I've been writing fiction and poetry since 2010, and run two writers' groups.
This is a blog to talk about that writing, and to speak to fellow authors.
I had to make a journey on Sunday involving a change between two buses. In case of delays, I’d left myself plenty of time, so I made a last-minute decision to grab a book for the journey – but not just any old book.
For several years, I’ve owned a paper copy of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Before falling out of the habit, I’d already reached the halfway point and it had remained virtually untouched ever since.
Despite its reputation for being dense, the structure is surprisingly reader-friendly. The book is actually an omnibus of four volumes, each divided into several parts and subdivided into a lot of short chapters. So in the 45 minutes between buses, plus the journey itself, I made some decent inroads.
Even the text itself is rich in humour, not something I expected from a tome about the Napoleonic Wars. That said, I took a decision early on not to worry too much about following the plot and simply enjoy the current page.
After making such a positive start on Sunday, I wanted to continue the good work. As such, I’ve given myself a target to finish the last page by the end of December, and I’ve even set up a spreadsheet to monitor my progress. And when it’s finished, I’ll be sure to pass it on to someone else who wants to see what all the fuss is about.
On Thursday, realising I had a free evening, I took the opportunity to see some performance art. This was hosted by my pal Luke ‘Luca’ Cockayne, who was reading a series of autobiographical pieces over the span of 12 hours. I only had time to see around two hours.
I don’t want to focus on the performance itself, particularly because the aftermath is still on for the next five days. Rather, I want to look at something I did during that performance.
One of the organisers handed out pens and paper to the tiny audience with the intention that we could draw if we felt inspired. Much as Luca has tried to teach me some art, I’m still far more inclined to write by default.
I enjoy the challenge of improvising poetry on the spot, so my rough plan was to compose a rough version based on the performance I could see in front of me, and then extract a polished version from that. Yet after writing my so-called polished version, I felt it didn’t quite work, so I tried another.
I ultimately ended up with a total of seven poems. Put together, they form a cycle of sorts, each of which approaches what I want to say without being able to cut to the heart of the matter.
I feel there are diamonds to be dug out of the mess here, so I’m going to keep these drafts for the moment until I find some sort of home for them.
Every March, I make a point of going to the St Andrews poetry festival, or StAnza. While I’m there, I take the opportunity to visit a pal who lives at the back end of town.
A couple of years ago, he lent me a poetry book – Occasional Poems by Callum Rodger – which I thoroughly enjoyed. I recently found it again while clearing out some old papers, and I asked whether he wanted it back, which he did. I happened to have some free time that coming Saturday, so I arranged to pop over.
He was unwell on the day of the visit, but I didn’t plan to stay long anyway, as I had other places to be before and afterwards. I was glad of the visit because I came away with several suggestions for novels to read, to the point where I’m considering reactivating my Audible account.
St Andrews is also home to my nearest branch of Topping & Co, somewhere else I usually make a point of visiting, but time wasn’t on my side. There will always be a next time, though.
Since just before the pandemic, I’ve been involved in at least one Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game. I’m currently in two: one every fortnight in Dundee, and another every six to eight weeks in Fife.
For those unfamiliar, D&D is a tabletop role-playing game where players create and improvise adventures, guided by the Dungeon Master (DM). Players describe what they want their characters to do, and the DM narrates the outcomes based on dice rolls and the game’s rules. The setting is usually a fantasy land where weapons can be wielded and spells can be cast.
Every D&D game is unique. In my case, the Dundee players are all in the same writing group and live in the same general area. As such, we know each other well and sessions tend to be filled with in-jokes. By contrast, the Fife players generally need to travel and won’t see each other from one week to the next. We make the most of our time with longer and more intense sessions than the Dundee game.
One of the few factors that unites both games is that I’ve volunteered to be the designated note-taker. I’ve long been able to touch-type, so I can keep an eye on the action at the same time.
But why is this important? The simple answer is: there’s a lot going on. It’s not necessary to capture every detail, but because campaigns can span multiple sessions, it’s easy to lose track of key names, plot points and locations.
