As a result, 160 posts were rescheduled and posted today as if new.

I have no idea why it did this, but I have disable both my Patreon plugin and my Bluesky cross post plugin and moved all the posts to ‘draft.’

I’m leaving everything as is as I’m moving to a new apartment tomorrow, and am packing tonight and tomorrow, but will spend some time on site clean up and fixing these things this weekend.

Again, my deepest apologies, particularly those who subscribed to this blog via email. This was insane. I know because copies of everything go to my own inbox, which is positively swamped.

So, so, sorry!

https://tobiasbuckell.com/a-move-to-scotland-the-prelude/

https://tobiasbuckell.com/a-move-to-scotland-getting-permission/

https://tobiasbuckell.com/moving-to-scotland-part-3-the-flat-from-hell/

https://tobiasbuckell.com/moving-to-scotland-part-4-the-good-stuff/

So what comes next for ye olde author?

I am working part time teaching creative writing at the MFA program at University of Southern Maine. That is basically half a salary, so I have a few months now to look for the other half.

It could be a novel contract (I have two novels, one very close, another a big fantasy needing a deep revision), it could be editing work. I am putting out feelers to offer development edits, and will revamp my site to offer those soon. To be honest, I’m putting out feelers.

I do want to build my overseas publishing. My career has been insular and American-centric for various accidents of fate. But the fact is, I have a whole bibliography that hasn’t really been published in the UK. I am going to be looking for ways to bring my books out into the UK market, and Europe as well.

I’d like to get back into writing, but the teaching has been bread and butter for a bit, and my CV is looking good there. I don’t know what is coming next, but we will be based in Stirling, Scotland. I can get to Glasgow in 35 minutes, Edinburgh in 35 minutes, both by train. I can also get to London in 6 hours by train. So I don’t know what is coming next, I need to get situated, update my resumes, and LinkedIN, and change my site to indicate I am for hire.

If you think you’d like to hire a Tobias S. Buckell I have:

• Published 15 novels and 150+ short stories in professional markets in the USA and much of that list is available for print in the UK.
• Taught writing at the graduate and undergraduate levels with waiting lists and recommendations to work with me from students who have.
• I have been a lead writer on ID’s DOOM: ETERNAL DLC 1.0 Gods and Monsters.
• Written episode pitches for TV (Amazon).
• Written a 15 minute film script for All Her Children Fought.
• Spent 15 years doing SEO for various websites and AOL.
• Spent 10 years designing eBooks for small presses.
• Attended Futurism conferences and think tanks (this summer I was a part of this year’s SETI/MIT Ultraintelligence Institute’s funded workshop on DysonSpheres).
• Wrote copy for many websites.

If an SF author who’s written books on climate change, is comfortable with design futures, knows a ton about how to architect stories of various kinds (including helping you tell design stories without the need for conflict but cooperation), I’m looking for work.

But on BlueSky I’ve been posting a bit about what I’ve been up to even despite the flat situation and temporary accommodations.

For one thing, since moving my acid reflux cleared up. Is that because of the food being less processed? Is it because I’m walking more every day? I don’t know. I went on a walk with Emily to see Ravenscraig Castle and then onto Dysart Harbor, which I loved.

On the way back from Stirling, on a whim, we visited The Falkirk Wheel, which has been on my bucket list for years:

I attended the British Fantasy Con in Glasgow two weekends ago, where I met many authors I’ve been wanting to chat with for years now. And enjoyed wandering around Glasgow a little:

And then this last weekend was a guest and panel moderator at PictCon.

It was at both of these cons that something happened that really blew me away. The Scottish SF and UK writing community just welcoming me in with open arms and enthusiasm that I could not have anticipated. In particular, the Scottish explained that I’m what the Scottish government, and society, calls a “New Scot.”

That is to say, a Scottish author told me at Glasgow in 2024 they were asked by the audience to define what a Scottish author is. And they said “someone who lives in Scotland and participates in the economy and culture of Scotland.”

I’ve been here barely a few weeks, and was being introduced as a New Scot to everyone.

I thought about this a lot as I was down in Edinburgh thrifting and picking up some books to read.

It is rare to be so wholly welcomed so quickly. One author asked what my first Scottish project would be.

So many authors I’ve met have offered to introduce me to people, help me navigate UK publishing, and just warmly welcome me. I went into Fantasy Con not really knowing anyone, and left the next day with a list of contacts and suggestions and a warm feeling of excitement about my future.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t felt hope in a while, I’ve just been… surviving.

And then we come to some of the other things that are giving me hope. Many wanted to know, what’s it like moving? What are the differences, how are you getting on?

We’re scared about finding jobs, and work, we’re nervous about that, and getting the kids into schools when they were expecting to only have a year left before uni.

But on the day to day, I’ve been surprised and hopeful because:

Groceries are cheaper. Like, a lot. I am going to estimate 50% of what we were paying, if we’re targeted, and use Lidl more, and use coupons and plan a bit, I think maybe even 40%. Fruit doesn’t molder in one day. The veggies are crisper. I’m told that there was more variety before Brexit and bette quality, but compared to the rural midwest (the cities have fresher and better, more money and clientele in bougie areas) I’m enjoying it. Things like veggies, fruit, and potatoes are cheaper. Essentials. I’m also finding a ton of vegan products that are cheaper, not more expensive as they are in the US.

Cellphones are radically cheaper. Our family plans are, total, about $18/month for all of us, with large data plans and we can tether the phones. It’s not even comparable. It had a 14 day cooling off period if I changed my mind.

