Left Coast Crime 2019 by Cathy Ace (Toastmaster!)

I think Terry’s response yesterday to this week's question is pretty much along the lines I’d have adopted…but…since I have just returned home from Left Coast Crime, Vancouver 2019: Whale of a Crime, where I was honoured to be Toastmaster, please forgive me for going off-script this week.

Four years ago I (somehow) managed to convince Linda McNab and Colleen Glynn to put in a bid to allow Left Coast Crime to come to Vancouver. Their bid was accepted (no thanks to me – I did nothing but cajole them) and last week the event took place. And I think it all went rather well!

L to r: Colleen Glynn, Linda McNab, me - back in 2014 just before our plans for LCC 2019 began!

The Hyatt Regency - half way toward the water on the left!

 As Toastmaster, it’s not expected that a person gets involved with the actual organization of a convention, but – because I was “to blame” (their words!) Linda and Colleen involved me every step of the way. We first visited the Hyatt regency in Downtown Vancouver over three years ago, and I was impressed by their facilities. Since then there have been a million little things to sort with them, then last week we discovered how good their facilities, service, attention to detail and commitment to our event really was – they were excellent! And the banquet team did us proud too – the general response to the setting, food and service was extremely positive. PHEW! 

Oh, and Vancouver herself put on her glad rags for the convention – the sun shone the entire time, the cherry blossom…blossomed and the daffodils and tulips glowed happily in their urban setting. Those who took the side trips to tour the city, over to Vancouver Island on the ferry or out to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC all had a wonderful time. Oh how the sun makes everything look and feel so much better!

The convention had over 200 authors in attendance, and around 700 attendees in total. There were so many panels most of us wished we could clone ourselves and the Guests

Muggin' it up! 2 Minds, one aim - FUN!

of Honour were interviewed in fine style. I was extremely nervous about being interviewed, but Catriona McPherson (yes, OUR Catriona) was gentle and kind. She’d more than done her homework, and her questions allowed me to talk about my work, and give a few insights into my life too. I felt a huge weight lift when the interview was over – I’m not used to being quizzed…I think I prefer to be the quizzer!

A special event was M is for Memories: Sue Grafton Remembered. Sue was delighted to be told she was being given a Lifetime Achievement Award by LCC back in 2017, but her sudden and untimely death in December that year

meant the award was presented posthumously to her daughter. I was delighted (and somewhat nervous) to be the person given the responsibility of organizing this memorial, so I did my best…and it seemed to be well received. I know people laughed, and I saw people cry. Perfect! Her daughter was gracious and a smashing person.

L to R: Me (host) with the guest speakers I invited to participate and Sue's daughter: Barbara Peters (Poisoned Pen Bookstore), Maureen Jennings (Canadian GOH), Jamie Clark (Sue Grafton's daughter), Jim Ziskin (our very own! and Lefty Nominee), Kellye Garrett (Lefty Nominee), Ovidia Yu (award-winning author, in from Singapore)

An important part of the weekend is the chance to raise funds for a local charity. This year One-to-One Literacy BC was

MaryJane Maffini won the quilt

selected; they make arrangements for those who are left behind in terms of literacy skills to be given a helping hand, and work with over 100 schools in British Columbia. In total we raised over $7700 – which, even though it’s Canadian dollars – is a good sum of money! Donna Andrews did a great job as auctioneer, as did those who provided items for the silent auction and the quilt raffle. 

The Lefty Awards are voted on by conventioneers during the convention. This year, 7 Criminal Minds had three nominees: James Ziskin and Terry Shames were both up for Best Historical Novel, and Catriona McPherson was up for Best Humorous Novel. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that Catriona won! 

Photo of Catriona by Kay Kendall

Congratulations to her for her now-award-winning novel “Scot Free” (which I’ve read, and is indeed hilarious).

The final panel of the convention featured all the Guests of Honour, and was one where I didn’t have to do any prep – because Matt Coyle – who’ll be Toastmaster when LCC is held in San Diego in 2020 – was moderating. It was a delight!

