We’re juggling home office spaces here in Casa Del Brain Jar, trying to find an optimal amount of space to get everything done on my end while also factoring in space for my partner to work from home a few days per week. It’s interesting to sit down and interact with things from this perspective: […]
David Tennant Does a Podcast is a constant source of unexpectedly good advice for artists, largely because its not a podcast attempting to deliver good advice–it’s just Tennant sitting down with a bunch of talented people and asking the questions he’d like to have answered. There’s also an interesting pattern form–every season, the best episode […]
Over the past few months Brain Jar Press has released a series of chapbooks and short story collections at a pretty decent clip. Both Kathleen Jennings Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion and Angela Slatter’s Red New Day and Other MicroFictions have sold in surprising numbers (and, in Kathleen’s case, really surprising numbers). We’ve brought […]
Over the past few weeks I’ve been following the Observation Journal template laid out by Kathleen Jennings, pushing myself to pay attention to creative patterns and sites of attention. Structurally speaking, given my focus on Publishing rather than Writing at the moment, my right-hand pages tend to be a lot less on creative exercises and […]
Brain Jar Press launched issue 2 in The Kaleidoscope’s Children earlier this week. It’s shiny, in a LoFi kind of way; a 14,000 word novelette about unlicensed bootlegs, murder-happy fans, and family legacies being discovered. All in all, this is a very different beast to Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We […]
For the past few years I’ve been running a more-or-less weekly newsletter that goes out to a couple of hundred loyal readers. What started out as an exercise in promoting new books and updating folks about projects gradually evolved into a weekly missive where I stashed write-ups about publishing, writing, technology, creative processes, culture, and […]
Yesterday, I sat down to read Zoe York’s Romancing Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series, and she impressed me immensely with one of the most incisive opening salvos ever included in a writing book. To whit: The truth is, writing is hard, and publishing is a brutal business—and not always a meritocracy. To […]
It’s May, 2009. Approximately four years after the release of A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Readers are getting antsy about Martin’s insistence on doing other things: editing books in his Wild Carda universe; writing stories that are not A Dance of Dragons; consulting on […]
LOCATION: Windsor, Brisbane, Australia. THE QUICK-AND-DIRTY UPDATES Just finished up ten straight days of marking assignments, and I’m rebuilding my writing routines. Pivoting into a month of fairly intense deadlines—I’ll be slow to respond to emails, comments, and messages. My brain is full of pirates, comics, and space mercenaries. If you read 11 years of Warren […]
On her Wednesday blog post, The Trainwreck, Kristine Kathryn Rusch laid out her vision for just how bad COVID will get for traditional publishing and the next steps she recommends for authors working with that business model. Her prognosis is fairly dire: traditional publishing is in grave danger, and likely won’t really understand how grave […]
There’s an augment to be made that comic books are a disposable medium, but that’s talking about the history of the form more than its present. Comic books on newsprint paper, printed in four colour. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, and easily disposed of, which is half the reason old comics gained value as […]
Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF […]