Car insurance is cheaper. Almost half. Gas is way more (about $8/gallon), but I purchased the cheapest shitty car in all of Scotland for 1,500 pounds (a Chevy Spark with 55,000 miles on it). Once we’re settled we’d like to go car free to really save, but because we own the car cash and it gets 55mpg, it’s not as much a drag on finances. Also, there is a 30 day guarantee if anything is wrong with it. In Ohio I’ve literally had a transmission fall out the car a mile from the dealer… my issue. For a 100 pounds I have a 6 month warranty and don’t have to worry about it harming our finances by breaking down. That’s part of the consumer protections that Europe seems to have more of, and it means instead of feeling sick about buying something because I’ll be scared I made the wrong choice and will harm my family’s finances, I felt safe. Every car has a log book with all the repairs done, so there’s a history. There aren’t cars being sold held together with duct tape. We hope to sell it and be car free, but needed it to run around looking at places, and moving things, and car rentals here are so expensive that we were going to have to spend 1500 pounds either way, this came out cheaper.

Home internet will be cheap, and come with channels. We can get, for about $30 us, what $100 would be in the US.

NHS. There is rationing, I don’t want to overstate that I know there are issues and people are quick to explain them to me. But I was able to get my long covid medicine refilled, and the doctor did it by calling me on the phone and chatting. “Do I need to come in?” No, why would I, he talked to me like one adult to another, and sent the refill. Never met him. It did take 10 days to get the call, but in the US to get those meds it took me almost a year and so many visits.

When I refilled the meds, I walked into a Boots and gave my temporary address. They handed me the medicine. It’s fucking free in Scotland. I was paying hundreds a month for it. The doctor was outraged when I told him that. “The ingredients are just a few pounds, why do that to you?” he said. Without it, I get 2-3 hours of function. With it, 10+ hours. When I took one of my daughters to an appointment, people were complaining in the waiting room about the one hour wait. It felt no different to me than any normal visit I paid for back home, we’d have the same waiting room wait. I was so scared about the standard of care given what I’ve read, horror stories. The facilities are more humble, yes, we had to make appointments ahead, but the nurses and receptionists and doctors have been comparable so far.

There’s this app called Too Good to Go. You can sign up and get pastries, or whatever restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stories are going to toss at the end of day. That’s been fun on occasion, to get a mystery bag of whatever for a few pounds.

I don’t think we’re going to try to buy a place anytime soon, but mortgage brokers here have a fiduciary responsibility to the customer, and get audited to make sure they’re not giving bad advice.

I’m told gas and electric is really expensive, but electric is only slightly higher than Ohio because Ohio hides so many hidden charges in the bill that it’s not that far off. I’ll learn more about the gas and boiler prices this winter. But those constant hidden charges that everything in America has are gone, and it is amazing what that does to the constant background tension you have.

The homes are smaller, and that will be a challenge. The cars are smaller, the parking tiny, the roads harder to navigate.

But there is architecture, and places to visit, and more protections. I feel like people aren’t just things to be ground down as much, a feeling that’s already noticeable. I have access to two world class cities in Glasgow and Edinburgh with a short train ride. I’ve met such warm and welcoming people.

There’s a lot of niceness in the midwest, but a corporate-first inclination that make you feel dehumanized at every turn.

Here, I’ve encountered issues, but there’s a kindness, and a human-first system underlying the systems.

The moment it really became obvious to me was when I dropped a rental off at the edge of the town I’m temporarily in. It was at an Enterprise a mile outside the limits, on what I would call a state highway. We walked along the highway on a pavement (sidewalk) and crossed it a pedestrian crossing, walked along the path through some woods, and came out at a bus stop we used to catch a bus back to our VRBO. In the American midwest, I often cannot walk from one business next to each other to the other.

It was evident to me when I went to the Citizens Advice Bureau in town to discuss our temporarily homeless situation, and while they couldn’t help, did ask if I needed a referral to mental health help due to the stress of the situation.

There’s often a place for humans in the system, and I am feeling more and more human every day.

This is a big scary adventure. Will I make local friends at 47? Can I get a community again like I had in Ohio? Will we find jobs, will they be at all fulfilling in a way that teaching university has been? Will be ever be able to afford a home of our own again?

I don’t have answers.

But sitting on a bus the other day, looking out over vibrant green hills and seeing a hot air balloon meander over the desktop background-worthy landscape, I hope this works, because I feel optimistic about my chances for the first time in a long while, whereas in the US, even without ICE worries, I’ve just felt as if we were in a unsustainable spiral of things just getting worse from quarter to quarter.

Do you know what it takes to get cats into the UK if you don’t fly them in the hold? It takes flying to the EU first. The UK doesn’t allow you to have animals in the cabin, so my family didn’t feel great about that. We needed to get pet passports for the cats for both the UK and the EU, and our plan was to fly from Detroit to Amsterdam (8ish hours), then catch a ferry from Amsterdam to Newcastle, then drive to the flat in Kirkcaldy we’d been renting sight unseen.

When Emily, my wife, came back from the vet, we found that we only had EU paperwork. Not UK. And we didn’t have time to go back, as the paperwork had to be issued within 10 days of the flight, and my family had to be in the UK by the 20th for visa reasons.

I decided I was going to try to talk the cats through the border.

Worst case, they would end up in quarantine for three weeks.

We pulled 8 50lb check on pieces of luggage, 2 carry ons, and 4 backpacks, and 2 pet carriers through Detroit to check in and got the 8 check ins sent ahead. Got the cats verified, and then fly to Schipol with one cat unhappy the entire way as the four of us crammed into economy in a row.

I apologize to anyone on the flight who heard a pathetic big boy of a Siberian cat who resisted being drugged and sadly complained most of the way to Schipol. I don’t think any of us slept on the red eye flight. But we landed in Schipol on time, and we hauled all that luggage all the way across the length of Schipol, which had backed up lines due to, of all things, a security strike happening.

The cats were taken to a room and checked, and we took the luggage across Schipol to catch a van. We often had to move the luggage in stages, moving some of it over pavement to a place, leaving it with a kid, then going back to get the next back, and so on. Exhausting. But we were close! Almost there.