Overall – it most certainly is an honour to be Toastmaster, and there are, of course, responsibilities that go along with the title. Now that LCC 2019 is in the books, I’m able to look back and remember all the good times last week…and hope that Linda and Colleen forgive me for persuading them that “they could do it”! Well, they did, and they did a great job of it. 

L to R: Matt Coyle (Toastmaster 2020), Cathy Ace, CJ Box (US Guest of Honour), Maureen Jennings (Canadian Guest of Honour), William Deverell (Local Legend), Don and Jenn Longmuir (of Scene of the Crime Books, Fan Guests of Honour)

One final point - I know you might have seen it on Monday, courtesy of Susan, but I'm also including the photo we managed to get with a LOT of Minds in it! It's more than ironic that we never managed to get Danny into a group photo when he was actually blogging with us, and that we have managed to snag him now he's an Alumnus!  

L to R: Susan Shea, Terry Shames, Jim Ziskin, Cathy Ace, Brenda Chapman, Catriona McPherson, Danny Gardener

So here's me, saying thanks to everyone who came to LCC 2019, thanks to the hard-working, long-suffering Linda and Colleen for choosing me to be Toastmaster, and a BIG thank you to my husband...he's never been to one of these conventions before and was a bit overwhelmed by how many people were there, and how lovely they all were. Oh, and he took the photo of me at the start of this blog post, which I actually like (I never like photos of myself!). Cheers, folks!

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Metaphors in the Attic

READING: What book did you not enjoy, but motivated you in your own writing?

by Catriona 

This is timely. In the last month I've given up on a recent hit crime novel  - lauded as "original", "a triumph", "blisteringly real", "utterly compelling", "beautiful"  and "astonishingly good" . . . I made it to page fifty before breaking my "give it a hundred pages" rule over my knee and throwing both bits behind me.

Then I read Flowers in The Attic.  Oy, oy, oy.

Flowers in The Attic was yet another bit of American popular culture I felt I'd missed out on that would be worth catching up with. And enough reliable pals praised it - looking at you, Kristopher Zgorski - for me to give it a go.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The incest - consensual between siblings, not child abuse by an adult - was believable in the context and served as evidence of the mess these kids were in. BUT the lingering over the details was still - here comes a literary theory analysis - icky. And I learned nothing. I already knew that the authorial stance you take in relation to potentially titillating details is crucial.

Then - seriously, SPOILERS - one of the kids died. A little boy with golden curls who'd tamed a mouse and learned to play the banjo . . . died.  Not since I switched off that episode of season one of The Wire and sat staring at the black telly screen, have I been so reluctant to believe what my eyes just told me. "Maybe he's been hidden? They didn't see the body. Keep reading."

But no. He died. I didn't exactly learn anything from that. I already knew it was wrong because Stephen King (curtsy) said, on a discussion about the difference between a short story and a novel - "Misery" or Misery -  that "no one wants to root for a guy over three hundred pages only to discover that between chapter sixteen and chapter seventeen . . ."

Of course, little Cory wasn't the hero of FitA. But still there was something off-kilter about his death and its aftermath. It served as a reminder that if you're going to kill a child in fiction, you need to get it right. I think it can't be tidy, facile, quickly handled, plotty, or convenient. It can't be a lesson. It shouldn't have the look of a fridge-magnet homily.  

I think if you're going to kill a fictional kid it should be like that episode of The Wire. It should be shocking. 

But what I really learned from FitA was the importance of pacing. And that's a lesson I badly need*. The book - after Cory's death - fell off a cliff. The plot start to move faster and faster and the resolution I'd been rooting for for three hundred pages wasn't just rushed. It was cursory. I was left with the suspicion that, sometime towards the end of the writing, Andrews got the idea that it was going to be a series and didn't want to leave herself with nothing to say in book two.

I have no evidence for that. But I took it to heart anyway. Forget the career. When you finish a book you should be completely spent; everything on the page and nothing up the sleeve.

