infinite imaginal space.

My friend Lisa wrote a post this morning about coming up with an elevator speech — a short description you can share in the time it takes to move between floors in a lift — to describe her work as an artist and creativity coach.

That's funny: I'd just read another post that said we shouldn't use elevator speeches. I found the anti-elevator-speech article while hopscotching from a link in a tweet that was a retweet then following a link on a site... one of those WWILF ("What Was I Looking For?") episodes.

Okay, I have to admit that my first reaction was...

(My author photo sucks, so I shouldn't talk.)

Then I read the piece and took the point he was making: We should have genuine conversations with people, because nobody likes giving or hearing a canned litany.

Still, people do ask us creative folk "What do you do?" and it can be difficult to give an answer. Despite the advice to the contrary, I think it does help to find a concise and compelling way to talk about it that saves us trying to convey the entirety of the work or give an experience of it on the spot, which is pretty much impossible to do in those situations.

The question I get the most is "What kind of books do you write?" And the answer 99% of people are expecting is a genre category, because that's what the corporate marketplace has reduced literature to. The problem is, I don't write "horror" or "romance" or any other potted type of story.

I'm overhauling my whole approach to self-promotion right now, and in the meantime, to spare myself the agony, and to give people a taste of "Oh, a tiny handmade thing; this is possible?", I've created a little leave-behind catalogue and FAQ for my books:

The big challenge, I find, with most of the advice about marketing and promotion is that it's aimed at people who sell a product or service. So we're told: "What do you do? Who does it help, and how?", or, "What do you sell? How is it useful? In what situation?"

Of course, if your answer is "A dance" or "A novel", or "A painting", it's pretty difficult to quantify the magic of the received experience — particularly when only certain people will perceive and connect with that magic (get lost in your book, be moved by the dance, connect with the painting, &c).

Oscar Wilde said that art must be useless; if it's bent to a purpose, it's no longer art. Yet we artists live in a market-driven world and have to justify our place in it. I suppose this stops us from crawling completely into our own navels — though I think anyone who's worried about being too self-absorbed probably shouldn't be worrying. In fact, most of us could probably go further and be more daring.

I dunno. I'm still going to advise authors to come up with an elevator speech, because having one helps keep the book focused while we're writing it, and afterward helps potential readers find a starting place in understanding the book and whether it's for them.

I just replied to an e-mail from someone who follows DIY Book, and, I have to say, has really run with the idea. I'm touched, kinda proud, and am impressed with what he's making. (He's got a shop on Etsy.)

He asked me about promotion — an issue that's standing right in the middle of the road in front of me. After a wonderful visit with my folks, I'm trying to gather my energies and figure out what's next, and that all came out in my reply to him — which I'm sharing here, 'cause the letter finally gave me a chance to articulate this for myself:

------------------------------

Marketing is my great bugbear. Oh yeah, I can make the stuff available and present it well -- I'm happy about those skills. But communicating about it, having conversations in which I close the sale, doing successful promotion on the web — that's where I suck.

I'm actually in a space, though, where I'm going headlong into this stuff 'cause I want to beat it. No, not "beat", transform. There's no enemy out there or anyone holding me back; it's about 87% just stuff in my head that holds me back. I don't want to be gross, I don't want to pretend that my work is for everyone 'cause it's got some gay in it, and it's all imaginative and stuff, and they're not serious. (Just sent a tweet out asking people if they actually care about that.)

So I've bought an online course about "non-icky promotion" and another one about writing articles, and I'm really going into this question, trying to figure out what my approach is — and, on a deeper level, figure out exactly what I'm doing in writing fiction and being creative in the first place, what my intention is. (Though I suspect that it's because it's in my DNA, my constitution, so it's not like it's a choice.)

In the meantime, I created a tiny catalogue with order/contact information that I can leave with people when we have The Conversation ("Oh, what kind of books do you write?") That way they get a taste of what I do, and I get to dodge the gross sales stuff. (Though I do understand the value of actually putting the question to someone and asking them to buy — closing the sale — because without that they will happily drift off without buying anything in most cases.)

So that's one idea for the book you're talking about, creating a small, throwaway promotional thing, 'cause experience has taught me that review copies are a waste of time and energy. Even indie people, friends of friends who said they'd read it and write something, people who know you made it yourself, still don't ever get around to reading them. Magazines, newspapers, agent — same thing. Total waste. Better to focus on readers.

The other piece of advice, albeit bog-standard advice, would be — if the book has a specific angle to it, something a particular group of people are interested or involved in — to target them online, at meetings about that subject, and so on.

