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The (self-imposed) deadline looms.

As is all too depressingly obvious, it’s not long until Christmas and that is my deadline for finishing off my second book.  This will, as I may have mentioned before, run on from UTCWAM, chart my adventures in England, Canada, New Zealand and the western USA, and effectively bring the mission up to the present day in terms of trips.  The working title for the book is “Mullet 2″, but that too easily lends itself to various secondary titles, like “Mullet 2: Mullet Harder” and suchlike, the realm of which I am more than inclined to avoid.

Such titular considerations have been at the back of my mind, however, given the pressing need to get the actual content finished.  It had been looking a bit touch and go of late, and indeed I actually planned to finish it this time last year, and then this summer, but I am confident that aiming for this Christmas will be the last delay.  Obstacles have basically revolved around lots going on in real life and the day job, so finding time to sit down and write – even with my free Mondays – has been hard.  But increasingly as I’ve found the time, I’ve been more effective at using it, and I’m now more confident than ever that I will hit the target.

The easiest bit – for the most part – has been writing about the trips themselves, which were of course great fun.  A little trickier have been the intervening bits, trying to remember what was happening in life, what mullets I discovered when and how, what things are entertaining or relevant enough to write, and how all fits in the right order.

I’ve got the bulk of the book finished, and I am now in the process of finishing up the “in between trips” sections, and then follows the numerous rounds of redrafting and editing.  I’m definitely in the final straights now, which is a relief after a frustratingly long time in getting this second book near to completion.

If it is to be published, we should be looking at some time later on in 2012.  I will of course keep you posted.

I’m not long back from my Inverness Book Festival appearance, which was really good fun, and wonderfully supported by the brilliant staff at Eden Court.

I was lucky enough to have a great audience who asked lots of interesting questions, and I hope my slideshow presentation tour of the mullet adventures (both those featured in Up The Creek Without a Mullet and those from later trips that I am nearly finished writing up) went down well.

However, many of the comments from Kit Fraser, who chaired the event and introduced me, and the questions from the audience, focussed on the fact that the adventures have often taken me to places where not a lot happens – quiet villages, remote and uninhabited backwaters and so on. This surprised me, but pleasantly so.

In amongst the admittedly oddball and madcap adventures of UTCWAM and the impending sequel, there lies, I hope, a quiet focus on the solitude, emptiness and downright unattractiveness of some of the non-entities that I visit. It got me thinking a lot about how some travel writing dwells on, even relishes, the idea of empty, uninteresting and rarely-visited destinations. This is something especially valuable in a world where all the most exciting and interesting places are so easy to get to and so regularly covered by travel writing and new or interesting angles on them are increasingly hard to find.

I made reference in one of my answers from the audience to Daniel Kalder, a Scottish travel writer who, I feel, magnificently captures how such empty and little-known places can be compelling precisely because of their emptiness and nothingness. His two books, Lost Cosmonaut and Strange Telescopes, are well worth a read if that side of travel appeals to you. I increasingly find that it does to me.

I can now confirm the details of my appearance at the Inverness Book Festival next month – the unmissable date for your diary is Wednesday 10 August at 5pm in the OneTouch Theatre at Eden Court.  Full details including online ticket booking are here on the book festival website.

I’m really chuffed and excited to be appearing.  It’s the first time I’ll have done a book festival, but am looking forward to it and am already working on what I’m going to be doing.  It won’t just be a simple book reading, though.  I’ll be in conversation with local author, publican and man-about-town Kit Fraser and – to make the ticket price all the more worthwhile – I’ll be doing a few extra bits and pieces, hopefully giving more of a back story to the mission and talking about some of the adventures that came after Up The Creek Without a Mullet (which will feature in the sequel).

If you can make it, please do come along.  It would be lovely to have a good crowd along to support our local book festival.  To my shame I’ve never been along to any of the festival in the past – things have always tended to get in the way – but this year I am hoping to get to one or two other events as well.  It’s an exciting line up and a privilege to be a part of it.

