​Back in 2018 I participated in an annual event called “NaNoWriMo”, short for “National Novel Writing Month”. The idea is to draft a novel in a month. You sign up, track your daily word count, add friends so you can keep track of each other, etc. Groups get together for writing sessions (I did one where we all spent an hour on the train writing furiously). I did it. 65k words in a month.
Total garbage.
Largely because it was my first attempt at writing a novel. The premise? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In Space. With beer.
After the month I took a break from it. But it never left the corner of my mind. When Covid hit and I had 3 months of teaching from home, I decided to make another go. This time writing a book for elementary school kids. I’d been reading my class “Sideways Stories from Wayside School”, which is one of my favourites. I decided to write a book about a kindergarten class on a starship off searching for a planet to colonize. I got a dozen stories written. I did the author thing. Block off a chunk of the day, go somewhere to just write. Which was great. Right up until my body said “Nope. No more writing for you.” I think it was the combo of writing on an iPad keyboard (great device for focus, but should have plugged in a full sized keyboard) and the volume of computer work involved in teaching from home, I overdid it.
My hands were a mess. I ended up spending a year in wrist braces most of the time. I spent a bunch of money on keyboards and mice to find one that wouldn’t hurt. But that’s okay, voice to text works, right?
Nope.
My voice went as well. I’d been using a lot of dictating already, but the way you talk to get the computer to understand is a strain. Add to that recording an hour of video a day for teaching and I ended up barely able to talk some days. 3 years later I’m still struggling, but I found a great vocal coach that got me singing again!
In the meantime, I couldn’t get the Beer book out of my head. I kept having ideas and making notes. My biggest hurdle is description. People, places, etc. World building and plotting I’ve got a solid understanding of. My background writing university papers prepared me for that. But giving characters depth during the story is tough. When I read, I skim the descriptions and mostly read the dialogue because that’s what moves the story along.
Then one day I was chatting with a friend who is also a writer and popped the question – “Do you want to write a novel with me?”. She’d talked about a story idea she’d had in her head forever that she couldn’t do anything with. She can do characters and description, but plotting and worldbuilding are her struggle. Perfect!
So that’s where that’s at. 5 years later we’re ¾ of the way through a new draft, currently waiting on life issues to get going again. But I can’t let go. I HAVE to finish this book. I’ve got a whole series planned in my head, but at the very least this one is going to happen. When? No idea.
Stay Tuned!

One attempt I made to create something in a similar vein to “The Duck: How to Make THEM Pay” was inspired by a book my dad had when I was little. It was called “The Gashleycrumb Tinies” by Edward Gorey. It was an ABC book with spectacularly dark line drawings, each letter featuring a child suffering horribly.
For some reason I was looking at the World Health Organization website and discovered that there were (at the time) exactly 26 vaccine preventable illnesses listed. An alphabet!
So I sat down and created a tribute to Edward Gorey, The Anti-Vax ABCS -26 poems of children suffering preventably. That was pre-pandemic, so it needs an update to include covid.
Of course, it needed art, and an artist I am not. So I reached out to fellow yoyoer Coffin Nachtmahr (yes, that’s his name). Look him up, he’s one of the most spectacular looking humans on the planet. He’s a yoyoer, skater, and artist. I asked him for some graffiti-style line art letters.
He took forever.
When I finally got samples from him, I was blown away. Each letter was a detailed drawing the reflected the illness it matched. When I asked about it, he casually informed me that he collected old medical texts. Because of course he did.
Book finished, I learned a key lesson about independent publishing. Research your topic. I published it, waiting for the nutjobs to start leaving terrible reviews based entirely on the title. Crickets. Tried running ads, but they got rejected due to the topic. I did eventually get a few of and they are funny. “This is fiction and should be listed as such.” Well…it’s a book of poetry about fictional people, so you are correct. But the symptoms described are medically accurate.
It doesn’t sell a lot of copies, but it makes a hell of a fun gift to give people. There’s a barbershop in Seattle that has both that and the duck book for folks to read. The owner brings their kid to a yoyo contest in Seattle that has a vendor booth that sells my books every year. They thought both books were hilarious.
If you’re looking for a gag gift for a friend, or something to give to the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist in your life to but them, pick up a copy!