*My editor fixes the results of this habit of mine before anyone else ever sees it, by the way. I close the draft with a bang. She pleads for another chapter or two. I moan and do them. She's right. I'm wrong. The book is better than the draft was.

So, all in all, I'm glad I read Flowers in the Attic. I could have lived a happy life without the image of that amaryllis stalk swelling into a plump bud, mind you. That was worse than Hitchcock's worst.

Should have left it here, Hitch.

And the recent "vivid gem", "tragic and brave", "poignant" and "unputdownable"? It was a debut. And it taught me to stop worrying that I maybe don't have another book in me after twenty five of the things have come out of me. Instead, I'm going to be glad I'll never write a first book again.

The Name of the Prose

Business - Overheard at Bouchercon in Florida last month: "I don't write series *or* standalones; I write books." Do you love/hate/mind/notice/use/ignore the publishers' and booksellers' classifications of your work?

by Catriona

When I first met my good friend Eileen Rendahl (aka Lillian Bell, Kristi Abbott, and Eileen Carr) eight years ago, we were mutually intimidated. She hated me before she even clapped eyes on me because I was European and she thought I'd be toffee-nosed (she might not have used that exact phrase) and I was dumbstruck by the answer she gave to my first question.

"What do you write?" I asked.

"Urban fantasy, romantic suspense and chick lit," she replied, revealing that not only did she write in three genres but she knew what they were.

My elevator pitch for my first book was "It's about some people". 

We're over it now.

I always knew I was writing crime fiction and was happy proud to be included in the venerable list of Scottish crimewriters: Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, William McIlvanney, Val McDermid  . . . My little country punches far above its weight. It took a while to be able to call myself a mystery author with the same confidence, but now I'm completely bilingual.

Inside the genre, things were always less certain. If someone unconnected to publishing asks you what you write, I think it's better to name some names and set yourself among them than to bamboozle with sub-sub-sub genre titles. So I'll say "Do you like Dorothy L Sayers? You might like Dandy Gilver." Or "Do you like Janet Evanovich? You might like Lexy Campbell."

But if someone from the publishing and writing world asks what you write, it's a bit daft not to know and it's a wee bit precious to make out that your work defies classification, isn't it? I'd be nervous of claiming wild originality for anything I wrote in case there was a well-known and identical book that I'd somehow not heard of.  Like that time I wrote a time-travel love story and thought surely no one . . . then Audrey Niffenegger published The Time Traveller's Wife. (I've still not read it because I'm still sulking.)

If I was the boss of all this - and I'm not; I'm barely the boss of me - I'd say Dandy Gilver was in the tradition of the presposterous 1930s detective genre. That should be a real category.

And I'd say Lexy Campbell and the Last Ditch were crime capers. I much prefer that title to "humourous mysteries" because "humourous mysteries" is such a humourless expression.

When it comes to the standalones I can't improve on what I do call them, when forced to. "They're those crime suspense domestic noir psychological thriller things. You know the ones I mean." And guess what. People usually do.

my new mystery, coming later this month

My new crime novel, also coming later this month

My Dear Watson

"Are there archetypes in crime fiction you wouldn't be without? Are there any you'd happily never meet again?"

By Catriona

I do love a sidekick. Holmes' Watson, Poirot's Hastings, Wimsey's Bunter, Myron's Win . . . the supporting character saves us ploughing through a lot of internal pondering and delivers instead my favourite element in any novel: dialogue.

"I wondered how much longer I could spin out this one drink, when the barman would swipe the glass with its puddle of ice-water out from my grip and show me the door."

OR

"Don't drink so fast."
"We're on expenses."
"Who pays the expenses, genius? Oh God, here comes the barman. Spit those ice-cubes out and let them melt."
"I'll share them if you don't stop bugging me."

I know which I prefer.