It must also be stated that my notes are still predominantly from my character’s perspective, so I can’t stress enough that the other players should keep additional personal notes. For instance, while tidying up the Fife notes yesterday, I realised one character had encountered two others in a room we entered, but I hadn’t recorded what happened to them during or after that interaction.
It sounds like tedious admin, but I enjoy this process as it helps me out enormously with co-ordinating the two games.
Back in July, I mentioned I had my poem January & Youpublished by Speculative Books. The launch was scheduled for Tuesday of last week in Glasgow.
I knew I wouldn’t have much time to catch the bus after the end of my shift. As such, I’d kept my phone off to avoid any distractions, only turning it back on once I was on the bus. Shortly after it pulled away, however, I received an email. It explained the launch had to be cancelled because of illness, with apologies for the short notice. There is a hope to reschedule it for later in the year.
My time on a Tuesday evening is typically ring-fenced to run a writing group, but I’d arranged with the other leader to make an exception. Had I seen this before we started moving, I might just have cut my losses on the cost of the tickets and stayed in Dundee to help out with the group. Now I was stuck on the bus for around 45 more minutes until we reached the park-and-ride in Perth, so I considered my options.
I could have stopped there and found my way back to Dundee. But some of the buses are painfully slow and infrequent, while the railway station is at the other end of Perth, so I might not have made it back before the group was over. Besides, booking at the last minute is never cheap.
Instead, since I knew the writing group was in good hands, I elected to continue to Glasgow and then on to Paisley.
I was at university there between 2002 and 2005 taking a BSc Music Technology course, long before I was interested in prose and poetry. While I’d been back several times, my most memorable visit took place in 2017 when I thought I might find some inspiration for poetry.
Today, I would have taken the time to find the layout of the area, see where the side streets were leading and work out the most convenient way to visit other places. For example, I used to volunteer at a community radio station in the Glasgow district of Govan. I can’t understand why I always paid extra for buses when I can now look at a map and see two more direct routes covered by my travel card.
I didn’t intend for this entry to be so personal, but I also didn’t intend to visit my alma mater. If there was a silver lining, it’s that the resulting poem from 2017 was published in a collection about the town. The more I think about it, the more I’m inspired to write a sequel, so I’ll see where that takes me over the coming days.
A few weeks ago, I announced a show called the Virtual Nonsense Tour of Dundee. The premise was to present an audience with ten stories about the city and ask them to guess whether they were true or false, in the style of a pub quiz.
Just over a week ago, it finally happened. My co-host and I adopted the alter-egos Magdalen Green and Albert Street – named after real locations – and took the risk. It helped that most of the audience knew one or both of us, which helped the banter to flow.
We’d built in a lot of slack to allow for chat, delays and/or technical hiccups. It ended up being too much time and we finished early. Most shows run over, so it was a refreshing change in that sense. Of course, we weren’t the only act in town – far from it.
For the last four years, Sweet Venues has run the Dundee Fringe. It’s run on the same principle as its much larger and more famous Edinburgh counterpart, in that they provide space for acts rather than running shows or dictating the content. The scale, however, is very different. Approximately 70 acts were booked, which was huge for our single venue but dwarfed by the 3,700 acts who pack out the capital every August.
I made a point of going to other shows, with highlights including the student burlesque company Marvelesque taking their show off campus for the first time, Buckets of Blood featuring Grimm fairy tales told as they were originally written, and Tango the Pain-Proof Man who performed stunts such as chewing glass and lying on a bed of nails.
I can only speak for the shows I attended, but while crowds were small, they were loyal, and I’d often meet the same people at the box office. I hope there is a 2025 edition and that the enthusiasm continues, especially as I’ve now had time to reflect on our virtual tour and understand what to do differently next time.
Persons! I had a technical failure yesterday, the like of which I haven’t seen in a long time. This meant I couldn’t bring you a full entry.
I was at my weekly Tuesday writing group as usual. The Internet can be dodgy there, but it normally connects after a few tries and/or a reboot. This time, my laptop was having none of it, so I tapped out a short entry on the Jetpack app briefly explaining the situation.
However, it’s another literary group I want to talk about today. Long-term readers will know about Hotchpotch, which is a monthly open-mic primarily aimed at writers, where members can sign up for five-minute slots. I didn’t set up the group, but when I took over in 2015, it had already existed for five years.