At the DFDS ferry dock, we moved our luggage into a waiting area and, nervously, checked the cats in. Since the EU pet passport has the same requirements as the UK pet passport, they shrugged and let us on. Then we had to move our luggage up a 3 story escalator and then up a slightly slanted 500 yard gang plank. Then we used a tiny two-person elevator on the ship to get the luggage to storage.

And we got into our ferry room for pets, had something to eat, watched the coast slip away, then pass through fields of giant wind turbines, before we were out to sea.

We slept hard, it had been a long 24 hours.

We woke up pulling into Newcastle. We were in the UK!

The cats were waved through!

The relief I felt as we piled our luggage into a rental van was immense.

I had a three hour drive ahead of me, and it had been at least ten years since I last drove on the left and navigated roundabouts, let alone in a van, but I’d opted for a full coverage insurance and was ready!

Excited even.

We drove through some of the most jaw-dropping coastal scenery on our way up to Kirkcaldy, and my excitement grew. The worst of it was over. We’d made it. I could breathe freely. Yes, a lot of work lay ahead to build new lives, but we’d gotten through the intense bit, right?

We got to the rental flat late Saturday.

It was dark, and we knew it was a humble place. We’d seen it as a landing spot, a way to get us into the UK. From there, we’d look for something better. But I couldn’t get the power turned on, I found some bills indicating the prior tenant had skipped out on months of payments, so the power company had locked down the power.

Defeated, we found a hotel to spend the weekend in. It was pretty much the last of the planned move money, so hit by two application fees for 3 family members, and renting for 18 months but not living there. But Monday would be better, I told myself.

On Monday, in the light of day, I got the power turned on, and we got into the flat.

On first glance, it was humble, old build, not too different from our first apartment as a couple.

But then, as I was getting the power on, my wife called out “are these T-shirts stuffed in the cracks for insulation?”

Indeed.

The fireplace had moldy pillows and bedding stuffed into it to stop the wind, and the sides were stuffed with T-shirts. The windows were open, we thought friends had aired out the place. No, half the windows blow open when the wind blows and wouldn’t shut. One had been shut with transparent tape, invisible to a video walk through, but visible when close. Another window was screwed shut with screws that stuck out several inches and had been painted over. The bathroom fan was so loud the entire flat was filled with the screech.

There was black mold in many places.

We were distraught by the condition, but rallied. This is was always going to be temporary until we found a good place to land, so let’s tidy it up for now then go looking.

We got to cleaning, I did mold remediation with products from the hardware store, we cleaned. For almost 7 hours.

And…

We slept on mattresses the first night, and as I tried to sleep, cigarette smoke from the apartment upstairs began to trickle through the un-insulated spaces into the flat. I have lung damage from a pulmonary embolism, so breathing began to be difficult. From below, the tanning salon’s chemicals began leaching up through the floor boards as well. By five in the morning I was having trouble breathing, and my lungs were in so much pain I was considering going to the hospital.

The next day we began strategizing. I called every letting agency in the area, and we found a short term let. But the price was crazy to have cats. But I needed somewhere I could breathe, and that we could be warm in and not exposed to mold. I found a short term rental, a VRBO, and got us in there, and then did a GoFundMe, which saved our asses as we’d used up our moving budget. We got the rental through to October 24th, and took all our suitcases and two cats into it.

I felt homeless.

I felt defeated.

But the generosity of everyone on the GoFundMe meant we had time to look for an apartment. Which I spent three weeks at. Every day calling, going to advice bureaus, anything I could think of. And finally, two apartments in Perth came up and put us on the short list.

We drove up right away, and just before that, Emily spotted a place in Stirling that popped up. I dashed off an application, and we saw the places in Perth. One felt… like the place we’d just left, but the windows did seal. The other was a good place, next to a golf course. And then the Stirling location reached out.

The next day we visited that one, and it was a proper apartment, and it was within walking distance of downtown Stirling, and the train station. That meant we could look for jobs in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, or Dundee (or Stirling). I filled out a mountain of details, and we got approved to move on the 21st, as long as we were okay with some remodeling going on after we moved in.

Abso-fucking-lutely. I wanted us to get stuck in somewhere, and to give my family some stability.

Today is the 20th, tomorrow we move in.

Finally, after two years of trying, and 10 weeks of intense work, living out of suitcases for 4 of those, with confused cats, I can say we will be living in Stirling, Scotland for the immediate future.

I’m really, really looking forward to it.

And in part four, I’ll explain why I think it is going to be good.

To immigrate, I needed to apply for a Spousal Visa.

That turned into a two year ordeal that almost broke me. The plan had been to move shortly after the inauguration, maybe that summer, so that our daughters would have two years of high school, a gap year, then university.

First of all, during the Tory rule and fears about immigrants breaking out, the government changed immigrating on a Spousal Visa to include the estimated price of the NHS to be pre-paid for all family members, and raised the fees tremendously. So the application costs thousands of pounds, and then you have to prepay even more thousands of pounds for the NHS fee. You will then have the NHS taxes also deducted, so immigrants to the UK pay double. Bringing a family is about 14,000 pounds. Oh, the application fee is non-refundable (6,000 pounds total), the NHS charge is refundable.

We initially applied, but then the law changed, and the center we showed up to do biometrics for had shut that day in Columbus (and by then also had an armed US Border Patrol or immigration [forget which] person watching Fox on TV and laughing about people being rounded up, honest, not even making that up). We were able to cancel and get a refund, but then had to start over again.

At this point I tried to engage the services of a lawyer to help us fill it all out and apply. That lawyer said yes, we had a Zoom meeting, and then they just… ghosted us. I put the application together on my own.

Our first official application went out, and we paid an extra thousand pounds each for a quick decision.

It came back that summer. Denied.

Why?

Well, there were 4 different mistakes I found on the denial.