Today is my last day before going back to work after a month off spent writing.  I’d set myself the target of finishing a first draft of my second book, and while I haven’t quite achieved that I am about 75% of the way there and am pleased with my progress.  The momentum remains as I return to work, which is just as well as I have given myself a definite, immoveable deadline: I’m off to France on holiday at the start of September so if I tell you here, publicly, on this blog, that I’ll have the draft done by the time I trek Franceward, then I have to stick to it to avoid the your mocking comments.

Before I get back to the writing, a few things I’ve learned about the process of putting finger to keyboard for a prolonged period.

1. Social networking, and the internet in general, is not that much of a distraction, and certainly not the distraction I feared it might be.  When you think about it, most of the internet is just guff anyway, and social networking site are much the same.  Not least Facebook, which I am getting increasingly bored of; while Twitter is only as useful, helpful or distracting as you make it in terms of who you follow, and the beauty of it lies in the ability to very much drop in and drop out of it.  Even having joined the new Google+, which incidentally is very good so far, hasn’t proved to be much of a distraction.  Or maybe it’s just that I’m disciplined now after a few weeks of focussing myself.
2. It takes a long time to get into the rhythm of writing: a few days are required to build up a head of steam, get the momentum and make progress.  I imagine for some it’s easy to pick up and write at a fair pace, but I am more of a slow-to-accelerate juggernaut.  Now I’ve got going, thoough, I am sure it will be easy to maintain the pace in evenings and days off.
3. If you don’t want to write, don’t.  Forcing yourself to write takes away what should be the fun of it and leads to poor quality.  If you’re not in the mood, go do something else.  You’ll naturally come back to it.  Or if you don’t, ask yourself why you’re trying to write if it’s not what you want to do.
4. If you’re determined not to give up, just write something that you know isn’t going to be quite good enough.  Redrafting and improving something later on is easier than starting from scratch.
5. Feed your brain as you write.  I’ve realised how important it is to avoid hunger or thirst to keep the mind alert and focussed.  So keep constantly drinking water, and regularly eat.  It’s a great excuse to tell yourself that you really need some chocolate or sweets.
6. I’ve found that music is hugely important – getting the right background noise is essential, and preferably it should be something that matches the pace and tone of what you’re writing.  Some folk might like silence, and I thought I used to, but then any little sound becomes an easy irritant or curiosity.  Soft, ambient lyric-less electronica seems to work well for me: aborbing but not too demanding or captivating, atmospheric without being unduly complex.  I’ve found that setting my iTunes to play the entire discographies of Ulrich Schnauss, The Echelon Effect or Boards of Canada create a soundtrack for a half day or so that blurs into one and gives a nice sense of journey.  It doesn’t have to be my favourite music that I listen to – indeed, I’ve tried writing to other music I especially love like Mono or Explosions in the Sky but the music is too loud and too engaging.
7. Finally, if you’re enjoying writing your subject matter, that’s half the battle.  I found as I strive to retell stories from my mullet trips, I’ve been finding I recall new details, make myself laugh or smile in reminiscence, and thus develop a new desire to convey the jist of what happened.  I’ve been lucky on the trips to go to some amazing places and meet some amazing people, and this rubs off in terms of it being fun to write about too.  If I didn’t enjoy reliving what I was writing about, perhaps it wasn’t all that fun to start with and isn’t worth writing about.

Yesterday, I started a month’s annual leave, which – despite the temptation to disappear somewhere – I am using to get stuck into my second book.

As I wrote a while ago, it’s been quite a battle getting into the groove of writing but I’ve recently broken through an important barrier.  I would have been on a roll in recent weeks had I not been so busy.  Hence a month off from the day job to allow me to work up a good pace and make some real progress.

My aim for the month, whether realistic or not, is to get a first draft completed.  That means I can then spend the rest of the summer editing and revising, and hopefully towards the end of the year I might be able to report whether or not it will actually be published.

