A Close Call

18th September 2015

I gave a mini Skype interview this week about my book Veil Of Time on a site called booksgosocial.com. I will post it on my website (clairemcdougall.com, press page) when it becomes available. Not trusting anything to chance, I had prepared a spiel about how I came to write the book and what it was about, so when the interviewer asked for the "elevator pitch," I skipped over the "elevator" component and launched into my monologue. About fifteen minutes later, my interviewer jumped in: No, I just need the elevator pitch.
So I started over: "In  my book, Maggie escapes a bad divorce by moving to the ancient fort of Dunadd in Scotland and...." If you don't know what the phrase Tabula Rasa means, it's what happens half-way through your elevator pitch. Blank. The kind of blank I would like around two o'clock in the morning when my mind is doing back flips. I needed one of those Monty Python brain surgeons to step into the frame and hit me over the head. Good thing we weren't going live.
I tried again, but she said I wasn't looking at the camera. I was staring off, as I so often do, into empty space. It goes with the job.
So I trained my eyes on the little red dot and struggled on: "I embarked on Veil Of Time despite the fact that I don't normally write historical fiction..."
She stopped me again. She sounded shocked. "Was that an airplane?"

Are you conducting this interview in the middle of a runway? I had to admit then that I live in the flight path for Aspen Airport. This is where they put you when you belong to the wrong caste in a city of billionaires, when you don't have a private table at restaurants where they charge you $25 for a bottle of water flown in from Bora Bora. It was probably just such a shipment that was flying over my roof in the middle of the interview. This is one of the few places where a lowly waiter can you make you feel like scum.

All you have to do is ask for a glass of Rose when they show you the wine list. "Madam, we don't even count that as a wine." You have to supply the French accent, but, as God is my witness, I was told this once in an Aspen restaurant. I was told on another occasion that a beer I was contemplating was positively wine-esque. I didn't order it.
I got through the interview, awkward as a hippo in a tutu.
"No worries," said my interviewer in the face of my profuse apologies. "It usually happens this way."
That's because you're talking to writers. We don't hide away in our offices for protracted hours for nothing. In my next life, just so you know, I'm going to be an actress. Interview me on Skype then. I might even manage a pirouette.

Like the Corners of My Mind

11th September 2015

When I was in my early teens, I was taken by my mother to visit her ailing father in hospital. This was no cuddly Grandpa, but someone who had remained distant to both his children and his children's children. He was sitting in a wheelchair in a common area when we arrived, and as we stood there making conversation, he started to fumble with his dressing gown. He was trying to close it, but only managed to open it further across the gaping fly of his pajamas. The point is: the sight of my grandfather's white hairy testicles is emblazoned on my memory, and I will never forget it (though I have tried, believe me.)

(That's not him.)
Same goes for this day in history. 9/11 has only one connotation around the globe. The very mention of 9/11 conjurs images of those planes hitting the Twin Towers and it always will. This is the way memory works, and it's a good thing for us writers that it does.

When I was eight years-old, my father, in an unusual move, took me and my best friend into the center of Glasgow where he had some business, and there in a very fancy sweetie shop he bought us each a bag of any sweetie we chose from the many jars sitting on the many shelves. I chose a confection that seemed impossibly magical: different coloured lozenges with actual writing on them! They didn't taste that good, but that doesn't seem to spoil the memory.
When you think of all the things that happen to you as a child, relatively few stand out, but the ones that do have a certain force, a sort of floodlight behind them. These stand-out memories, if you're artistically inclined, are like little booster points that urge you to self-expression.

(Just for the record, the all-important Battle of Bannockburn happened on September 11th, in which the Scots sent the English King Edward back to London tae think again. That was their first and last ouster of English interests.
And September 11th is also the birthday of DH Lawrence, who showed us the working life of Nottinghamshire and gave us the wonderful Lady Chatterly's Lover, which the BBC has just re-filmed with Richard Madden as Mellors. Can't wait to see that!)