Oh, and a third thing: Readings and in-person events are where I've sold the most stuff. There's something about the force of someone's presence that gets past the hesitation to buy. On the next step down are situations where people can actually handle the book, and the bottom is online, where they're trying to make a decision based on a JPEG and some copy.

So that's what I know now.

I just removed the blank hardcover books from the shop on my website. You can blame:

a) My crap photography, combined with my a mediocre phone camera, which made the books look junky. That doesn't reflect how I feel about them nor how people respond to them in person.

b) The experience is missing. The whole thing about handmade books is touching them, picking them up in your hand, and feeling the gravitational pull of the blank pages. They want your thoughts, your words, your scribbles and doodles! A JPEG does not achieve these things.

c) The pricing is impossible to get right. I make these by hand, and they're all different. The time and thought that takes can't be justified in a competitive price, nor do I want to slave to compete with the price of the Indonesian journals Paperchase.

d) It's not my business. The future I want to build is about writing and sharing more fiction. I love making these books and showing other people how to do that, and I do like how people react to them at book shows, but I think it may be a distraction to have them here.

I dunno. It's just something I'm trying. If I can get pictures that look better, I may reverse this decision. And maybe as a 'proof of concept' about the hardcovers ('cause I do want to encourage people that they can make those, too, if they want), I should make a few limited edition hardbacks of my novels.

Hardcovers are more complicated to make, but there's also the perception of increased value with them, so at least I can bump up the price some — and have fun making them.

Speaking of signature-bound, imposed book-blocks (we just were, honestly), I've been writing back and forth with the amazing Antonio from SintraWorks, who make PDF Clerk Pro, the program I use to do the imposition of my books (rearranging the pages so they'll print in the right order). I'm helping him test out a new product, and all I'll say is that this is going to be a really big help for people who want to produce their own books but find imposition programs confusing and cumbersome. The test version is already very helpful — as is Antonio; there is nothing like a developer who communicates and responds — but the final version is sure to be great.

I got a letter from someone in response to "DIY Book" — a young guy who's making some really lovely little books. He's talented, and right now the world isn't exactly heaping rewards on his head, 'cause I gather he's not so far into the game of "find out who'll will pay me to be me".

This reminded me of my early twenties in Toronto, which was a time full of earnestness and art and discovery and... difficulty. Here's how I described to him the path from there to here:

------------------------------

For a time in Toronto I sold greeting cards I'd made by hand. I'd left acting some time before and couldn't stomach any more waitering.

I hand-made the paper for the cards with a blender in the kitchen (I lived with my best friend, who was tolerant of the splashes on the walls). Then I cut out a window and stuck in little cartoons I'd drawn. It was do that or go on welfare, and one visit to that spirit-crushing office with all their humiliating questions was enough to convince me to go it alone and live by my abilities.

That kept me going for a few months until the next thing presented itself -- working with computers, since friends had chipped in to buy me one to help me reproduce my cartoons for the cards, and I discovered I had a knack for making computers do stuff.

That led to me doing graphic design, which led to me being able to design my first book and to the multimedia job that transformed into a job as a full-time copywriter.

And here I am, twelve years later, very happy, and making a good living.

So you never know.

I really do intend to stick to the plan I talked about... at some point. But not now, evidently.

The book-plough turned out to not work for paperbacks. The hot-glue on the spine dulled the plough's blade after one book, and the distributor confirmed that it can definitely only work on paper. (I know this now, after I spent an hour this morning cutting through two sides of a single paperback, sweating over the thing like a Viking rowing in the bowels of a ship.)

So that's... not good. It means I can't produce my novels, which is kind of the point of this whole endeavour. So this morning, when it became apparent that this lovely-looking piece of romantic, historical bookbinding gear was not fit for my purposes, I went online and ordered a new guillotine — one that isn't a Chinese knock-off like my previous one, but evidently has a laser indicator and... stuff.

Fingers crossed this will sort it. And the plough... I dunno. If I manage to sharpen the blade, it'll be fine for the insides of blank hardcover books. Or it'll just be a very big decoration.

Meanwhile, I got to play all afternoon yesterday and I'm almost finished my "keeping score" boardgame:

This guest post appears here as part of the Drollerie Press Blog Tour.