The Duck: How to Make THEM Pay
Years ago my yoyo company (Rain City Skills) made a yoyo called “The Ducc”. It was an ambitious project, we designed it by committee. A series of 14 polls in the biggest Facebook yoyo group where they voted on each design aspect. When it came time to vote on the name there was no question. In the year previous, someone had started adding “duck” to any poll. Favourite color string? Red, blue, yellow, green or duck! What weight do you prefer for your yoyo, 60g, 62g, 64g, 66g, or duck?
You get the idea.
What I didn’t anticipate was the deluge of duck memes and jokes that started coming my way. One was a link to an amazon review of this 150 year old book on raising and selling ducks called “Ducks and How to Make Them Pay”. At the time there was a single review. “Not the duck-specific revenge manual I was looking for.” At the time I had finished 2 non-fiction books and was waiting on editing and filling time with a short-story writing binge. On a whim I decided that this would not stand, that The Duck should be held accountable for it’s crimes. So In an afternoon I drafted a manual on how to survive when The Duck rises up to exterminate humanity. My wife edited a later extended edition and describes it as “being yelled at in print”. Which was what I was going for, a YouTube conspiracy theorist ranting!
 I published it to Amazon as a test case. Little did I know that it would become my best seller! I mean, it does less than $100 a month in revenue, but I know traditionally published authors that would kill for that! What’s ridiculous is that it took me as long as it did to realize I should follow it up.
In the meantime I published the yoyo books to resounding crickets. Except for my tiny niche.

"I'll just write a little guidebook to the modern world of  yoyo, so people can read and understand what all us yoyo nuts are doing these days."

That's how it started at least. The working title (pretty sure it was my wife's idea) was "Diary of a Yoyo Magnate". Which I'm pretty sure counts as irony, as I don't think ANYONE in the yoyo world counts as "Wealthy and influential". Influential, sure. At least in our tiny niche. That said, hop on netflix, look for the series "We are the Champions" and have a laugh at the episode filmed at the 2019 World Yoyo Contest. It's actually pretty impressive that hundreds of people fly from all over the world to compete for the title!

After a couple years of spending 2 hours on the day on the bus researching and writing, I ended up with a beast of a manuscript. A friend read my draft and (after chasing him down for weeks) called me and said “I’m sorry, but it’s a mess. You’ve done too much. But don’t panic, you’ve written 3 books, which is much better than just one!”

This was February of 2019. I’d been promising for the previous year I’d have a book signing table at the USA National yoyo contest that summer! The good news is I’d been on a deep dive into book marketing, and figured I could put together the business side of yoyo pretty quick.
“How to Run a Boutique Yoyo Business.” Is a prime example of a terrible product. It has a target market of a couple dozen people who would be interested in running their own business. But that wasn’t the point. My goal was to create a book that would answer the many questions newer yoyoers ask like “Why is this yoyo $20 and this one $120. They look the same!” The answer being one company is a huge (for the yoyo world) Chinese company that can produce 10,000 yoyos at a time and sell them through at a tiny margin. The other company pays a higher end machine shop to make their yoyos, goes through 4-5 prototype runs, and makes maybe 100. Business expenses, marketing…it goes on.

What I realized is that I need to re-title the book. “How to make your hobby pay.” I’d basically written a guide to turning a hobby into a small business. But that’s a project for another day.
 