Some traditional sidekicks bumble and make the hero look even more dashing and heroic (Hastings and Watson himself), some do the technical stuff that's never going to make a scene sizzle (Bunter with his camera and his insufflator), and some do the dastardly deeds that might need done but which would tarnish the hero's halo beyond all re-buffing. Win, in Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar series, is a psychopath by any way of reckoning. He's got a little wart on his psychopathy, granted, in that he loves Myron. But for the rest of us, who're not Myron? I'd rather spill Tony Soprano's drink than Windsor Horne Lockwood III's. Wouldn't you?

In my own writing, Dandy Gilver's sidekick, Alec Osborne, does the dull bits and spars with the heroine but he's not a bumbler. They get a pretty fair share of the lightbulb moments each (I think), and their crotchety, competitive, nearly good-humoured dialogues are the most fun I ever have writing these books.

When I started a new series (SCOT FREE: out in the US this Sunday!) it was supposed to be an ensemble piece. There's the heroine, Lexy Campbell, and six more people - wait, seven - who she befriends at the outset of her first case, when she checks into the Last Ditch Motel. By about a third of the way through, one of the seven had become her Watson.  And looking back now, it was inevitable from the get-go. Lexy meets Todd when he barges into her motel room, demanding that she help him dispose of a spider.

“Tis gone,” I said, coming back into my own room. Todd was under the covers again.

“I heard the faucet. Did you just wash it down the plughole? Because they come back.”

“I didn’t just wash it away,” I told him. “It’s dead.”

“What did you- No! Don’t tell me! But what did you- No!”

“It’s not out the window. It’s not in your bin. It’s not over the rail. It’s not back here with me. It’s gone.”

“Gone where? Don’t tell me!”

“Okay,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go. I need to bail a friend out of jail this morning and I’m running late.”

“Would you like to borrow a hat?” said Todd.

‘It’s too hot to wear a hat,” I said.

“Hot?” said Todd. “It’s not going to be hot today. I’ll get a hat for you,” he added, standing. “The judge is never going to let your friend walk free with your hair like that."

He's got a big heart, a big brain, a lot of free time, a car, and absolutely no boundaries. He's the perfect sidekick. I know I shouldn't say this about a character I wrote, but I love him.

Now, to the second half of the question. I was going to say I found "will-they-won't-they" a bit played out, but then I remembered Robert Galbraith's novels (three and tapping my foot: where's the fourth?). They've got a terrific hero in the shambling, ex-army misfit, Cormoran Strike, but I find Robin just as compelling and the relationship between the two has breathed new life into the venerable crime-fiction trope of unresolved sexual tension. The genius of the Strike novels is that none of the tension is in the characters. They're just offered to us: Strike with his horrible ex, and his ill-judged one-night stands; Robin with her passive-aggressive fiance and her kindness. It's us, the readers, who're screaming at them to go for it. Maybe it's just me. But I'm screaming pretty loud.

Just Add Elvis.

"How do you come up with titles? Do they change during the writing process?'

By Catriona.

Like Cathy yesterday, I'm sticking to titles because the process of naming characters is so different from the process of naming books. A character name comes while I'm writing, like the fourth name of the cat, from profound meditation and rapt contemplation. (see T.S.  Eliot's "The naming of cats" here).

The name of a book, in contrast, comes once the book's written. And it comes in various ways.

A: from a message exchange between me and Terri Bischoff (Midnight Ink) that goes like this:

C: Hang My Hat okay?
Terri: Sales don't love it. What else you got?
C: Lexy, Last Ditch, Last Ditch for Lexy, Caledonia Dreamin', Lexy and The Last Ditch.
Terri: Nah.
C: I dunno. A pun?
Terri: Likes of plaid, tartan? Are you serious about the Jimmy Wig? Even with no hat in the title?  I like the woman floating in the pool.
C: I do love a drunk woman in a duct-taped inflatable. Oh! Oh! Oh! Loch Ness Monster inflatable!
T: LMAO. What's the title.
C: Oh yeah. Scot Free? Forget I said that.
T: YES!
C: No way. I was just thinking aloud.
T: I love it.
C: Oh God.

