http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ Ron McMillan's Blog en webmaster@sandstonepress.com Copyright 2010 2010-08-25T05:09:48+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/08/2010/air_travel_joys/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/08/2010/air_travel_joys/ Flying in a commercial airliner is assuredly safer than tying your shoelaces on Sauchiehall Street, but the dangers of air travel are not of the sort to which a lot of logic can be applied. Nor are they quite the same the world over. Yesterday’s disaster in north China puts me in mind of a trip I did around China in the late 1990s, a marathon jaunt on assignment for the Sugar Devil, Inc., that saw me flying nine times on consecutive days, in everything from a 747 so fresh it still smelled of Seattle to a Chinese-made Yak (no,… 2010-08-25T05:09:48+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/07/2010/cursed_land/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/07/2010/cursed_land/ Two stories on the Guardian website on consecutive days bring North Korea to mind. The first was about Kwon, Ho-ung, the formerly high-flying member of North Korea’s political elite whose ‘policy failures’ earned him a brief appearance before a firing squad. That there can even be an elite sector of a Workers’ Paradise that claims to embody all things democratic and socialist is, of course, a contradiction. But North Korea is a giant contradiction, one with not much in the way of hope for even members of the pampered elite – the sector that, however confusingly, has to exist in… 2010-07-21T08:22:41+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/06/2010/a_watched_pot/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/06/2010/a_watched_pot/ I write this in strict watched pot never boils mode. A package of Yin Yang Tattoo books has been in limbo for nearly two weeks, not so much winging their way to me as stuck in a transportation and communications mire whose origins bear little scrutiny - though, it should be said, they do not rest at the grand doors of Sandstone Towers. The mystery of their non-appearance was solved earlier today when I heard from the courier (who goes un-named, lest its mention be read as an endorsement), and so, instead of watching the telephone in the hope of… 2010-06-08T06:56:43+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2010/trials_and_hurdles/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2010/trials_and_hurdles/ 2010 could wind up being an interesting year. After months of revision and who knows how many drafts and fine tooth comb endurance sessions, yesterday the manuscript for Yin Yang Tattoo was at last signed off. In the coming days it will go to the layout specialists and on towards printing; the turnaround for all this is remarkably short, with the book expected back from the printers in June. A privilege of middle age is the shedding by the wayside of some of one’s precociousness. Folk who know me will laugh at the notion of… 2010-04-24T04:00:13+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2010/25_years_on/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2010/25_years_on/ About 25 years ago I was living in South Korea, feeling the strain - and down on all things Korean. Unjustified contempt showed its ugly face when I disparaged Koreans while in conversation with a friend by the name of Mark McTague - an ex-Peace Corps worker who knew Korea so much better than I did (and who, a quarter-century on, is right now kindly proof-reading Yin Yang Tattoo). I decried Koreans as automatons, as sheep who traveled in mindless flocks without a stray thought crossing their rigid mindsets. [the weakness in the defence is glaring, I know, but I… 2010-04-12T07:27:59+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/02/2010/a_troubled_conscience/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/02/2010/a_troubled_conscience/ My conscience is bothering me. What’s the use of a blog if you don’t write it? I have never had any problem with mitigating circumstances. With generating and reaching for and spouting them without shame, I mean, and these days are no different. Distractions? I embrace them with as much passion as I apply to that which is evidently more important. And so I sit at my lovely big walnut desk - did I tell you about my desk? - wondering why the list of things achieved in recent weeks looks so threadbare, and consider another escapist tootling session on… 2010-02-21T03:30:59+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/12/2009/soi_26/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/12/2009/soi_26/ I am coming to understand, and certainly to appreciate, that I presently live in a village. A village in the middle of a sprawling city the exact size of which no-one seems able to accurately estimate, but a village nonetheless. I mentioned before that Sukhumvit is not only the best-known street in Bangkok, it is the most renowned in all of Thailand. Stretching as it does all the way from downtown Bangkok to somewhere near the eastern border with Cambodia (about 400 km away), its fame and familiarity is in some ways synonymous with the nation it dissects. I… 2009-12-10T15:23:19+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/11/2009/onward_bound/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/11/2009/onward_bound/ In a little over twelve hours I’ll be airborne, initial destination the cheerless temple to duty free consumption that is the giant Dubai