Author: Gavin Cameron

I've been writing fiction and poetry since 2010, and I run writers' groups. This is a blog to talk about writing and adjacent topics.
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Poetry Connections and Train Connections

Although it happened too late to write up in this blog, I was at the Inn Deep bar in Glasgow last Tuesday for the launch of The SpecBook 2024. One of my poems had been published by – as the name suggests – Speculative Books.

Copies of the collection had been sent out to contributors, but as mine was lost in the post, I collected one there. What I didn’t realise is that there are actually two small volumes. It was great to see my name in print other than in poetry group pamphlets.

Part one of the schedule was devoted to the published readers, so the first section lasted for a long while. The audience were reminded to support rather than heckle, which is exactly what I would say.

Part two was given over to an open-mic, where anyone could read a poem, whether they were in the book or not. I even met someone I knew from my former open-mic, but I wasn’t able to stay long enough to hear her work.

That was because I’d never visited Inn Deep before and I’d booked my travel cautiously. I’d allowed plenty of time between connections, going from one coast of Scotland to the other. As it happens, this worked out so well that I was home an hour earlier than expected.

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Site Stats for Gavin Cameron

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about dipping back into an older blog. Further to this, WordPress sends me an email every month about my site statistics, displaying the number of visitiors, views, likes and comments received, along with an indication of changes from the previous month.

The most recent one, received yesterday, showed that November brought 144 views from 131 visitors, who left 17 likes.

I don’t typically monitor such statistics – if I look at them at all – but that’s a decent ratio, even if all the figures were all down from October. There were also no comments, but this page tends not to attact them and I’m happy enough with that.

The core purpose of this blog is to give me a reason to write every week, and it’s served that purpose for 11 years now. Whether anyone actually reads it is a side-issue.

What I do hope people will read is The SpecBook 2024, published by Speculative Books, as I have a poem included there. The launch was supposed to be in Glasgow in September but was cancelled due to illness.

So let’s hope tonight’s rescheduled launch goes ahead as planned, and I’ll report back next week on how it went.

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Background Noise

Whenever I’m starting a longer writing session, I like to play some music in background. Over time, my playlist of choice has changed.

It was initially the soundtrack of the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Since that lasted only around 45 minutes, I bulked up the playlist to just over an over with more Nick Cave songs.

More recently, I’ve switched to a musician called Jason Lewis, although I can’t recall when I first discovered his work. Since 2006, he’s produced three-hour mixes with isochronic tones. These are regular repetitions of a single tone mixed into rapid beats, which are supposed to enhance concentration.

From what I can gather, there’s no scientific basis for this, but I find his mixes work for me. They’re completely instrumental, allowing me to focus on writing, and free to access on YouTube.

The only real difference between the soundtrack and the Jason Lewis music is the familiarity. With Cave and Ellis, I would hear exactly the same songs in the same order and know roughly where in the playlist I was. With Jason Lewis, by contrast, I tend to listen to either the most recent mix or choose one that matches the mood of my piece.

Of course, I’m completing this entry at my regular Tuesday writing group, which comprises whatever the bar decides to play. It can be a strange mixture of pop, metal, easy listening, dance or rap, with no apparant pattern. Tonight is a reasonable mix, featuring Elton John and Kiki Dee with Don’t Go Breaking My Heart right now.

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Dipping Back Into an Older Blog

I must preface this entry with an assurance that I’m not ditching this blog. Rather, I’m here to talk about two others that still exist but are largely disused.

My first is LiveJournal – known to its users as LJ – which was once the enfant terrible of blogging and is now the senine grandparent. My profile page has always shown the start date as 15 March 2004, but I suspect there’s some longstanding technical glitch because my first entry was written three months previously on 19 December 2003 and I definitely didn’t backdate it.

I do have cause to visit LJ regularly to read entries from one person who’s never stopped updating. But I only update it when I believe it’s the most appropriate medium. The last time was for an art project in January 2022.

But that’s not the blog I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about the other one.

In 2008, two former LJ employees set up a new site called Dreamwidth that addressed their concerns over the user experience. When LJ was the target of several Distributed Denial of Service attacks the following year, several users began to crosspost there, fearing their own blogs might be taken offline. Because both sites share a similar codebase, it was simple to adapt.

I used it differently, taking the opportunity to curate a circle of close friends where I would post more private thoughts. To this day, every entry remains protected and the profile has no connection with my profiles elsewhere.

I updated a lot back then, to the point where I bought a seed account for $200, which is essentially a lifetime membership with premium features. Looking back, I now realise I needed to fix the root of my angst earlier rather than analyse it extensively every month or two while taking no real action. Once I did, the updates ground to a welcome halt and there have only been a handful of entries since 2013.

That said, I updated once again a couple of weeks ago after I felt it was the only possible outlet.

This entry wasn’t quite like the older ones. For a start, it was much more measured and positive. This was more the digital equivalent of writing a letter to someone and placing it in a filing cabinet instead of posting it. There’ll be only one still-active person likely to read it, but I simply had to spill out my thoughts before I could move on.

As I write, I realise I’ve been updating WordPress regularly for more than 11 years, which is approximately equal to the 11 years I was regularly updating LJ. It won’t be too long before I’m past the balance point. Even so, I’ll be keeping that site and Dreamwidth active for the foreseeable future, just in case they come in handy.