B. A short text exchange between me and Krystyna Green (Little,Brown) that goes like this:

K: House.Tree.Person is the worst title I've ever heard. It's just three random words. Can you give me something better in twenty minutes?
C: Ha!
C: (twenty minutes later) Angels Unaware, The Dance of Angels, The Weight of Angels.
K: Weight of Angels! Ta.

Coda:
C: (emails Terri Bischoff): London is calling HTP The Weight of Angels. Waddaya think?
T: Won't work in the US market. Buyers will think it's real angels.
C: Real angels?
T: Inspirational Christian fiction.
C: Oh, jeez. It's really not.
T: House.Tree.Person is a great title.

C: Phone call with Francine Toon (Hodder & Stoughton)

F: Dandy word, crimey word, plotty word.
C: Dandy word, crimey word, plotty word.
F: Dandy Gilver and a Dandy word . . .
C: And a crimey word . . .
F: Dandy Gilver and  . . . unseemly, appalling, dreadful, distressing.
C: fearful, frightful, rather.
F: corpse, death, body, murder, crime, clue. And a plotty word.
C: Nun, convent, orphan, habit.
F: Ooooh, habit!
C: Dandy Gilver and The Rather Unseemy Habit?
F: But church people with bad habits? And an orphanage?
C: OMG. No way. That's dreadful. So not unseemly, or distressing, appalling and all that if it's habit.
F: Mysterious.
C: Misleading.
F: DANDY GILVER AND A MOST MISLEADING HABIT!

(Note: this book has been called The Nuns in every email since that day. )

The only one I still pine for was my working title on a book that ended up being called Growing Up Again. It was a time-travel caper - think Forrest Gump joins Friends Reunited on Groundhog Day - and I called it SAVE ELVIS. which is job one for a time traveller. Well, the publisher wasn't having it. I tried. I even handed out questionnaires to the core demographic readership asking which title they preferred. (They preferred Save Elvis.) But the publisher thought Elvis was a forgotten and,  even if remembered, then a sad, old, dead man. No good for a caper.

When Growing Up Again was published there had just been a self-help book out called Growing Up Again: parenting our children, parenting ourselves. Deeply caper-free. And at the launch event, the bookshop staff - in all innocence - set me up in front of a display for a new Elvis biography. Oy. God bless my mum for her sense of humour too. She always bakes a book cake. Here's the cake for Growing Up Again:

I'm still glad it happened, though, because no title change since then has had the power to hurt me. Whether it's a skoosh like the upcoming Go To My Grave. which was my working title and is a go in the UK and US, or a struggle like Lexy Campbell Bk 2 (watch this space) it rolls off me like split mayo.

Scot Free: 8th April (US only) Midnight Ink
Go To My Grave: 23rd October Minotaur (US) Little,Brown (UK)
The new Dandy? We're still having Dandy word, crimey word, plotty word phone calls.

The Reek of Wrong Titles and Character Names

Q: How do you come up with titles and character names? Do they change during the writing process?

- from Susan

CAPTAIN AHAB’S GREAT ADVENTURE

THE WHALE AND THE SEA CAPTAIN

ISHMAEL’S STORY

ONCE UPON A WHITE WHALE

A: Titles are tough for me. When forced to submit one I think is lame and that surely my publisher can improve, I’m rattled when they say, “Oh, I like that.” I admire authors who come up with good ones, time and time again. But nobody does it for me, alas, so I struggle. If anyone out there wants to chime in when the next book is close to submission, I will be absurdly grateful.

Names are another thing. They matter so much to me as a writer, to the book’s credibility, to the reader’s satisfaction as being believable. Because my lazy brain tends to sample and re-sample typical Anglo-Saxon options, I have taken to looking at online resources: names from a specific year – unpopular as well as popular – , surnames from other countries that may help readers see my characters as coming from a particular culture, and the occasional need for a name that starts with a letter not already used by one of my characters.