One week ago, at the last meeting, I announced my intention to step down from running it after nine years and pass it on to Eilidh, who’s been assisting for well over a year. We’ve taken a couple of months to discuss how we would make the transition, and that process will continue into our next event in October.
The reason I chose this time is not because Hotchpotch is in a bad way. It’s arguably the most streamlined and consistent it’s ever been, and it’s precisely because it’s so strong that I feel able to step back from it in favour of new projects.
I’ve had a technical failure today like nothing I’ve ever had, with my laptop failing to connect to the Internet since lunchtime.
As such, I’ve had to bash this out quickly on my phone, and I’m not going to be able to type out everything I want to. As such, I’ll aim to put a full entry out by 8pm tomorrow.
For many years, I was involved with National Novel Writing Month; for brevity, we’ll use its diminutives NaNoWriMo or NaNo. We gathered such an enthusiastic group that we started running weekly meet-ups from 2015, even outside the novel-writing challenge of November.
Six months ago, there were a couple of scandals. The first was when a member of staff in California stood down after making a racist comment about a colleague. Separately, the organisation was slow to remove a forum moderator who was sending inappropriate material to minors. You can read the full reasons in the entry from March 2024.
After this, it was a relatively simple decision for my fellow organiser and I to withdraw our affiliation and continue as an independent group. In my view, this group is now much more streamlined while keeping the experience much the same for members.
Then over the last couple of weeks, NaNo has faced another backlash, this time over their implicit approval of members using artificial intelligence in their projects. Literary news rarely makes it to mainstream outlets, but the New York Times and Wired both reported the story.
The statement from NaNo was a long and rambling piece, but the most widely reported passage was:
We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.
This statement has now been somewhat retracted, but not before several board members resigned and partnership organisations considered whether to continue their involvement.
It’s not just the message that disappoints me, but the tone of it. The organisation I joined in 2010 would never have been so confrontational. The organisation I knew would have considered the question carefully and then addressed it with good grace and humour, reminding members of their core values.
I’ve imagined below how they might have phrased their statement.
We recognise there are strong feelings in the writing community at large about the use of artificial intelligence software, both in favor of its use and against. As NaNoWriMo is self-guided, we can’t stop you from using such software to craft your novel. However, we feel typing or writing each word by hand, day after day, is more in-keeping with the spirit of the challenge.
By ditching the attitude problem, isn’t it so much more pleasant to read? You can also bet the old NaNo would have responded to any feedback in a measured way. Its new version has fallen into the same pattern of making brash statements and then backing down but without apologising.
The next test of NaNo in its current form will be the main November challenge.
If the current organisation manages to scrape through the next three months without involvement in any other newsworthy events, then even I concede it stands a chance of surviving until 2025 and beyond. However, it will almost certainly be with a much-reduced membership who will be watching the situation carefully.
If something else happens to rock the boat during that time, I reckon that’s the end of NaNo as an organisation.
Nobody asked me, but I’d recommend National Novel Writing Month announces a voluntary winding up of operations in December. This would allow members to complete one last novel, to download their data from the website, and to end the organisation in a relatively neat manner.
But that won’t happen because any good grace and self-awareness has now vanished from National Novel Writing Month.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a pet project. Now the proposal has been accepted and advertised, I’m finally at liberty to tell the public.
Since 2021, Sweet Venues has organised the Dundee Fringe. Like its Edinburgh counterpart, the organisers don’t run the shows themselves, but provide the venue and invite performers to apply for slots. In previous years, I’ve run a game show, but this time around, it was time for something different.
In fact, I already had a solid idea with pal who shares a similar sense of humour. One of our recurring jokes was to talk about organising a tour of Dundee but telling tourists absolute nonsense about the city instead of facts.
I half-seriously wondered whether we could actually make this happen, even as a one-off event. Then when Sweet Venues put out the call for performers, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. We didn’t need to take anyone around the city; using just a projector, the city could come to them.
Just before I made the application, I started by pulling together a presentation, making sure my pal was willing to co-host. We held our first rehearsal at the weekend, ironing out a few flaws in the script and making sure the technical side worked without fail.
Gavin Cameron 