So, apart from all the towers and the battles and epiphanies, what I want to say is, cherish your memories. Unlike your darlings, don't kill them. Hold them in your hand and feel the weight of them. And then write about them. Even the bad ones.

Too Much Original Sin

4th September 2015

A young man, over whom I languished in my youth for longer than was respectable, eventually told my best friend that he could never go for a girl like me because I was too emotional. In my late teens and at the height of my emotionality, I could make little sense of this assessment. I wasn't given to thinking I could be too anything. That he ended up in market research could be seen as par for my  course, but I have since had pause to consider what he might have meant and why he viewed this as a killing epithet.

I have just put down Tobias Wolff's terrific memoir "This Boy's Life," and it seems that people distanced themselves from his youthful self for similar reasons: too suffering and self-destructive, too rebellious, too emotional to hide all that very well behind a veneer of bluster. But perhaps this is the stuff of writers. Too much. Too much. People who knew me in my childhood and youth still shake their heads and think she's just a bit much. Not that I have ever had any bluster. My own Christian upbringing in the shadow of Original Sin put paid to that.

I do have a habit of being sure that I am right. This is a fault, I admit, and yet, if I didn't feel that, would I bother to put my thoughts down on paper? Would I flinch so severely at outright injustice and want to speak its name?

People have a problem with the ungilded truth.  I have a problem with spinach. It's tastes awful. I am quite sure of that. Just as sure as I am of the fact that being too emotional is not a sin. And might even be helpful.

The Crime Scene

30th August 2015

Since I have been going on at length about the machinations of the writing life, I thought I'd share a picture of the place where it all goes down. This is my study, a nice study, I have to admit, but just remember that before this space was added on to my house, I wrote several novels in the broom cupboard under the stairs. So I deserve it. I even fengshui-ed it.

So, let me describe it. In the foreground (top right), if you look carefully, hangs a wooden seagull. I'm always off in my mind to the country of my childhood, where this sea bird's cry is simply the background against which everything else takes place. 

Out of view behind the chair is a big-breasted statue of the Buddha's mother. What looks like a boom mic hanging from the ceiling over my desk is a bundle of lucky feathers and other amulets, because I am extremely superstitious. It's worked so far! All along the right-hand wall are pictures, of family and a signed poster of Braveheart. Next to Mel is a picture of John Steinbeck with his dog Charlie. Heroes all.

There's an alcove on the far left with a writing desk, though I rarely sit there and it's mostly a place to put things that don't belong anywhere else. 

Moving further up the left wall, there's a table on which sits a replica of the 12th C Lewis Chessmen, and a couple of browned photographs of my great grandmother Rebecca (aptly named Brown) and her husband in WW1 uniform.

So that's my creative space mapped out in 3D. I only have to step into it to feel different. It's my version of Mozart's billiard table  (at least as it was portrayed in Amadeus.) This is my Holy of Holies. 

The Slightly Dark LIfe of a Writer

21st August 2015

I am always waxing lyrical on this blog about heavy stuff, mostly because that's what keeps me up at night: Scotland, the state of the universe, the state of book publishing and where I fit into that. So I thought this week I'd lighten up (I'm a writer, so I have to be reminded to do this - especially when someone asks me how I am doing, and I take that for a real question.)
There's a lot of mythology surrounding the life of a writer. A lot of it has to do with whisky, which is just so much posturing, if you ask me. You can't write good literature if sozzled. You just can't. A lot of it has to do with living up to that reaction you get when you tell someone you have a published book.

But it's all bubbles.
Here's the reality of being a writer. The first thing is bums on chairs: every day, same time, and it isn't always going to look like you're actually doing anything. Ask my husband. Writing is sort of like the universe: only 5% of it is stuff and the rest is either dark energy or dark  matter.
The next thing is that you are incredibly difficult to live with. Ask my husband. If you're engaged in writing something long like a novel, you can't really discuss it, for fear it sends the muse scurrying off. But the pressure of holding all this in looks something like my pressure cooker when I get distracted, as I often do (because I am a writer), and forget to turn the heat down.