“The People of Yoyo” was my passion project. I started out on that 2+ hours a day commute reaching out to any yoyoers who would reply, collecting their stories of who they were in the yoyo world and what yoyo meant to them. I got the range of “started as a kid” and “My kids got into it, I got hooked then they quit.” All the way to the very surprising variations on “Yoyoing saved my life” and “yoyo helped me get sober”. Really deep, heartfelt moments. I’m really privileged to have shared these stories with the world, even though it’s only a tiny slice of the world that knows it exists.
If you are reading this and only remember yoyo as “That thing your dad did way back in elementary school,” it’s changed a LOT! In my 15 years we’ve gone from “why is there a ball bearing in this yoyo, that’s cheating” to “yo, check out this retro yoyo, there’s no ball bearing in it!” YouTube has taken what used to be a fad that came and went to a sustained hobby that people carry for years. My grade 2’s often asks how many tricks I know, or if I know ALL the tricks. My answer? “In the 2 minutes since you asked that question, dozens of new tricks have been created around the world.”
Head to YouTube and look up “World Yoyo contest” and prepare to lose an hour to watching something akin to sorcery. But like many hobbies, the competitors are a tiny slice. There are folks who get great joy from their collections, hunting for rare and unusual yoyoers. People who spend their life teaching people how to yoyo, online and in person. Some people’s only real social connection is through the yoyo community. It goes on.

It might be time for you to grab your first/next yoyo and read all about it!
​

The Duck: How to Make THEM Pay
Years ago, my yoyo company (Rain City Skills) made a yoyo called “The Ducc”. It was an ambitious project, we designed it by committee. A series of 14 polls in the biggest Facebook yoyo group where they voted on each design aspect. When it came time to vote on the name there was no question. In the year previous, someone had started adding “duck” to any poll. Favourite color string? Red, blue, yellow, green or duck! What weight do you prefer for your yoyo, 60g, 62g, 64g, 66g, or duck?
You get the idea.
What I didn’t anticipate was the deluge of duck memes and jokes that started coming my way. One was a link to an amazon review of this 150-year-old book on raising and selling ducks called “Ducks and How to Make Them Pay”. At the time there was a single review. “Not the duck-specific revenge manual I was looking for.” At the time I had finished 2 non-fiction books and was waiting on editing and filling time with a short-story writing binge. On a whim I decided that this would not stand, that The Duck should be held accountable for its crimes. So, in an afternoon I drafted a manual on how to survive when The Duck rises up to exterminate humanity. My wife edited a later extended edition and described it as “being yelled at in print”. Which was what I was going for, a YouTube conspiracy theorist ranting!
 I published it to Amazon as a test case. Little did I know that it would become my best seller! I mean, it does less than $100 a month in revenue, but I know traditionally published authors that would kill for that! What’s ridiculous is that it took me as long as it did to realize I should follow it up.
In the meantime, I published the yoyo books to resounding crickets. Except for my tiny niche.

​About 5 years into teaching elementary school a show came through doing storytelling with yoyo tricks. My grade 2's all bought yoyos so I grabbed one to learn enough to help them.
15 years later I've run over a dozen yoyo contests, competed at the world yoyo contest, won the Canadian Championships twice, written 3 books about yoyo, and built a successful yoyo brand. 

Roll back to around 2017. My wife and I moved in with my father in law to keep him in the family home as long as we could. The downside was I went from a 15 minute walk to an hour drive to work. Except at that point I'd stopped driving. So 1.5 hours on the bus each way. What to do with all that time? Write a book!

This move coincided with my finally getting diagnosed with ADHD and deciding to try medication. Wow. Not for everyone, I know, but it was life-changing. My mother is a retired school principal. One of the many challenges of teaching is that we aren't allowed to say anything that even vaguely resembles medical advice. Which is good. But when a parent is at wit's end and asks "should I try medication" after they've tried all the supports and adaptations for their ADHD kid, the teacher or principal can't give any opinion. But my mom could say "Well, my son has had ADHD all his life, and in his 30s started medication. He's since written and published books and started a successful business, sooooo."