Airport, where the two-hour connection gap should pass quickly enough, middle of the night or not. After that comes the seven-hour leg to Bangkok, and a much delayed reunion with what is to all intents and purposes home. What was initially meant to be a two-month spell in darkest Paisley while I sought out a couple or three writing projects somehow stretched to just over eight months; some of the delays were self-inflicted, though others were work-related,… 2009-11-14T23:57:25+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/10/2009/never_say_no/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/10/2009/never_say_no/ Never say no to a challenge, since only if you fail will you realise that perhaps you ought not to have taken it on in the first place. And by then it will be too late. Not particularly wise words, but I did just bash them out on a whim. Something of a whim on the part of a TV director friend sees me approaching a journey deep into the unknown world of writing for film. About nine months ago, Jim emailed me saying he had an oilman in Aberdeen who had money burning a hole in his pocket, fancied… 2009-10-24T10:45:59+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/10/2009/seoul_saigon_sauchiehall/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/10/2009/seoul_saigon_sauchiehall/ In thirty largely itinerant years, I have been blessedly free from misfortune of the criminal variety. Until today, I could say I had never had anything stolen, and that, so far as I could tell, I only twice suffered attempts to divest me of belongings. Yet there has been something of a symmetry to the occasions, one each in the 1980s, the 1990s, and, as of today, one in the ‘noughties’. The nightlife district of Itaewon in Seoul in the mid-80s was a pleasure-seeker’s bonanza of restaurants, bars, nightclubs, bars, cathouses and more bars besides. The action on the road… 2009-10-01T21:47:19+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/09/2009/james_ellroy_speaks_out/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/09/2009/james_ellroy_speaks_out/ My thanks go to my good friend and writer Charles Martin in Seattle for sharing with me this online radio interview with James Ellroy. Hearing him speak explains a lot about his writing style. The following link should take you to the correct page, after which you may have to click on the Ellroy link on the right side of the page: James Ellroy interview. Charlie kindly transcribed one of the many great quotes from the interview: I love rewriting American history to my own specifications. You get… 2009-09-21T16:30:31+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/09/2009/intellectual_snobbery_works_both_ways/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/09/2009/intellectual_snobbery_works_both_ways/ Independent Scottish publisher Two Ravens Press does an admirable job of keeping a topical book-related blog well stoked, and last week it turned to the never-ending grudge match that is Literary Fiction vs. Genre Fiction. This was prompted by a well-timed and fiery outburst in the Herald newspaper from Scotsman James Kelman, one of the great names in British literary fiction today, bemoaning what the Herald called “a commercialised literary scene in thrall to Harry Potter and Rebus”. So far as Kelman is concerned, the ‘Scottish literary… 2009-09-04T22:54:40+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/08/2009/books_that_changed_my_life/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/08/2009/books_that_changed_my_life/ Not one, but two books changed my life – and continue, more than three decades later, to affect it. They could hardly be more different. During an early-70s library visit my Dad surprised me (I was in my early teens) by suggesting a book with a lurid period cover dominated by a statuesque, suntanned blonde wearing cowboy boots. A Purple Place for Dying was one of more than twenty ‘Travis McGee’ novels by American author John D. MacDonald, and from it grew a lifelong passion for the oft-maligned genre that… 2009-08-19T15:55:23+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/08/2009/inspirations_past/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/08/2009/inspirations_past/ Recent days have been brightened by the renewal of email dialogue with Paul S., an old friend and fellow-wanderer who, it must be said, could talk the hinds legs off the proverbial beast of burden – but with whom I have always enjoyed blethering about books in particular. When I first met him more than 25 years ago, it was somehow prophetic that the encounter took place in a library in downtown Seoul. Paul is a man who, if you dropped him in the middle of the Gobi Desert, bound, gagged and tied in a sack, would make a friend… 2009-08-07T10:46:24+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/07/2009/all_pink_and_shiny/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/07/2009/all_pink_and_shiny/ I was in a police car chase once. In China in 1997, while returning to Beijing from a photography assignment in the boonies. It happened at the end of two tiring days travelling to and from a rural high school funded by a client hoping to forever embed in rural Chinese kids the cool factor in drinking tooth-destroying branded sugar drinks. The day of the chase started painfully early, with a last few hours of numbingly predictable PR photography endured before climbing back aboard an ageing Toyota Crown for the four-hour haul back to Beijing. Like most