Emma

Mrs. Poliver

Jane

Precious

Gwendolyn

Bianca

Right now, I’m struggling because the protagonist’s name I settled on after two other choices starts with the same letter as her surname, which I love and don’t want to alter, and her fiancé’s, which I will change. I wasn’t crazy about it anyway. He is Anglo-Saxon and from a prominent New York family, and of another time, so there’s more research ahead of me. From Charles to…? (No, not Percival or Peregrine. I’m not trying for humor.)

I recently read a book I liked quite a lot, except that the protagonist’s name grated on me every time the author used it. To me, it seemed absolutely wrong for who she was, her age and her background, and my bias kept me at a distance from the story as a result. That’s an entirely subjective reaction. I don’t for a minute blame the author, whose own history, nostalgic recollections, or family names might have given her a completely different reaction to the name when she tried it out. No names will please everyone all the time. Late at night, scrolling down lists on Google, I remind myself of that. And I thank the Word programmers for the search-and-replace function, which makes the change of name after a ‘eureka’ moment so easy.

So, names matter. Title matter. And if I knew exactly how any why they matter to readers and editors, I’d share it with you. But I bet you know perfectly well when an author hits the mark: The Reek of Red Herrings, anyone?

Take one vulture . . .

How do you set real life aside and connect with the imaginary worlds you create? And how long do you write each day/week?

by Catriona

I've been scraping round the dusty corners of my brain trying to work this out for the last ten minutes - gazing out the window at a bit of dead wood sticking up, that looks like a perching vulture. Or maybe a small hawk. But I'm a crimewriter, so vulture. Which would be a terrible way to find a corpse in your garden, wouldn't it? You're admiring a bird, wondering why it's sitting there so patiently . . . How many vultures would have to assemble before you went to see what had drawn them to that spot?

In short, that might be the wrong question. The puzzler is "How do you set aside the imaginary worlds you create and connect with real life?" And it's a problem teachers started suggesting I work on when I was five. "Dozy Daisy Dreamboat" what what Miss Shaughnessy called me. Fair comment.

But trying again to address the topic: I think a sharp division with no blurring is key for me. I need my emerging fictional world to be all mine, with no input from anyone in the real world. That way, no one outside my head uses the book title and/or character names, or chats about any of the events. So I can step from my real life to the rooms, streets and clifftops of my work in progress without having to pack anything. And I can step back again without bringing souvenirs. 

I'd hate to have to remember what someone (real) said over coffee about my character's motives, or report on progress in the fictional world when I was done with it for the day. Brrrrr. Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

The weird moment comes when the book's done and I do let other people in. Every time, I get a kind of vertigo when my agent says "What I loved about Gloria-" or "Why did Lowell-" as if she's read my mind. 

By the time the book's out, I'm over it and I'm happy for any reader to have any opinion on anything. I'm no longer the boss of that world. Most readers of The Day She Died disagree pretty fundamentally with me about a certain plot point and it's never bothered me. 

Oh wait, though: a recent reader of Come To Harm asked me for a detail I didn't put in the book and I didn't know. I asked her what she thought and she came up with such a perfect, elegant, lighter-than-air detail that I wished I'd known in time to write it in. 

I don't know if I've just re-invented beta-readers or if that incident supports my furtive control-freakery. I mean, maybe it's only because I protect the world so much while I'm making it that it feels this real once I've made it. It's a complete world, with an answer for every question whether I know the answer or not. 

And how long do you write each day/week?

Much easier question! No gazing at stump-vultures required. Officially* I work from nine-ish till six-ish Monday to Friday, with some Post Office runs and a bit of travel time, if I'm headed for a coffee-shop. Of that probably half is actual writing. "Actual writing" means everything that happens before someone else sees the book. (Blimey, that really is the continental divide for me - I didn't realise before today.) So producing the first draft, researching the stuff I made up to put in it, adding the research, editing it down, re-reading the second draft, adding corrections, producing a third draft . . . Everything that happens after I hit "send" for the first time - structural edits, copy edits, line edits, proofs - is not "actual writing". 