1) It didn’t consider my work from home income, which I documented and proved. 2) it didn’t consider all our savings, just some. 3) it misclassified the application from a spousal visa to a humanitarian refugee application, and 4) something else I can’t remember and don’t want to look up because the whole thing gives me PTSD. Oh, it also claimed we’d applied in 1979, on my wife’s birthday.

We consulted with a lawyer that had been recommended to us, and they said that due to all the clear mistakes, we could try to take it to a judge to get a second look, but it would be expensive, more than just re-applying, and take longer than just re-applying. We took the 9,000 pound hit and started over again. I was so sick about the loss of money I was actually sick to my stomach for days.

Our second application went in over the winter, after reading as much as I could and looking over successful applications, and spending weeks on it checking it over many times because I’m ADHD, we sent it in. Our biometrics were done in February of 2026.

And we waited.

And we waited.

Summer came around. We waited.

May, I started calling. Where was the status? In process. Just wait.

Every week in June. In process.

In July. In process.

By now two summers had gone by, and estimates on what we could get for selling our home had lowered.

My stress levels, after two years of this, were so extreme I could barely sleep. ICE raids were growing, more violence was on the news. I wanted to know for sure what we were doing.

I finally, in desperation, reached out to a member of parliament. Because this whole time we’d been paying for renting a flat, a requisite part of the application. More money we could ill afford. The MP, at the end of July, after I filled out some paperwork, was able to tell us in just a week that there was indeed, actually a decision made.

What was that decision?

I had to fill out more paperwork.

A week later, the Home Office sent us a copy of the PDF approval.

Guess what? They mistyped our email address in, and because it was fat-fingered, we never got the approval.

Sent on May 12th.

Only an email. No text, no letter, either of which would have changed our summer for the better.

So in early August, we told our jobs we were leaving for the UK, and set out to sell our house in 6 weeks.

Why the rush? Well, according to the paperwork, the visa has to be used by a certain date. When I called I was told it was 90 days from May 12th, when accepted, which meant we needed to get my family to the UK in a few weeks. Another call said it needed to be done by Sept 20th. Another call said I could bring them in whenever.

I tried to call our lawyer, and found that they had shut down and disappeared. Which, after having ghosted us, made sense.

I found the most expensive, known immigration firm in London and paid for an hour of consultation, and found out that the date was basically September 20th. So we sold, donated, or threw away everything we owned to pack everything down into:

• 8 50lb checked suitcases
• 2 carry ons
• 2 pet carriers
• and 4 backpacks

I won’t talk about how challenging it was for my family to do that, but they rallied, and none of us will ever talk about the utter insanity that was six weeks of selling the house and doing all that ever again, because the headline is: we survived it. And none of us killed each other.

With our original moving budget from two years ago destroyed by two sets of application fees, and 18 months of renting a flat unseen, we thought we’d done the impossible. Sold our home, gotten permission to move, pared our lives down into suitcases, and purchased tickets.

On the last Sunday of the week we were in the US, we threw a going away party. People from three different states came over, and I said good bye to dozens and dozens of beautiful, amazing people that made our community.

Our friends drove us to the airport in Detroit, where I thought the last challenge waited: the logistics of getting all the luggage and two cats to an apartment in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, would be hurdled, and then we could rest for the first time in 6 weeks.

Little did I know, I was only halfway through our ordeal.

In part three, I’ll talk about the flat from hell…

Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling and World Fantasy Award winning author. His novels and almost one hundred stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio.

It now says:

Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling and World Fantasy Award winning author. His novels and almost one hundred stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Scotland.

So that’s a little bit of a change.

The other day on Bluesky I posted a photo I took while me and one of my kids was out thrifting in Edinburgh:

How did I end up here?

Long story short, I’m not an American, I’m not naturalized. I hold a UK passport, and have since birth due to being born in a country that was a part of the UK the year I was born, thus giving me, through accident of birth, a UK passport. I’ve lived in the US for 30 years, but never did naturalize.

Why Leave Ohio?

Partly because I was a freelancer, and the Green Card renewal was cheaper than the citizenship application, by like many hundreds. It was always the cost of a mortgage’s difference, and renewal kept landing during a period of tight finances, so I did the smart thing each time and renewed the Green Card. Partly because, at first, I would have had to give up my British citizenship (until the very late stage of the Bush administration, when it was legalized, but I didn’t realize that for some time). And there are only two things I’ve had since a childhood of moving around, losing all my personal belongings, and starting over several times: a plush hand-crocheted dog my mom made for me as a toy as a child, and my passport.

When Tr*mp was reelected, after seeing the autocratic tendencies of his first term, my family and I had a long conversation. Reading over Project 2025, I could see that being a non-citizen in the US could become a very tenuous and dangerous position.

So, so many Americans told me that someone like me would be fine. They were only going after criminals. They were only going after people not working.

“You came the right way,” someone told me at a store once. “You’ll be fine.”

The calling of the White House of pro-LGBTQ writing and journalism, as well as anti-Fossil Fuel and pro wind energy writing as ‘seditious’ and trying to get that into legal frame works, the rolling back of legal protections, the attempts to roll back birthright citizenship (which could affect my children and leave them stateless), and the activities of ICE all factored into our math.

Then let us look at ICE.

If ICE is only going after criminals, what makes a criminal? A felony? Right now. What if misdemeanors are added to that list? Do you have speeding tickets or parking tickets in your past? I have a speeding ticket in my history. Technically that’s enough to label me a criminal. If most conservatives who saw “Bobias Mickle, deported for a misdemeanor” they wouldn’t blink.

And it’s not being deported that concerned me. It was the fact that Stephen Miller told ICE to make detainment as ‘cruel as possible’ on purpose.

There was an institutional sadism to what was happening that became clear to me from the outset. Detainees stripped of access to medicine, being released in winter storms with no clothing to die. And British citizens were getting caught up in this, I noted. American Citizens even.