So weaponized ADHD. I got lucky. Found a medication that works at a low dosage. So I still get the hyperfocus and chaotic connections brain, but I have the ability to stop and consider. To DECIDE if I want to spend 4 hours obsessing over something, or if I have other responsibilities. 

This brings us to "How to Run a Boutique Yoyo Business" and "The people of Yoyo." 

Originally they were part of the same book, but it got too big. I still need to write a book on the world of yoyo contests, but that's down the road. It started with a friend insisting I read "The 4 Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferris. It was full of good advice (and some not so much) but one bit that stuck was the 3 types of product.
1. Sell other peoples goods
2. Create and sell your own goods
3. Create an intellectual property.

I'd done the first 2, but I liked the idea of creating something once and selling it forever. And no-one had written a book about yoyoers and the community. Sure, there were plenty of books of history and tricks. But nothing about the people. Yoyo has changed drastically since the 1990s. Technology has allowed for absolute sorcery to be achieved with this little spinning disk. Youtube made it possible for exponential innovation, the instant sharing around the world. So a book happened.

I had to learn how to write. Apparently my university training only got me far enough to plan and write a book, not to make it readable. My first editor taught me how to take academic writing and turn it into something enjoyable to read, and how to identify and delete every adverb I could.

Of course, once I started self-publishing books I got hooked! That side of things actually started  with a different book - "The Duck: How to Make THEM Pay"

More to come!

My favourite part of university was writing history papers. I loved digging into the research and telling a story. I've always loved telling stories, although the people stuck listening to the chaotic stream of consciousness that comes out of me when talking don't always agree.

Writing allows me to get my thoughts in order and refine them. At least, when I was able to stick to it. I got two "A" grades in University. One was a paper on Lyndon Johnson (US president). My dad had a huge collection of books about him (more than the university). Really fascinating president. If the cold war hadn't so very broken the psyche of the USA he would have been great. But he got sucked into the "can't let the commies have an inch or they'll take over the world" and Vietnam happened. So I handed in a 12000 word essay (the assignment was 4000 words) that I had edited to death for flow and readability and the teacher loved it. 

​The other one was an Easter European politics course. It was from 7-10 pm on a Thursday in the basement of the university. The teacher had clearly studied dictators too long because he was a tyrant. Like, TV caricature levels of awful, humiliating people who contradicted him or made mistakes. I had injured my hand and couldn't write with a pen, so I was one of the 3 people at the university packing around a laptop (it was 2001). The course was 40% Research paper, 40% take home final exam, and 20% participation. We were each assigned an eastern Europeans country to study, and as we progressed through the cold war era each week we had to report on our country. I got the full 20% for 2 reasons.
1. I got the Czech republic. Nothing happened. They had the same dictator for most of the cold war. So I could always report "Not much happened" and look like I'd done the reading.
2. I sat at the back of the class playing solitaire and taking the occasional note. While everyone else was asleep at the table.
But the biggest reason for an "A" in this course was the take-home final exam. ADHD brain - can't focus long enough to memorize facts and recall them on command (just if I was lucky enough for the gremlin in my hippocampus to give them to me). So a "B" was the best I could get after the exam dragged my grade down. But not this time!

I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until 15 years later, but in hindsight the volume of sugar and caffeine I needed to stay on task was a clue. That and the time a cousin handed me a couple of his Ritalin to keep me awake to study. I passed right out both times (which fits ADHD brain, it calmed my mind)

After University I didn't write much until I got hyperfocused on yoyos (That's another story). I started a blog, which led to "The People of yoyo". 

More to come.

*phew*
November was a busy month! I took up the Nanowrimo Challenge for the first time and manage to draft 65,000 words of my first novel. It's a complete train wreck of a draft. It will need a total re-write, but that's what a first draft of a first novel is for. The act of writing it helped me sort out what I actually need to do when I get back to it. But the most important thing it did for me was show me I could draft a novel. I need to write more, learn more, and build my skills before I'm willing to go back to it, but now I know I can.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least have one blog post here to talk about yoyos. If you are a new fan who found me without going through the YoYo world, here’s a bit about that maddness.