*Unofficially, once a first draft has got some thermals under it and is floating free, I usually end up writing every day and can get my 2K words down in about three hours. I'm not there with this book yet. Here comes five hours of plodding.

Ae Fond Blog

Well, this is fortunate. It's free-for-all week at Criminal Minds and so I get to write whatever I want on the 25th of January of all days. It's an important one in the Scottish calendar, being the (258th) anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. 

Who? Robert Burns. Odds are if you asked a hundred Scots "Who's the greatest Scot who ever lived?" you'd get the answer "Rabbie" from most of them. (Even people who don't think they know who he is, do kind of know who he is because he wrote "Auld Lang Syne".)

So that's how I'm spinning this: he was a writer and this is a writing blog.  He wasn't a crimewriter, but he was passionately interested in justice. A man of such humble birth that his nickname was "the ploughman poet", he never had his head turned by success, but remained in sympathy with the most unfortunate and down-trodden in society and was their champion, railing against unfairness and lampooning pomposity.  

One of my favourite poems of his is "To a Mouse: on turning her up in her nest with the plough, November 1785". It can move me to tears. It made me ugly-cry when Neil recited the first verse to the wee mousie we caught in a cup in our kitchen.

wee sleekit, cowrin tim'rous beastie

The second verse goes: "I'm truly sorry man's dominion// Has broken Nature's social union// And justifies that ill opinion// Which makes thee startle// At me, thy poor, earth-born companion// An' fellow mortal!"

His whole philosophy is right there. I believe we need his humility, wisdom and compassion more than ever now, so many years after his birth. 

But Burns Night isn't all solemnity. There's food, drink, singing, drink, men in scratchy skirts, drink, toasts, drink and a few drinks to wash it all down. I love Burns Night and I love my American friends who've taken it to their hearts so completely, I'm not even homesick anymore.

Except in one crucial way. I have to make my own haggis! It's impossible to express how daft it seems to have to make your own haggis. It's like making your own cornflakes. It's like making your own jeans. No one in their right mind does it. And I've done it seven times now. 

I'm almost good at it. But I want to look back to the first time I tried and it went horribly wrong.

Some haggis ingredients: don't ask.

World’s first Haggis Transplant and Triflectomy (from January 2011)

Scots have a long history of medical innovation: Simpson and his chloroform; Fleming and his penicillin. Now McPherson joins them with a pair of linked surgical procedures. One is illustrated below. No one needs to see the other.

Scene: kitchen in Calfornia. 

Time: late January.  

V/O: In a worrrrrllllld without haggis, one woman is on a quest to track down liver, find out the Spanish for “sheep’s stomach” and learn how to flirt suet out of Mexican butchers before Burn’s night commmmmmmes.  This [pause] is her storyyyyyyy.

The Spanish for “sheep’s stomach” is oveja buce but I never found one. So I made my haggis in a pudding basin, like a clootie dumpling, and there began the problem. Haggis for twelve includes a kilo of oatmeal. Let me share a secret with you: oatmeal swells. A kilo of oatmeal swells a lot. And the bowl I’d set aside to steam my haggis in wasn’t up to the job. I’ve got a bigger bowl, but it had a rhubarb and ginger trifle under construction in it.

So, despite the mystery of the missing liver and the flirty suet, the biggest challenge of my first home-made haggis was performing a mid-gestation transplant and triflectomy. Big spoon! Fish Slice! Spatula! That thing with the holes!

Hey-up!

The patient recovered well and custard masked the scars. Then cream covered the custard. If only it had been dipped in batter and deep fried it would have been the perfect Scottish salad. (Just as well we’re good at medicine really.)

And the haggis was lovely.

Happy birthday, Rab. 

Happy Burns Night, everyone, for tonight and for Saturday, when I'm guessing most Burns suppers will be held (with drinks).

And remember: Your social status is just the pattern on the face of a coin. What you are inside is the gold the coin is made of.  I make a lousy poet, eh? Burns said it better: "The rank is but the guinea's stamp. The man's the gowd for a' that."