drivers, I know… 2009-07-17T11:05:09+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/06/2009/toe_by_toe_behind_bars/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/06/2009/toe_by_toe_behind_bars/ Toe by Toe ‘Behind Bars’ The daily newspaper in my Central Scotland home town covers the issue of crime in the community with a degree of virulence that surely constitutes preaching to the choir. Those convicted of crimes against its (invariably ‘tragic’) reader victims are roundly condemned as ‘evil’, and are not jailed, but ‘caged’ and put ‘behind bars’, never mind that it is decades since there were bars on British jail cells. These are times when the people in our prison system are hardly flush with public concern for their welfare or rehabilitation, and jail terms are roundly mocked… 2009-06-15T13:36:04+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/06/2009/two_wheeled_frolics/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/06/2009/two_wheeled_frolics/ I went cycling in Bangkok, once. A city so big that nobody seems able to say to any degree of accuracy how many people actually live there (estimates vary from three to eight million) might not strike you as a place particularly well-suited to recreational cycling. And even if you discount over-population you’d still be right, for no reason other than the climate. Bangkok is so stifling that I have seen Asia virgins, fresh from Europe, wilt under waves of perspiration that continued for the entire duration of their stay. Thais, meanwhile, confound us by somehow being able to… 2009-06-05T13:46:48+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/05/2009/digital_wins_hands_down/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/05/2009/digital_wins_hands_down/ Near-horizontal in a room with old-fashioned ceiling cornices so familiar that I could just about reproduce them from memory was an odd time to experience something of an epiphany. Here was an interior defaced by four decades of negative associations encompassing everything from feigned indifference to eye-flashing indignation, ritual humiliation and yep, even pant-threatening trepidation – and I was having original thoughts. I don’t normally associate visits to the family dentist with the entertainment of epiphanies. The moment when the good Mr Torquemada set aside blunt instruments and rotated a computer flatscreen to show me the exact state of peril… 2009-05-24T15:01:25+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/05/2009/beijing_spring_20_years_on/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/05/2009/beijing_spring_20_years_on/ I find myself once again glimpsing snapshots from fading memories, the current ones inspired by a newspaper that got the jump on the opposition by running a Remember Tiananmen news feature. The feature coincided with the anniversary, not of the armoured cars arriving in the square in the early hours of June 4th 1989, but of the spontaneous gatherings after the April 15th passing of Party reformer Hu, Yao-bang that spawned the later demonstrations. On April 22nd 1989, despite the fact that I was several hundred miles away, the news reached me by word of mouth. I was on a… 2009-05-09T20:50:04+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2009/jaded_traveller_not_me/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2009/jaded_traveller_not_me/ It was only the other day that an impending personal milestone occurred to me. 2009 marks the end of my third decade on the move. Granted, my definition of ‘itinerant’ conveniently encompasses periods with a solid home base (nine different countries on three continents), but even then I never really stopped moving.  Everywhere that has ever been ‘home’ for more than a few weeks exercises a sentimental grasphold upon me, and even those not re-visited in more than a quarter century retain a special status. Yet none has a stronger grip right now than Shetland, the subject of… 2009-04-24T13:56:40+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2009/reds_plus_yellows_equals_bangkok_blues/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2009/reds_plus_yellows_equals_bangkok_blues/ Friends surmised recently that I must have been glad to be anywhere but Bangkok. They were surely fooled by blanket news coverage from the Thai capital that ran the gamut from mildly sensationalised to sickeningly cynical. One Scottish newspaper was so desperate for a local tie-in that it trod the hackneyed, parochial road and tracked down a family of Scots holidaymakers who, it transpired, were delighted to be the centre of a non-story. And so a family foursome snapshot, soon to hold pride of place in a Glasgow scrapbook, graced a two-page spread amongst photographs of burning buses,… 2009-04-15T22:35:53+00:00 http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2009/whether_weather/ http://www.sandstonepress.com/blogs/ronmcmillan/04/2009/whether_weather/ People ask how I like being back in Scotland again after yet another long stretch in Asia, and what ought to be an innocent enquiry often seems larded with preconceptions. Even after thirty years of coming and going, I am struck by how the question arrives laden with the implication that so much about life here is somehow rather dreadful. Perhaps if I was here for the long-term, unable to cling to the pleasing prospect of being re-united with Asia within the coming months, I might share such negativity. But that I do not means some of my views come… 2009-04-08T21:26:09+00:00