I knew I was very low on a list, but I knew I was on the list to get to eventually. My country of birth Grenada, is listed on all my documents, and is on the ICE/Tr*mp list of countries to be targeted because they had the audacity of not doing something Trump wanted and thus are in his list of ‘shithole countries.’

During the first administration, I had an experience at the border coming back that… told me a lot about what was coming. And during the Bush administration, was once detained for an hour and hassled for my country of birth and general suspicion. With ICE agents now patrolling airports, I quickly stopped accepting requests to travel around the US. While I figured the chances were low, very low, if the improbably happened, I need daily medicine to control my heart rate. The risk, incredibly low, but in a developed country it should be *fucking* zero.

We know it isn’t about immigrants doing it ‘right’ as they’re getting picked up outside courthouses, or during their mandated check ins. We know it isn’t about who’s not working, because ICE is showing up at job sites.

It’s racist targeting, it’s pain, it’s institutional cruelty.

By the time we left, I knew of at least one immigrant family hiding in a basement somewhere in the US like Anne Frank.

In all my years of talking to Americans, who fought the Nazis in WW2 so thoroughly, I wouldn’t have expected this to be a country to succumb to it. But I heard my MAGA neighbors in grocery stores and what they said, not seeing my white-passing face and realizing they were talking about me. I still remember the hispanic American who said “I came the right way, the rest of them *should* be rounded up” and wonder if he’ll be safe.

And I’ll never forget the face of the border guard that detained me, those years ago, how gleeful they were at their petty tyranny. It was the same glee I saw in the faces of MAGA neighbors celebrating being on top and owning the libs.

This paints a dark picture of America.

It is a true one.

There is also another America. Another side I left behind.

It is the millions organizing against this. It’s the families taking in immigrants to their basements, and protecting them. Churches doing the same, and making sure they are fed. It’s the amazing community I found even in a county that votes 70% for Trump and the most evil/shitty congress representative, Jim Jordan, who turned his back on his students being raped in showers to keep power and wealth and influence. People who are staying, and fighting, and spreading love and building things even in these dark moments. It is these people I will miss dearly, who surrounded us with love, honesty, community, and insight.

To be honest, I don’t think MAGA wins. I have a theory about where this goes. And if I were a US citizen, I’d stay to see it. I’ll write that up in a follow up post, I’m actually bullish. But I think the next 2-7 years are going to be a mess, and I’m 47. I invested 30 years of my life in staying and fighting, and now I want to retire and build my own life up in ways I want it to be. I wanted to follow a dream that was what some would have called the American Dream 50 years ago, and the more I looked into it, the more Scotland fit that bill for freedoms for me and my family.

And even if there’s a blue wave tomorrow, there will be little change in Northwest Ohio. I won’t have access to decent public transportation there, or trains, or better education. Healthcare, maybe, if Medicare for All became real, but that is years off, even if a blue wave happens, two years at least, likely many more. Ohio is gerrymandered to lock in a Republican majority, a corrupt leadership that holds the State government in thrall. In many ways, Ohio is similar to Iran, a religious autocracy with some voting for publicity. It’s a state where non-individual solar power is largely illegal, where the US’s largest bribery scheme ever seen was one where AEP, the power company, paid Republicans to force fossil fuel to be used for the grid. Ohio has fallen to the bottom of the human development index, and on almost every vector, has fallen to the bottom of state rankings.

It is, however, the easiest place to take advantage of workers.

I think it was the moment where I looked at the life expectancy of an Ohio resident and realized that I gained almost 5 years of life statistically by moving out.

My wife had been fighting cancer when I decided to go to a therapist for the first time to help me deal with that. Then the election happened. They spent a lot of time telling me I can’t run away from something, that I had to run toward something. I rejected that, I’ve moved countries multiple times to get away from a bad situation, and it has always opened up opportunities. But, I had reasons to eye Scotland.

Why Move to Scotland?

It’s dark and rainy and the sun sets early in the winter. Why Scotland?

We flew to Scotland before Tr*mp was inaugurated to spend some weeks here. Ohio is dark and dreary, but it actually has a lot more sun than Scotland, so there’s a big adjustment, no doubt. But I already have to have a sunlamp to get Vitamin D during the winter in Ohio, and take Vitamin D to survive. I have the coping mechanisms already, I think.

In our time in Scotland, we hung around Glasgow, where it rained the entire time. But, unlike Ohio, the grass was vibrantly green, like someone had taken the saturation filter (a comment I am stealing from Allen Stroud, who I met recently) and turned it up a couple of levels.

Yes, the weather was miserable, but there was a lot of beautiful country that fills the soul in a way mud and bare trees and empty soy and corn fields don’t.

Holy shit, the vistas in Scotland: every time I take the bus or train, I put my phone down and stare out the window most of the time because there’s something to see. And it reminds me of being in the Caribbean. Things may be hard, but you could go to the beach, or go for a walk, and see things that filled the soul in a way I have to drive hours in Ohio to do. And the constant driving just drags me down and tires me. I’ve gone on more walks here in three weeks than in three months in Ohio. Maybe even three years?

The NHS. I’ve spent so many thousands a year on medical bills when I’m already paying thousands year to have insurance. It makes planning impossible. And while there is waiting in the NHS, I don’t think people in Europe realize that in the US there is tons of waiting as well, plus the added horror of just… being denied for insurance you’re already paying for.

Transportation. We wanted more walkability in our lives. In just the few weeks I’ve landed, I’ve taken buses and trains around to do things, and it’s been amazing. It’s not perfect, trains can be pricey, but as a society, the UK seems to be trying to work on this in a way the US doesn’t even try. It may not be perfect, some European systems seem shinier, but it’s fucking there and I adore it.