I’m determined to be disciplined and industrious in the coming weeks, so may not blog or even tweet a great deal.

Oh and Monday’s Night of Adventure in Edinburgh went very well, thanks for asking.  I believe the videos will be online soon so I’ll come back soon to share my video with you and tell you a bit more about what was a fascinating and inspiring evening.

“It’s like apples,” he said.  ”You only need one or two bad ones to turn the rest bad.  And that’s how it is with Muslims – maybe only 10% are fundamentalists, but they can turn the others.”

It was a difficult conversation, for diplomatic rather than linguistic reasons.  He spoke excellent English, but the situation Niall and I found ourselves in meant it was somewhat difficult to disagree, even politely.

It was 2001, and we were roughly midway through our big post-university travels from Frankfurt to Cairo.  Working our way down the Balkan coast we’d found ourselves in the Montenegrin town of Budva, a slightly charmless sprawl of concrete, not aided in its character by the time of year.  It was October, I think, and the tourist season seemed long over.

We probably shouldn’t have been surprised, therefore, to find the campsite on the edge of Budva was closed.  There were, however, three men at work building new metal gates for the driveway.  We conveyed our situation to them using our rudimentary grasp of what we were now being careful to call Serbian (after three or so weeks of referring to essentially the same language as Croatian or Bosnian in those respective countries to the north).  The metalworkers said the boss was away and the campsite was closed for the off-season, but we’d be welcome to camp a couple of nights anyway.

It wasn’t a luxurious stay.  If the owner, who we never saw or met, wanted things shipshape for the next tourist season, he would need to do more than just build new metal gates.  The grass, for a start, would need a good mow.  It was knee-high in places, a lush home for thick clouds of insects.  Getting in and out of the tent became something of a skill, as we learned to unzip it, dive in and close it up tightly again as quickly as we could before any bloodthirsty wildlife could swarm in.

And then there were the toilets.  To be fair, they weren’t quite the worst toilets we’d encountered on the trip (a grimy stop on the overnight bus from Tirana to Pristina won that accolade, I think).  But one of the toilets was broken such that when you flushed , it would flood the cubicle, the water rushing out along the floor almost as fast as you could run to the door.  It could have been worse, of course: better to have the compulsion to dash out of the loo at top speed than into it.

But the metalworkers made for good company.  I forget their names now.  Only one of them, the younger of the three in perhaps his late twenties or early thirties, spoke English, excellently as I say, but all three were kind, friendly and chatty. They cooked for us one evening, frying some chicken in a fire on the ground using a converted blade from a plough.  Or at least that was what I assumed the sort of kayaking action was meant to convey when I asked one of the non-English speakers who was on cooking duty what the improvised frying pan was.  We asked what we could contribute, and I was dispatched to the nearest shop, freshly equipped with the Serbian word for “potatoes” (never since used and thus forgotten, I confess).

Over food, and through the medium of the only bilingual member of the team, we talked.  The metalworkers explained that they lived in Vojvodina, a northern province of Serbia with a substantial ethnic Hungarian population.  Work was hard to come by, however, and they spent a lot of time away from home, hence their current job here in Montenegro building a gate.  Vojvodina wasn’t properly home, though.  If I recall correctly they said they were from Krajina, a part of north-eastern Croatia that bordered Serbia and was mostly ethnically Serb. The name rang a bell from the news as one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in Croatia’s war of independence.  Many Serbs had left, forcibly or otherwise.

So perhaps hostility to Muslims was unexpected for men from an ethnic group that had fought both them and Croats in the various wars that ripped Yugoslavia apart.  Especially if they had moved away as a result of the conflict.  They’d asked where we were going on the rest of our trip, and we explained that our next destinations would be Albania and Kosova.  Somewhat surprised, they cautioned us that it would be dangerous, and the people were not to be trusted.  I said I’d been to both countries before in 1999 on an aid convoy, and I’d found the people nothing short of hugely kind and hospitable.  Still, they insisted, the countries were under the influence of Islam, a religion that led to violence and terrorism.