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Staying Away From My Usual Groups

Long-term readers will know that after nine years, I decided to stop hosting my open mic night Hotchpotch.

I’m far from the first host, but the previous handovers were typically haphazard. That didn’t matter so much when our events were smaller and more intimate affairs. As we now boast our largest-ever following, we needed a few months to make the handover go smoothly. That period has now elapsed, so I stayed away from last Wednesday’s event to emphasise this clean break.

That evening, I instead took the opportunity to attend an indoor labyrinth walk that clashes with Hotchpotch. It’s entirely a coincidence, as our schedules are independent of each other.

You don’t need to be religious or spiritual to go along. The organiser brings a massive canvas with the labyrinth pattern, setting up candles and relaxing music to generate the atmosphere. While I was still geographically close enough to help out with the open mic if it was absolutely necessary, the walk offered a distraction. By all accounts, however, the event went well.

I also missed my weekly Tuesday writing group, called What’s Your Story, but for different reasons.

My poetry circle, the Wyverns, produces a pamphlet every year in conjunction with the University of Dundee. The launch event was supposed to be on a different day, but there was an unexpected double booking that was – fortunately – spotted weeks in advance.

Our theme this year was the George Orwell novel 1984, marking the 75th year since its publication. Because the author died barely a year later, this has also led to the book entering the public domain, at least in the UK and the EU, which gave us considerable artistic freedom. My contribution was titled 1985 and imagined how the totalitarian regime might end, based on the real-life Jasmine Revolution of Tunisia, starting in 2010.

I’ll definitely be back at What’s Your Story tonight. I’ll probably also be back at Hotchpotch next month, but strictly as a punter rather than a host.

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Subject Matters

I learnt yesterday that Jamie Oliver has withdrawn his children’s novel Billy and the Epic Escape over accusations that it stereotyped Indigenous Australians. It had already been on sale for six months.

As the backlash dies down, it’s being quickly replaced by puzzlement. If this book had been written by a previously-unknown author and released by a small press, it’s easier to see how this might have happened.

But this is one of the country’s best-known celebrity chefs contracted to one of the five largest publishers in the world, namely Penguin Random House. The manuscript will have been seen by countless pairs of eyes before the first copy was even printed. Each would have looked at a specific element such as grammar or typesetting, and that would typically include some consultation with the community it portrays. The story is also widely believed to have been ghostwritten, adding another possible layer to the checking process. We’re unlikely to find out who this is. It’s almost always a contractual requirement that the identity of a ghostwriter is not revealed.

Still, this book somehow slipped through the net, and the reason might never be known. I’m only conjecturing here, but it’s possible that everyone involved assumed someone else was dealing with the matter, or maybe any concerns didn’t reach more senior ears.

It must be stated that there’s nothing wrong per se with authors writing outside their own experience, but it’s vital to have an insider’s perspective. When Frederick Forsyth wrote The Day of the Jackal, a fictionalised background to a real assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle, he used his background in investigative journalism to construct his plot. It shows in the precision of the language and imagery, even if I personally think he could have deployed a few more commas.

Regardless of whether it’s done for well-justified reasons, banning or withdrawing a work is often the best promotion it can receive. I wasn’t aware of Billy and the Epic Escape before this news broke, nor about Oliver’s most recent cookbook, which is also on sale and has attracted no controversy.

At the time of writing, it’s still possible to bag a copy of the novel from Amazon UK, and you can bet the remaining stock will sell out soon.

Performing to an Audience

Flight and Fright

This morning, I attended a talk by Professor Angus Wallace. His name might not be immediately recognisable, but you’re likely familiar with his story. In 1995, he treated a passenger with a collapsed lung using improvised surgical equipment on a flight from Hong Kong to London.

Judging by the number of slides skipped, he probably brought twice as much material as he needed for the hour-long slot. The mid-air incident formed only a part of his speech, with the rest devoted to his many inventions in shoulder surgery and his later career as an advisor in major air and rail accident investigations.

All this could be a terribly dry subject, but the professor knew his audience was from a non-medical background. Any medical terminology was kept to a minimum or explained in simpler terms, and the whole structure of the presentation kept the audience engaged.

I suspect his rhetoric skill was developed through necessity. One of his earliest inventions was a tool for ingrown toenails which reportedly worked well, but was not marketed properly, so few people knew of its existence. From that point, he was sure to amplify his ideas more forcefully.

Quite by coincidence, I’ve been thinking more about my longstanding desire to start a group dedicated to helping people to overcome stage fright. I can tell you there are writers out there with some top ideas that will never make it onto a stage because they have no motive, whereas Professor Wallace did it as part of his job.

Just yesterday, I received an email from a local organiser, who brought to my attention that I’d been mentioned in an interview between two mutual pals. I started to compose a two-sentence reply, which quickly turned into several paragraphs outlining how I’d like this proposed group to look.

I have some definite ideas, such as aiming it at members who aren’t yet ready for more formal organisations like Toastmasters International. But there are many details that need input or experimentation. This organiser probably opened my reply this morning and thought What is this wall of text all about?

By writing about this proposal in such a public forum as this blog, and by speaking to the right folks, I hope to make it a reality and to help more people face their fear of the stage.

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War in Pieces

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.

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Cycling Around

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.

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A Short Trip Across the Water

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.