Consumer protections. They’re all but gone in Ohio, and minimal in the US. They’re there in the UK. For example, every service I’ve signed up for has a 14 day cooling off period that’s easy to invoke. I tried 2 different cellphone services before settling on a 3rd that had the best coverage for where I was.

Better quality of groceries. The number of recalls happening in the US are staggering. And since I’ve been here my acid reflux has faded so much I’m toying with going off my GERDs meds. That has to be about chemicals in foods, yeah?

Access to world-class cities: Glasgow, Edinburgh, all on the central belt, London being 6 hours away, as well as some real cool northern British cities I want to visit. I’ve already been to Glasgow for a conference, and to Edinburgh for thrifting.

Education: in three years, once my kids have been here that long to establish residency, free university. They’re not sure about waiting that long, but… not having student loans is a gift I can’t otherwise give them.

Real estate: houses and apartments (flats) in the UK are expensive. We were in a low cost of living area in Ohio, so in the past when we tried to look at moving, we couldn’t. Scotland has prices that are still more than Ohio, but more within reach in theory. So we could entertain the idea without it being mad.

A shot at being an author again: I stepped away from 5 years of being a professor, and I’m going to try to be a hybrid freelancer/author/teacher (I still am distance teaching at Stonecoast). I’m 47, this may be my last show to go back to trying this again. Is it a great time when my freelancing skills are now being replaced by AI in so many areas? No idea, but I was pulling

These are the reasons I thought I was moving, I found more when I actually landed. Which I’ll talk about in part three.

Moving to Scotland part two will be about applying for my family’s visas and landing here.

About six months ago I blogged about my Christmas gift to myself: a Svalboard keyboard. It’s a very non-standard design, very science-fictional looking. I wrote about my evolution of ergonomic design for typing in this post about my keyboards and meant to check back in.

What is the experience been now that it’s a daily part of my life?

In short, it’s great. It does the trick, reducing pain and irritation on my hands as I type. Adding the roller balls into the mix has also been interesting, my mousing hand has been healing as well.

How hard was it to adapt to? It’s hard to say, I spent a few weeks working hard at taking lessons on the custom typing app, moving slowly up the speed chart. I would say I could type on it at around 40 words a minute after a few weeks, but I was in the middle of a semester, and I did not move this to my office as a daily driver but kept it at home to use occasionally. By the end of the semester it still felt a little alien, and I had to think when I used it.

Cut to the start of summer, and my home office becomes my daily driver, and I started using the keyboard regularly. As of now, my last test showed 72 words per minute with a 97 percent accuracy rate. I hit a run of keys that tripped me up on a word, if not for that one word I would have hit more of a 98 to 99 percent rate, which is where I sit on a regular keyboard.

I would have adapted faster, were it not for the fact that I have been tinkering with and optimizing my Glyph editing system, which I’ve made tweaks to to consider the Svalboard’s layout more, as I had mostly been using it to edit on my laptop. The Sval’s roller balls mean I have to choose what key I use for a mouse click and right mouse click. I started by using the inner thumb keys, which are also the space keys, which trigger the Glyph movement and editing systems when held down for me now. That works great on all my keyboard setups except for the Sval, which then causes hiccups when I am trying to click and it thinks I really mean spacebar. When the ball is in motion, the key functions change, so what is normally spacebar becomes click as the ball is rolling, and for a split second after it stops. Miss the window, and you’re not clicking the mouse, but hitting space.

Well, that is something some people can internalize, I kept not doing it, so I remapped the keys a bit, and now click is the thumb up key that hooks over the thumb. Less immidiate than the space thumb key, but it doesn’t share any other key functions, all it does is click, and that is working well. But I have experimented with so many remappings of keys that I keep having to rebuild my brain connections and muscle memory, as you can imagine, this much remapping is also a heavy demand on the learning circuits…

…but the more I play, the more my brain goes ‘oh, this BS again, he’s playing around, I suppose we’ll have to adapt.’

I know this seems like a bit much, but seeing how many authors I talk to who experience carpal tunnel pain and reduced ability, whereas I seem to be healing up, and no longer having high pain days the way I used to, I still find this alternate ergonomic keyboard to be one of the greatest health investments short of a gym membership I’ve made in a long time.

Long live the Svalboard, eradicator of repetitive stress injury pain.

As an author, if I were ever to do an infomercial, it would be for this piece of kit. I cannot recommend it enough.

In a rare moment of feeling ‘old’ and shaking my fist at the clouds, I wish more of internet laid out text more like print. But that’s another cause I’ll be taking up on this site soon for display of my fiction. For now, I wanted to create a CSS snippet that I could drop into Obsidian using its CSS snippets function to change how my fiction is displayed as a I write and edit in Obsidian.

I slapped some CSS in there to create indents, but Markdown asks for an extra space between each paragraph and looks something like this post, or, here is a simple MD viewer/editor with some MD showing:

I can read Markdown and write in raw Markdown just fine, but when lost in fiction flow I prefer it to look like the printed page. So I deleted all the extra lines in my Markdown files and added indents, and got on with using Obsidian. Which was fine until… I needed to export my Markdown.

Now, that extra space is missing for MD to other file translators, so I was having to do a lot of copying and pasting and fixing the formatting to send documents to others. That was less than ideal. I did finally hack together a little script that could do it for me, but it broke, and I realized that by shifting Markdown format, when I used another Markdown reader that wasn’t Obsidian, the text looked wonky.

