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BIG NEWS THIS WEEK: One Last First Date Before the End Of the World was released today. What do you do when your date tells you Ragnarök starts next Tuesday? Logan expected his date with Stina Lorne to be a disaster, quickly ending after dinner when they acknowledged she was out of his league. Instead they went for a long drive, then a walk along a familiar beach. In fact, everything seems to be going better than Logan could have imagined when he asked her out last week. Sure, his date is convinced she’s the descendant of Fenrir, demon wolf of Asgard. And yeah, she’s talking about the apocalypse kicking off in the near future. Logan’s not sure that matters, yeah? After all, nobody’s perfect, and even the best relationships take work. One Last First Date Before The End Of The World is the fourth release in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press—home to stand-alone short story experiments

It appears I had a bunch of good ideas back in February, many of which were derailed by life rolls and complications far beyond my control. One of these was the regular STATUS POST as a lead-in to the Sunday Circle, and I’m going to try and back into the groove of such things. HAPPIEST MOMENTS OF THIS WEEK: I finished the redraft for Short Fiction Lab #4, handed it off to Brain Jar’s resident beta reader, and put it up for preorder at the usual suspects. BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: After rocking the whiteboard as an organisational tool earlier this week, I’ve actually succeeded in getting a bunch of things on-track. Aside from the aforementioned development work on Brain Jar’s next release: I hit my writing quota for the thesis for the first time since June, and actually started buying down the word-debt I owe that project. I progressed a fiction project every day this week–not quite back

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: A few hours ago I passed through my mid-candidature review for the PhD, which means I’m about halfway through my thesis (slightly more than halfway through my scholarship, but these things don’t necessarily sync due to the way PhDs are assessed from what I’m gathering). I’ve stuck to my writing schedule really well, and established a system for prioritising projects and figuring out what’s achievable in 2019 and what needs to be moved to next year’s to-do list (there’s more details in this week’s newsletter if you’re curious). I’ve also been gearing up for the first Short Fiction Lab release, Winged, with Sharp Teeth, heading into a wide release once it’s Amazon exclusive period is up in about 48 hours time. The gains in reading time after implementing some of the advice from Digital Minimalism continue to add up. Two weeks ago I’d finished maybe two or three books for the year–now I’m up to

THE BEST PARAGRAPH I READ THIS WEEK BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: I met with my supervisors this week, talking through the way we’ll be handling things as I move into my third year as a post-grad. I’m finally at the point where there’s less research and more writing required, so I’ve been thinking about how to keep my life balanced (and, occasionally, despairing that such a thing may be possible and debating which goals get deferred. The other big achievement for the week has been thinking really hard about my relationship with my phone, and removing all sorts of apps that have resulted in bad habits. Obviously, this includes social media, but after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism I’m trailing a bunch of other things as well. For the first time in years there’s no email app on my phone–a change that’s proving useful, as I tend to read an email while seated in front of my computer and

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: The first week and a half of January has been a bit of a mess for me–lots of disruptions to work habits, lots of anxiety about upcoming thesis milestones and presentations. Which, in turn, has leant itself to a god deal of practastiprojects between hammering away at my draft (although, thankfully, having just read Rest, I’m at least able to understand how the downtime has been helping). I’m on the third draft of a conference paper at the moment–and this one, at least, seems to have the content in the right order. I’ve also done a massive notebook cull, which saw approximately 70 notebooks leave the apartment and the rest nicely arranged in blank and ongoing-project boxes. I’ve finally eliminated spiral binding from my life–something that brings an incredible amount of relief and frees up a lot of mental space I didn’t know those old notebooks were occupying. I’ve also divested myself of cheap, 8mm

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: A whole bunch of Brain Jar busy work, including: New covers for You Don’t Want To Be Published and The Birdcage Heart. Finalising and uploading copies of Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Other Things We Called The Band, which will be the next Brain Jar Short Story release scheduled for Boxing Day. Resuming daily Conan posts over on Twitter, after some very intermittent posting over recent weeks. Christmas Shopping. STATE OF THE WRITING PROJECTS: Warhol Sleeping progresses scene by scene, but it’s well and truly over 40k now, which means we’re in short novel territory. I’m also working on a MMA-in-Space project that riffs on Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories, as a bit of a palate cleanser after the difficult narrator of Warhol Sleeping. CURRENT EARWORM: Bad Romance, Lady Gaga. Or possibly the Amanda Palmer version. I just have a whole bunch of oh-ra-oh-la-la running through my skull and it isn’t going away. CURRENT READING: I’ve ended up reading Genevive Valentine’s Mechanique: A

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: Aside from the release of The Early Experiments (available now, but free for all newsletter subscribers), this week’s achievements have largely been progress on projects-where-I-would-oridinarily-drag-my-feet. The short-list looks like this: I wrote a good chunk of my conference paper and started condensing the research into a formatted argument I wrote the advertising copy for a pair of short-story reprints I’m releasing as stand-alone reads for people who want to get a taste of my fiction I put together a whole new newsletter on-boarding sequence and did a forward plan for how that will change over time.  Designed four seperate covers for upcoming projects, including next year’s Warhol Sleeping release.  Not the sort of thing that sounds exciting, but they’re projects where I risk showing my ask as an amateur, which means they’re ordinarily delayed.  CURRENT STATUS OF WARHOL SLEEPING: Stuck on a thorny bit of the final act, bridging towards the final stretch. I’ve done something in