Not writing may be even worse: you're like a bicyclist in the  Tour De France that someone has accidentally locked in the toilet.

Well, that's about as light as I get. Just be glad you're not married to me.

Ghost in the machine.

14th August 2015

Almost as many Russians read this blog as do English-speaking readers. Russians love our bard Robert Burns and have some kind of a fascination for Scotland and its literary output. In fact. no matter how spurious their system of government, that country has never suffered from a lack of enthusiasm when it comes to the arts: it has often been pointed out that although you have to knock westerners over the head and abduct them to poetry readings, Russians will queue around the block.

Could you imagine that in this country? If you see a queue around the block in the West, it is either for the latest toy or the latest blockbuster movie. Sometimes, people will queue for books, but only if it is a bestseller. The publishing industry's wet-dream.
Western society, lacking almost anything else to gravitate towards lists towards the blockbuster and the bestseller.  It has entirely lost sight of the reality that literature should say something beneath the story. I read Goldfinch. Bestseller. Pretty good (if a little unbelievable - says she who writes about time travel!) but not much there beyond the action. It's like the first wash became the painting. America in particular is drawn to this kind of cult - look at Donald Trump polling at 25%. Is there anything there beyond money and hot air?
Not that I move in Hollywood circles, but I hear that everyone you meet in LA is sort of in a blockbuster trance. Ironically, someone like Amy Shummer who finally comes along and bucks the system, questions the role of women in the movie making machinery,  becomes a starlet of the cult herself. Her photo-shopped pictures start appearing on-line and in magazines.
The publishing industry, too, has been taken over by commercial enterprise and sits in wait for the next big thing. It has been asked many times, but it's worth doing so again: which of the late and great writers would be published today? Grapes Of Wrath? Not a chance. Any of DH Lawrence or James Joyce (Ulysees? Give me a break.) Ernest Hemmingway suffered from and played to cult status, but even he wouldn't be put into print in the current climate.
Since Amazon got into the publishing business, it has its own best seller list. The banner of bestseller has been flown until the whole notion has become frayed and faded, nothing more than a ghost.

Anyway, if I weren't sitting in literary limbo myself, I might not be beating this drum. I actually prefer the company of ghosts. But these are sinister ghosts, not good ones. They mess with your mind and rob the soul. Our collective soul. And soul is something here in the West we have so little of.

Finding Yourself at the Scottish Games

7th August 2015

I was dressed up in a tartan frock handing out my business cards and postcards for my book at the Colorado Scottish Games, feeling a little silly, gasping for a cup of tea. Although it is true that Americans of Scottish descent are willing to toss the caber and dance a Highland fling, they mostly shuffle away from haggis and don't ever gasp for a cuppa. At Highland Games in Scotland there is always a tea tent with empire biscuits (woops - just realised the significance of that little piece of confection!) and scones and  millionaire shortbread. And a team of older ladies sporting pinnies and perms who natter between themselves as they pour endless cups of tea, and none of your foofy flavours either, just plain tea like you get in Scotland and don't have to be asked what kind. Tea. Tetleys. PG Tips. Co-op. At these games there was not a cup of tea in sight.

But men in kilts there were aplenty, clan tents, even a McDougall tent. It's all authentic Scottish filtered down through America. It's highland dancers with big smiles, and bagpipers chewing gum. It's hot sweaty weather instead of drizzle. I won't say it's all a bit Disney. I happen to enjoy Disney, and I enjoy American Scottish games, too. I was just walking around in my tartan, not a thing I would do in Scotland, wondering what it was all about?

Well, you don't have to think too long. It's all about identity, silly. Everyone hankers after it, including myself. From one end of the earth to the other, everyone feels the need to belong. We're a clannish species and work better in small groups. If you share a little DNA, it helps. If you wear the same tartan, you're half-way there. And if you drink tea by the gallon and relish a plate of haggis, neeps and tatties, you can be sure where you really belong.