So I spent a day working on this, and here is the CSS if you want it for your own:

/* ============================================================
   Novel formatting for obsidian — reading view and live preview indented and no spaces...
   Source mode - raw markdown.
   ============================================================ */
/* ---------- Indent paragraphs ---------- */
/* Reading view */
.markdown-preview-view p {
    text-indent: 35px !important;
}
/* Live preview */
.markdown-source-view.mod-cm6.is-live-preview .cm-line:not(.HyperMD-list-line, .HyperMD-header, .HyperMD-codeblock, .cm-line:has(.cm-hmd-frontmatter), .cm-line:has(.cm-meta), .cm-line:has(.cm-comment)) {
    text-indent: 35px !important;
}
/* ---------- Proper paragraphing ---------- */
/* Reading view */
.markdown-preview-view {
    --p-spacing: 0;
}
/* Live preview */
.markdown-source-view.mod-cm6.is-live-preview .cm-line:has(br):not(:has(hr)):not(.HyperMD-codeblock) {
    font-size: 0 !important;
    line-height: 0.2 !important;
}
/* ---------- Scene break spaces ---------- */
/* Reading view */
.markdown-preview-view hr {
    margin-top: 1.5em !important;
    margin-bottom: 1.5em !important;
}
/* Live Preview */
.markdown-source-view.mod-cm6.is-live-preview .cm-line:has(hr) {
    padding-top: 1em !important;
    padding-bottom: 1em !important;
    font-size: initial !important;
    line-height: normal !important;
}

And here’s how it looks in Obsidian for me:

Live preview or edit mode

It looks like a book. I need to adjust the font, but I like the look. And I can edit, type, live in that just happily as I write fiction. And then, when I click back to source mode, I get raw Markdown:

The metadata YAML for the story is in the header, hidden when I am in non-source mode view, but easy to open when needed. When I work in notes, I can remain in source view, but for fiction, I have my more book-looking vibe.

Here are instructions for how to add custom CSS snippets to control how Obsidian looks to you.

So now my Markdown to other document format exporters work exactly as expected.

I just need to go write a script to add the lines back in to my over two thousand notes, novels, and story files in my external brain without destroying any hard work.

That’s today’s work…

Back in 2017/2018 I experienced wrist and arm pain, leading me to learn about ergonomics, and ergonomic keyboards. As I used a Kinesis keyboard, I started reading posts on mechanical keyboard forums, and found people talking about typing using ‘AKLs’ like ‘Dvorak,’ ‘Workman,’ or ‘Colemak.’ Ever curious, I followed links to websites like the Colemak site and realized something important very quickly:

QWERTY layout sucks for comfort. In fact, in 2018, there were amateur online hobbyists coding software to measure what the pain points are for typing. At the very least, they all seemed to agree that moving more of the commonly used English letters to the home row was more efficient. QWERTY has ASDF as the left home row and JKL; as the right. Colemak puts ARST on the left, and NEIO on the right. You can type so many words on the home row: station, nest, are, trio, stone, etc, while on QWERTY very few words can be written there. Colemak typer fingers travel, by estimate, 60% less than QWERTY typers, and that puts less strain on your fingers. Also, you ping pong around less in a more thoughtful layout.

In theory.

While using an ergo keyboard at my desk helped wrist pain, about 30-33% of my typing takes place on the go, on my laptop. And since it wasn’t ergo, it caused pain. Could using an AKL on the laptop help my aching wrists?

I set out to try. The first question is one that pretty quickly leads to analysis paralysis: which one to try? I went with Colemak because it kept the ZXCV keys for shortcuts in the same place. It took me a while to pick up, even though I switched cold turkey, because I over trained on it. I also failed to realize that just learning where the new letters were was only a small part of the whole process of learning a new layout. From a comment I posted on Reddit:

When I went from QWERTY to Colemak-DH, it took me a week or so to learn all the keys, and I started at about 10wpm. I hit the 20s in week two, and after 3 weeks I was stuck in the mid 30s for a long while. I didn’t understand the importance of bi and trigraphs (double and triple letter combinations). I was stuck in the 30s for so long because I assumed learning a new layout meant just memorizing the letter keys and typing them faster.
It’s more like:
Learning Level 1: Where are all the 26 keys in this new layout?
LL2: Can I strike these 26 keys faster?
LL3: What are the most common bigrams to memorize (HE, TH, EN, ED and so on), there are about 50 common bigrams that your fingers start to learn, so it isn’t just about hitting the letter, it’s hitting the HE bam-bam, like a chord on a piano almost. I hadn’t realized that I had 50-100 bigram pairs in my head for QWERTY that I’d slowly internalized over decades, so I spent a lot of time slowly relearning them unmindfully. Now I know I can use https://www.typingfirst.com/ngram-typing-practice.htm to practice the bigrams to boost typing speed.
LL4: This has overlap with LL3, but this is where I noticed trigrams entering my patterns (ING, END, THE, ERE, DED), and there are another 15 or so of those that you will, either on purpose or by intuition, add to your list of memorized patterns.

This takes me to about 50-60wpm.

Above that, the LL5 trick is paying attention to what one hand is doing when the other is typing to ‘prepare’ for the next strike. Like on QWERTY if you type THE, T is with the left pointer, then H with right pointer, and then E with left middle finger, so learning how to position the E while you are typing H is important. LL6 is about learning to read a word, store the pattern in your mind, execute it, and while you are flowing the pattern, be reading ahead to the next word to start storing/planning that pattern to be ready to execute as you finish typing the prior word.

When I got the Svalboard keyboard, I checked in to see how far along the AKL community has come, and was stunned to see that in the last 8 years, a lot of new thought has gone into looking at new layout arrangements. In fact, while I agonized over four different choices in 2018, there are now dozens. Some of them even have lineages, tweaked and updated variants, and different goals and optimizations. You can see a good list, with images and stats and the ability to tinker, at Cynophage’s site.

Which makes it harder now to make a choice.

I did my reading. This is a good guide to layout theory and the layouts the community seems to regard as the best choices we have today. And the AKL nerds like me created a textbook on Google Docs that I read every page of and learned a great deal about the theory. I also found this account of designing a new layout by the creator of Anymak to be a great read and overview of modern AKL theory. This Layouts Guide also shows when the different layouts were created, giving a neat timeline and family sense of how they came to be.