Who I Am and What I Do
by John B. Rosenman

Hi, I’m John Rosenman. I’m sixty-eight years old, an English professor at Norfolk State University, and I’ve been writing almost my entire life. Altogether, I’ve published fourteen books, with more to follow, plus over 300 short stories in places like Galaxy, Weird Tales, Fangoria (online), Whitley Strieber’s Aliens, Hot Blood, etc. (Check out my site at www.johnrosenman.com). I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and dabble in related areas. My first published novel (The Best Laugh Last, McPherson & Co.) was mainstream and cost me two jobs because of its sensitive racial subject matter. It will be republished in a year or so. My other novels are action-adventure science fiction mixed with romance, bizarre (and I hope fascinating) aliens, and a few cosmic mind-benders. Beyond Those Distant Stars, to take one example, is about a cyborg female who saves humanity from seemingly invincible aliens while trying to find love with an unfaithful pilot. Published by Mundania Press, it just won AllBooks Review Editor’s Choice Award.

I’m a child of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (the 1950s), and in my novels, I try to capture the awesome, mind-stretching wonders of the universe. So in some ways, my SF novels are a bit retro. A common plot is that the main character travels to a distant world and has amazing adventures, often getting involved in an intense romance. In A Senseless Act of Beauty (Blade Publishing), Aaron Okonkwo journeys to a distant, African-type world and gets seduced by a beautiful green alien gal. And that’s only the beginning of his problems.

What I like best about writing is the high I get from it, which is basically indescribable. When it’s clicking, and I’m writing better than ever before, I feel blessed and grateful for what I’m doing and able to do. Another great thing about writing is to find editors and readers who are moved by my vision and actually like my work and what I’m trying to accomplish in it.

But writing isn’t all joy and fulfillment. Sometimes it’s frustrating and demoralizing. Some of my worst experiences with works in progress involve the fact that they fail. No matter how hard I revise, the story just never works. Sometimes it even gets sicker, with more things going wrong with it. This is especially painful when I’m really excited about the premise or concept or make a really good start. The story has promise but for some reason can’t fulfill it. Or to be more honest, I can’t fulfill the story’s promise. Sometimes it’s all just a mystery, as with my short story, “The Great Gumball Machine.” It’s based on memories of my childhood and is steeped in nostalgia. The story should work but disintegrates in mysterious ways about halfway through.

Another bad experience involved my novel, Dax Rigby, War Correspondent. It’s SF on a distant world, and involves a young, charismatic hero. You can find a trailer for it on YouTube and elsewhere, including my website. I work with a writers group and was halfway through the novel when the group grew more critical and my inspiration flagged. There soon came a point where I didn’t know where to take the story plot-wise and otherwise. So I put the novel in mothballs for five months. Fortunately, when I returned to it, the book was reborn, and I (not too modestly) think it’s quite a success.

As for great experiences, I’ve had many. “Rounded With a Sleep,” a story which appeared in Galaxy in Sept./Oct 1994, had a rocky history that was strangely satisfying. It started off as a 3000 word story, swelled to five and six thousand words as I put in more background and local color, then went on a diet from its bloated state and ended at about 3000 words again. But it was much, much better, and to this day, I find its difficult evolution satisfying.

I’ll mention one other great experience. I wrote Inspector of the Cross 22 years ago before I had a computer. It’s about a 3000-year-old elite agent who travels on missions to distant worlds in a state of suspended animation. So everyone ages except him. When I finished the novel, I sent it around. Some publishers came close to accepting it, including Donald A. Wollheim, who critiqued it in a letter. Last summer, I dug the letter and the manuscript out and just started to retype the whole thing into my computer without even reading what I wrote way back when. I find the whole experience liberating and exciting. As I write, new possibilities have occurred to me, new dimensions and plot twists. I can hardly wait to see what I will write tomorrow, and what will occur to me on the next page that I didn’t think of when I was a much younger man.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Inspector of the Cross will be my best book. Even if it’s not, the excitement I get from revisiting old characters and adventures has reminded me of why I started to write in the first place.

This guest post appears here as part of the Drollerie Press Blog Tour.

Hi to Hamish's readers, and thanks to Hamish for having me! I'm Angela Korra'ti, author of the urban fantasy ebook Faerie Blood, published through Drollerie Press. This is my contribution to the blog tour I've organized between Drollerie authors and several non-Drollerie authors, in the interests of getting the word out about Drollerie publications — and in exchange, to give other authors a chance to come visit our own sites and tell us about themselves. As an ebook author, I'm naturally interested in hearing about how other folks pursue non-traditional means of publishing. Since Hamish is a DIY author, I thought that'd be a nice fit for a swap of posts, and I look forward to checking out his work.

Meanwhile, I wanted to write about the overall topic of this blog tour, which is, best or worst experiences with works in progress. Those of us participating in the tour thought that'd be a nice icebreaker sort of topic, and that it'd be a good way to introduce folks to all of us.