This was just a month or so after the September 11 attacks in the USA, and the dust of global politics was still to settle into what we now call the “war on terror”.  I recall just a few days after the attacks, we spoke briefly to an old man in a bus station in either Croatia or Bosnia, I forget which.  He introduced himself in his broken English as Mohammed, before for some reason feeling compelled to add with a jokey smile, “no terrorist!”.  Already, assumptions were being both made and assumed to be made.

The vast majority of Muslims are entirely peaceful and opposed to fundamentalism, I reasoned with the metalworkers as we ate our chicken and potatoes.  Probably right, replied the one who spoke English, but you only need one or two fundamentalists to change the others.  He made his analogy about apples, and I can’t remember how the conversation progressed thereafter.  Peacefully, certainly.

It would have been impolite, given the circumstances, to argue.  And in any case, after having heard so much from Albanians, particularly in Kosova, about the terrible things that happened to them in the 1999 war there, it was perhaps only reasonable for me to hear a view from the other side.

I wonder what the metalworkers are up to these days, and particularly what they would make of the recent news that Ratko Mladić has been arrested.  He was a military leader of the Bosnian Serbs during Bosnia’s chapter of Yugoslavia’s collapse, a comrade of Radovan Karadžić who he now joins as a detainee at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Scars take time to heal, as do prejudices, no matter how kind and friendly you are capable of being to two strangers from Scotland.  So perhaps the metalworkers would, like some Serbs, still regard Mladić as a national hero.  Or after all these years, like many other Serbs, they’d believe it’s time to move on from the crimes of the past to a more peaceful and cooperative Europe.  Who knows.

I discovered quite by accident today that Up The Creek Without a Mullet is now available on iBooks, Apple’s rather funky ebook reader for the iPhone and iPad.

Much as I am a huge fan of both ebooks as a concept and iBooks as an application, Apple don’t, for some reason, have as many titles on iBooks as Amazon have on the Kindle, meaning that the Kindle is definitely the leading ebook reader around.

Hopefully Apple will get their act in gear on this front, because it’s a better format – at least when comparing the iPhone apps, which is admittedly the only basis on which I make that judgement.  At the gentle command of your fingers pages scroll over beautifully in iBooks, and this makes for a so much more hands-on feel, something that people say they like about physical books and which the Kindle with its press-button page-change doesn’t seem to replicate.

Anyway, enough of the soapbox – I’m just delighted UTCWAM has another platform on which it is available.  It only seems to be available on iBooks in the UK and USA at the moment, though, making the availability no wider than on the Kindle version.

Perhaps that’ll change in time.  I certainly hope so.

I am all too rarely able to make it along to the monthly gatherings of the Highland Literary Salon, and last night was one such occasion.  It was a “slam night”, which, far from being a chance to practice ones wrestling moves as I first speculated, was in fact a chance for participants to sign up to read a five minute extract of their work.  There was a huge range of style and genres, from poetry and children’s story to crime and romance, many taken from works in progress such as novels or short stories.  I think mine was the only travelogue, knocked together hurriedly yesterday afternoon.  Here’s what I presented.

Exposure of more than a day or so to Fife can inspire a certain kind of wanderlust.

Not the kind that leaves you hankering for the open, dusty road or lush sun-kissed beaches; but rather a more basic and urgent wanderlust that compels you want to be somewhere, anywhere, that isn’t Fife.

Thus it was that my wife Nicole and I escaped from a few days’ break in Fife for a day out by ourselves in Edinburgh.

I know Edinburgh well – work takes me there frequently, too frequently.  It’s a long journey from home, so Scotland’s capital is more synonymous to me for the heavenly smell of the breweries as you approach Haymarket station, crowded trains at the end of the day, and faceless hotel rooms, than it is for its famous icons and sights.

So what to do in a city where I now have a chance to explore without deadline or work commitment, to wander, digress and absorb at will?