Out of my reading, I narrowed things down to a handful of new layouts worth considering for maybe tinkering with, or adopting, down the road.

ALT KEY LAYOUTS:

Graphite: this is a ‘NRTS HAEI’ layout variation, NERPS being one of the first in that NRTSHAEI family to show up. Graphite or Gallium is basically what AKL discord recommends if you have a slab keyboard and want a modern layout. It’s a high alternation layout (means the word is pieced together with lots of back and forth between left and right hands, as opposed to ‘rolls’ like Colemak where you get lots of arpeggiated runs on the same hand). Downsides on it? Look at the PHY for science words. That’s the pain point. Nonstandard punctuation locations as well, so more learning. The vowel cluster is interesting, though, and OU is such a common bi-gram (double letter combo) it makes sense. The stats on it are great.

Canary: this seems to be the high roll modern keyboard. It has fans, but as a Colemak user, one thing I do note is that high rolls, like Colemak, cause errors when I get going really fast. It feels amazing at medium speeds, but at 100wpm I mis-time the rolls quite often. The high alternation layouts seem to give you more accuracy, anecdotally, and as I played around, that caught my eye, so I moved away from Canary being shiny.

Anymak: End: this is a NRTS HAEI variant that swaps sides. I liked it, and reading about the anymak ‘layers’ led to me creating Glyph, so I learned a lot from studying it. I think it’s a great layout.

Handsdown Neu: Another layout that caught my eye was Neu, a slab version of the Hands Down family. It flies against keyboard layout circles by putting more common letters on the south row, see the CLD stack and the UOY stack on the bottom row? Since I move back and forth from a Svalboard and a slab, the downward keys on the Sval are *amazing* but… on the slab, not as muck. I’m optimizing for slab comfort, that 30% of the time I use my laptop, so I put this aside.

That being said, it was the HD family that taught me some stuff about the new ideas in AKL circles. For example, putting a letter on the thumb. Hands Down: Promethium is fascinating. And starting in 2022 or so, keyboards start hitting the slab format limits, and they start adding thumb keys.

Engrammer: This is a variant of Engram that caught my eye. It puts all the punctuation on the middle column keys, which I found appealing as that would be a very svalboard-friendly layout. But some of the stats for it, and using my pinky fingers for B, G, and P loads them up, and they’re my weakest. I read an anecdote by someone trying Engram while doing data entry that said their pinkies got hammered after a few months.

What did I choose?

As I was reading about alt layouts I saw an analysis of Pine v(4), which mentioned it as a variant of NRTS HAEI layouts with a little bit of a pinky issue due to having the Y on the upper row. But if you’re willing to live with that… it really caught my eye.

The THE and HE bigram looked very nice. The YOU vowel stack is nice. HE, SHE and SAID is easy to type. Even though I hammer active voice, there’s nothing wrong with WAS and it’s very nice to type in Pine. ING is a nice flow. ED is a nice pattern on a slab. I like the E on a stronger finger than ring.

But was I just going down a rabbit hole?

Well, I couldn’t find a design theory document on why the creator of Pine v(4) chose the layout. It was clearly in the popular NRTS HAEI family, but why this variation? Was it really better than Graphite?

I had settled on adopting what the AKL experts recommended. Go with Graphite as a modern, balanced layout to play with in my spare time. But… but… I joined the AKL discord and started reading. And someone posted a link to the AKL ‘keyboard battles’ web app. It’s an app that lets you input your own key layout, and then it ‘translates’ different words into random keyboard layouts and lets you type in it. So it would give you the word DARB to type, and then EAST. You type each one 3 times, 2-3 rounds, and then you rate what was more comfortable for you, and it also tracks how long each took to type between letters.

The data is early days, but there’s some data, and what struck me was that NRTS HAEI layouts dominate the top 10:

Pine, Maya, Nerps, Sertain, Seminak, and Graphite are all NRTS HAEI variants, IIRC. 6 of the top 10 are from that family. To me that was a good indication that I could safely try Pine v(4).

About two weeks ago, I made the decision to try to become bi-lingual. I lost QWERTY in 2018 for Colemak, but I’ve been spending 30 minutes a night typing in Pine 4 to learn it, and the rest of my day in Colemak.

I’ve learned 16 letters of 26, and bounce around 30-45 wpm (my accuracy dove with a new letter introduction recently, and by dove, dropped to 98.5%, which is wild because 98% is where I sit with Colemak after 8 years of use).

The bi-lingual bit is weird, I’ve been able to hold my fingers over the keyboard and just announce verbally to myself “I’m going to type in Pine!” or “I’m going to type in Colemak!” and… it works.

Until today. This morning I woke up and… couldn’t type in either. I would have panicked, but I know the feeling from 2018, and so I spent 15 minutes doing a typing tutor in Colemak and then I was back to normal, typing this essay.

My plan is to spend another two or so weeks typing in Pine in the evenings for half an hour a day, until I have all the letters and punctuation down, and 45-50wpm under my belt, and then switch over. I hadn’t planned on doing this over winter. In 2018 I spent hours a day practicing, and it was this herculean effort with a lot of pulling my hair out in frustration.

Eight years later, I know overtraining is a thing. I’m making the same progress in 30 minutes a day that I made in 8 hours a day back then and remaining productive in Colemak. In fact, doing 30 minutes a day, my typing tutor, KeyBr.com, suggests that I’ll learn Pine in 4 weeks total, instead of the two months it took in 2018.

I’ve learned how to learn a new layout, possibly.

So far the biggest challenge has been that the G and D keys are on V and N keys if you look at QWERTY. Lower case g and d are things I struggle with due to dyslexia, so having them on the opposing fingers has made them the hardest letters to learn. Words like digit, or giddy fall apart on me as I’m learning.

But it feels great, an upgrade from Colemak.