I'm pleased to say that most of my experiences with works in progress so far have been pretty good. What leaps immediately to mind as the worst experience, though, is trying to get my novel Lament of the Dove started. I made the mistake of asking people for input on it before I got very far--and the feedback I received discouraged me enough that I backed off trying to actually finish it for some time. The lesson I took away from that is that for me as a writer, it's much more effective to actually finish the first draft of the work and then ask for feedback on how to improve it.

More recently, my worst experiences have been more with not having the energy to work on my works in progress, rather than anything about the actual works themselves. The reason for this: breast cancer, in short, although I was very fortunate to have had the least severe case possible, caught very early. I didn't have to have chemotherapy, but I did have radiation treatment, a mastectomy, and ultimately reconstruction surgery. And there was plenty enough stress involved to kick an enormous hole in my creative drive.

I'm still working on getting that back, and relearning the daily discipline required to get my works in progress back into actual progress. Best experience? Writing Faerie Blood, actually. I did that book during Nanowrimo in 2003, and I went in after a couple of weeks of sketching out notes on what I wanted to write about. It helped as well that I was throwing everything I loved into this book: music (Elvis Presley music and Newfoundland folk in particular), magic, elves, biking, computer geekery, cats, and Seattle. So writing it was pretty much a breeze. Getting it revised and queried and ultimately accepted for publication at Drollerie was a lot more difficult — but the writing, that was easy!

I'm hoping my next work will get me back to that.

Thanks for reading, all, and if you'd like to say hi and learn more about my work, come visit me at angelakorrati.com. You can learn more about my fellow Drollerie authors on Drollerie Press's own site.

I was asked at short notice to do a reading yesterday for an arts fair called Hidden Door — a maze-like, multi-floor affair that was pretty darned cool. I decided to read from Finitude, since that's the thing I figure I should still be actively promoting.
I didn't want to just drone away, though, reading a teaser from my book then asking people to buy it. So I decided to make a game of it.
In one section of the book, the characters are faced with something called "Last Flights Day": The International Climate Coalition Government has declared that air travel is too damaging to the environment (which, in the book's world, is already very precarious) and that a particular day will be the last opportunity for long-distance travel. On Last Flights Day, you have to choose: Where will you go, once and for all?
I handed out fake airline tickets I'd made, each stamped with a unique number, and asked the audience members to tell me where they'd choose to go and why, and I did a draw later, giving out a blank book I'd made and a copy of Finitude.

The whole thing became a lot more fun — on both sides, I think, as the audience was personally engaged with the central idea in the chapter I was about to read, plus we were playing back and forth, dismantling some of that "I am up here and you are listening to me" hierarchy.
People's responses surprised me: I thought they're be about family, but a lot of them were about place, where they'd want to spend the rest of their days.
Here's what they said:
#591088: New Zealand
Because you can only sensibly get there by flying; although apparently when you get there it looks just like Scotland and the weather's just as bad.
#591080: France
To live happily ever after in a château.
#591081: London
To find myself and make the films I love.
#591089: Moscow
To walk home through a tropical North Europe.
#591085: Boulder, Colorado
It is beautiful, liberal, and has great summers + winters.
#591086: Sydney
Then I'd be home, & to be stuck there would be 'no bad thing'.
#591091: Home
It's where I want to be and stay.
#591098: Australia
Fun & sun & surfing.
#591094: Sedona, Arizona
Sitting on top of a red rock mountain — place I was totally content. Could go every day!
#591092: Abu Dhabi
My birthplace, which I have no memory of. To see an oil state, post-oil. To race my girlfriend back to Scotland on foot.
#591100: New Zealand
To be present to people and place. To learn to love.
#591093: Wick
To be with my beloved in our nest. [Hmm. Who was that now?]
I should create some kind of open bulletin board, 'cause I'd love to read lots more of these! Feel free to send me your Last Flights Day destination.

I've been looking into making book trailers for my novels, and after searching around, seeing some truly awful ones (full of melodrama, grade-D acting, and criminally derivative storylines), and finding some great ones, I decided this was something I could do.

My initial idea was simple, something I could execute quickly. Then I started researching, trying to find film clips that were royalty-free or in the public domain, and coming up with nothing. Not only that, but the project starting turning into one of those endless games of Internet hopscotch, and my ideas were getting more and more complex until the whole thing was utterly unfathomable.

The thing that really stumped me was, not being a filmmaker, I didn't know how to make the thing look coherent, rather than just a bunch of separate, found bits I chewed up and... Well, you get the idea.

So it occurred to me that I should draw something. I've always doodled, and for a long time people have been saying I should make an illustrated book. I don't particularly want to, but in this instance it struck me that doing an animated book trailer might be a good way to give everything a coherent look while underscoring that Finitude is, yes, about climate change, but it's not intended to be heavy or moralistic.