This photo was taken at my wedding. We had a very serious discussion beforehand and agreed that while I’d have my YoYo on my belt for most of the evening, I’d take it off for the actual ceremony. Which I forgot to do. There has literally been less than a dozen days in the past decade where I’ve not had a yoyo on my belt. My wife and I are both entertainers, and neither of us wanted a traditional wedding. Her because there are more fun ways to plan a party, and me because I didn’t want to treat my friends and loved ones like dirt. “hey, can you give up one of the few Saturdays of the summer to watch me get married, sit around for 3 hours waiting for photos, then sit in a hall listening to speeches all evening?

So we had a Cabaret show with a wedding ceremony as the finale. I delivered a YoYo performance, my wife sang, friends of ours did a light-up poi routine, a burlesque routine and a drag number. 5 years later we still have people commenting that it was the best wedding ever. 11 years ago I was a regular grade 2 teacher. Then the NED show performed at an assembly and sold all the kids yoyos. I bought one with the intent of learning enough to help my students. 11 years later I’ve won 2 national titles, founded the Canadian Yoyo association, built my own succesful YoYo brand, and started an author career by writing a series of guidebooks to the modern world of YoYo. 

Maddness I tell you! 

My wife, bless her heart, not only tolerates my passion for this age-old sport, she revels in the fact that I have this really cool skill and the drive to do something with it. Pretty much any time we are out in public, she finds someone who just absolutely needs to ”check out this cool thing my husband can do!”. 

Author Robert Fulghum wrote “We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”

That sums up my wife and I beautifully. We are playmates and we are weird together. This blog post started out about my YoYo hobby and ended up about my wife. But that’s OK, since that’s an accurate description of my life, a fact I’m grateful for every day.

-J.D. McKay

p.s. It’s Irish formalwear, you can tell by the Harp’s on the buttons and the cut of the jacket. The Sporin is Scottish though, it was a gift from a friend. I get asked often when I share this photo.

Gently now..Why is it when you tell your kids “don’t touch the element, it’s hot” the next thing they do is touch the element? Heck, why is it when you tell your friend “taste this, it’s awful”, they do?

Our brains are both incredibly efficient computers and at the same time really inefficient. You can’t just put data into the brains program and expect it to integrate. You have to massage it in.

In education we call that “I do - we do - you do”

The first time something enters our senses, it usually just exits again, leaving a hint of a connection. If we combine senses, it sticks better. See, hear and do. If we do a thing with a friend, it sticks better. The story we write about the relationship with the friend now includes the thing, as does our individual story.

The more I learn about marketing the more I realize that I’m starting from a strong point. Everything I do to convince a 6 year old that a given learning task is worth doing is transferable to sales. The soft repetition of a message and gentle nudging towards a decision. If I’m doing my job right they learn the concept without realizing that’s what is going on.

I start with building comfort. Kids have to feel safe to open up to learning, so it begins with building an environment that is safe. From there I deliver a concept through many different channels. Read aloud, worksheet, group activity, art activity. Somewhere in there it’s going to click.

When it comes to my yoyo business I deliver the experience of Rain City Skills in much the same way. I started by creating a bank of tutorials. Free lessons for everyone. I followed that with a friendly and positive online presence. When it comes time to design the purchase experience, I work hard to make sure that there is almost zero chance someone is going to feel let down. I package the yoyos in such a way that the unboxing is an experience in itself, and the ‘extras’ all have value. Finally I strive to deliver an impeccable customer service experience.

I maintain a presence in the various online yoyo communities of someone who gives more than he asks. Who sells products by engagement, not advertising.

It’s working so far. My brand is growing and I’m learning as I go.

Next task is to figure out how to do the same with my Author career.