Recommendations from friends pile in – the Camera Obscura comes top, with rave reviews of this sort of museum of lights and illusions, the highlight seeming to be 3D projections.  “You can fold up a bit of paper,” enthuses a friend, “and see a 3D bus ride along it!”

Staff, presumably, are well-trained in administering sedatives for those patrons for whom the excitement is unbearable.

On arrival at its door we decide against Camera Obscura – anywhere just a stone’s throw from the castle and enscrummed by armies of camera-wielding tourists is almost certainly a trap; the £9.95 entry fee confirms this, despite our unspoken acceptance that we are briefly, ourselves, camera-wielding tourists.

Instead, we take a wander up Calton Hill and take in not just the views outward, across the tightly-congregated histories of the Old and slightly less old New Towns, but inward too, to the curious jumble of architecture on the top of the hill itself.

Among them stands the National Monument, one of the city’s many Victorian-era Greek-style constructs that rendered Edinburgh “the Athens of the North”.  I must remember, should I ever visit Athens, to tell the locals how reassuringly familiar I am finding “the Edinburgh of the south”.  I’m sure they’ll see the funny side – the Greeks are known for their good sense of humous.

Not much humour greeted the National Monument back in the day, however, a project which ran out of money in 1826 and stands half-finished, a supposed “national disgrace”.  I found it no disgrace, personally, as I clambered up and walked between its few dark, lofty columns.  Like with the figurative glass, I take it as half-full, half-completed, like today’s Scotland.  And in a city that hosts the over-budget upturned boat that is the Scottish Parliament building and the hauntingly barren tramlines, the term “national disgrace” needs some context.

After further wanderings, and in a choice we’d regret, we find ourselves heading underground, on one of the city’s many tours of the streets that lie beneath the Old Town, cramped and disease-ridden alleyways and tenements, long abandoned, built-upon and for a time forgotten by new, grander thoroughfares above.

What I hoped would be a gripping journey back in time and a revealing exploration of a lost city, turned out to be a brief and cheesy tour of some darkened rooms laden with electricity cables and luminous “fire exit” signs, led by a woman in a half-hearted nod to period costume with an accent that was as many miles inauthentic as the years that separated us from the era we were implored to imagine.  The depth of our descent constrasted with the lack of depth of the history.

With no freedom to wander, the rigid, forced-cheerful tour was informative only insofar as gaining the hindsight that told us it wasn’t worth it, while the entertainment came inadvertently, in the form of an earnest American woman with some sort of ghost-hunting app on her iPhone, a fluorescent green radar spinning round and round on her screen, presumably not transmitting the message, which was of course that she was a deluded nutter and should stop pretending she was some sort of hipster ghostbuster.

Emerging back into the early evening dusk and drifted back to the bus station, none the wiser about Edinburgh’s murky depths and long past, we reflected on the tour.

Perhaps those 3D buses and folded bits of paper would have been exciting after all.

Tomorrow night is my book reading and discussion in Dingwall – 7.30pm at the Greenhouse, details on the events page.  Please do come if you can, and please don’t if you can’t. It is more of an “in conversation” format than a fully author-led format, so I’m looking forward to seeing what questions are thrown at me and where the conversation ends up.

Despite this, I have half an eye on my challenging event in June in Edinburgh, details again on the events page.  I’m a little more nervous and apprehensive about this, partly due to the unusual format and also due to the hardcore adventurers I’ll be sharing a stage with.

Thirdly, and just as a wee sneak advance teaser, I have another book event coming up in August which I’m very excited about, and I’ll semaphore you in due course once details are confirmed.

I was tickled to be directed by Fraser to this competition on the Bradt website – a travel writing competition with the theme “up the creek”.

I’ve no idea if they’ve been inspired by UTCWAM but part of me is sorely tempted to enter simply by posting them a copy.

I’ll not be doing, though – I have other writing to do, and am attempting to make the most of the long Easter weekend (and next week’s royal wedding-induced holiday from work) to make some progress.  So I really shouldn’t be wasting time writing this post.

Onwards…