Okay. So I was going to do that.

But then came an old problem: getting my drawings into the computer. Sure, I can scan them, but scans never look quite like what I drew, the lines end up fuzzy (antialiased), and I wind up spending all kinds of time fixing them to look right on-screen — which never really works to my satisfaction.

So I went out and bought a graphics tablet (no, not that Apple thing, a graphics tablet). I was taking a chance, but it paid off, 'cause these things have really improved in the last 15 years.

I know, I know. In computing terms that's a funny idea. The last one I used had a proprietary Apple connector because we didn't have USB yet. Still, though, some things (like scanners) haven't really improved that much since I started computing.

My first attempt was this (a promise that my novels are "100% Vampire-Free"):

I was amazed: I could actually, you know, draw with this thing! With the old one, the proportions were always wonky; it wasn't as bad as using a mouse (which is like trying to draw with sponges strapped to your hands), but it never quite represented what I was trying to do. But the new one — just like using pens and markers, but with none of the fading, feathering, or bleeding that shows up in a scan. (I was also reminded that computing with a pen is infinitely more comfortable for me than using a mouse or my fingers, which goes counter to the current trend, yet reinforces the fact that I draw with pens rather than finger-painting.)

Okay, so the next test was to try to animate something. (My projects always seem to involve this element of having to pick up new skills to complete them.) This isn't the style of animation I'll be using for the book trailer, but old-fashioned "cel" animation, where you keep re-drawing the same thing with slight variations. It's horribly time-consuming and pretty rough-looking, but... I think the end result is fun.

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.

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).

~

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.

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.

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.

I had a blast reading at Underword last night. Well, that was half the fun, getting to present something I'd enjoyed and hearing the wide variety of "cover version" stories the others read. The other half of the fun was going to the pub afterward and getting to meet more Edinburgh book-folk. It's easy to despair about the state of things, but these people are out there, madly writing, getting their work finished, packaged, and presented, and inspiring people to read and write.

Particularly valuable was a chat with someone from Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature. I had a lot of cynicism about this organisation and its purpose, which seemed to be about promoting its creators and the work of Edinburgh's long-dead white guys or the super-rich, don't-need-the-help mega-authors, while ignoring those of us on the fringes who are trying to create new work.

It ain't true — not anymore, at least. They may be very small, but ECOL are doing a lot of good work around the city. They've even created a bridge between independent up-and-comers and the Edinburgh Book Festival. I never thought I'd see the day. (For years, I've dismissed the Book Festival as expensive celebrity worship.)

So it's time to give up some outdated stories about this city, get out of my cave, and see if I can help make stuff happen. We're not there yet, but there are fewer obstacles than I thought, and some devoted, willing helpers out there.

I made a copy of Finitude to have in my bag for the occasion, and gave it to the ECOL woman when she told me her compatriot at work is passionate about hand-made books. We also talked about the possibility of a 'zine community in Edinburgh, like the one she saw in Adelaide, Australia and I've seen in Toronto, Canada. This from the ECOL! So I couldn't have been more wrong about them.

Before last night's event, after work, I'd been looking at expensive perfect-binding machines, wondering what the next evolutionary stage is for me in bookbinding. Then I gave my head a shake and just made that copy of Finitude, because I can do that already, and fairly quickly. My flatmate reminded me, too: "But your thing is telling people that they can make books themselves without all kinds of industrial equipment!"

Oh, right. I'm forever encouraging people to not ask for permission, not to get mired in arguments about the validity of their art, but just go ahead and do their own thing. Still, there's that slight twinge of shame that this page is a little crooked or that cover isn't very fancy.

Each of us has the right to our own "culture of one", and we should never apologise for the things we create, or get lost in comparisons.

It's easy to fall into bad thinking. I suppose it provides an excuse for not trying, and sometimes it's difficult to muster the energy to keep getting back up and getting out there. Sometimes, though, things are better than I think.

People are forever telling me "You've got to read this book!", but my stack of to-reads is already overwhelming, so I wouldn't say this to anyone if I didn't absolutely mean it, but if you're at all involved with writing or publishing... you've got to read this book: How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely. You will wet yourself.

It's about a guy who works as a copywriter and discovers that his ex-girlfriend from college is getting married. He wants to show her up, but he's a nothing, so he decides to become a famous novelist by writing a perfect con-job of a novel, reverse-engineering the bestsellers so he's guaranteed to get rich.

Hely sets every last clump of publishing world horsesh*t on fire. He parodies every type of fiction going, and it's note-perfect. but in the end, he surprised me by transcending it all to tell a story that isn't just a collection of snark, but has a heart, too.