When I started releasing short fiction through Brain Jar Press, I knew I was going to end the year with a flurry of new releases. It’s inevitable, when you’re a short story writer, that you end up with a bunch of previously published work that’s either hard to find or now out of print. Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called The Band […]
My goal for 2019 is to spend 1,460 hours working on first draft material, spread across my fiction, my PhD, and some projected non-fiction features I’m looking at for the blog. This largely equates to twenty-eight hours of drafting every week, or approximately 4 hours a day. If I’m right in my estimates, this should […]
‘Twas the week around Christmas and New Years,and all through the land,self-employed artists were fretting,about their families Holiday demands… If this sounds familiar, come join me for this week’s edition of the Sunday Circle, where we’ll set some intentions for the coming week and talk about the stuff that’s a little too knotty to get […]
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 […]
It may only be nine months since it came out, but I just gave the second Brain Jar Release a fresh lick of paint in the form of a cover re-design. Here it is, all shiny in its new iteration: I’ve been doing this sort of thing a lot recently, starting with the refurbishing of […]
So last week I put out Black Dog: A Biography, which is not a new story in the Brain Jar Press Short Fiction Lab, but a reprint of a somewhat experimental older story that I’m using as a free sample of the kind of short fiction I write. It contains fiction. It contains biography. It […]
It’s been a long, complicated week, as they tend to be at this time of the year. New Years is coming, people go on holiday, and managing your focus is a necessity if you want to get things done. If you’ve been feeling the drag on you projects this week, come join me for this […]
Joanna Penn’s post about the importance of Creative Routines showed up in my RSS reader this morning. I clicked on it immediately because, right now, my creative routine is basically out the window and there are no hard edges around my process. I scramble after whatever project needs attention most urgently, engaging in long work […]
For the last month or so we’ve been re-arranging our apartment, looking for more efficient ways of using the limited amount of space. Part of this has been setting up a work nook for me to write at–a place where there’s a clear signal that I’m doing focused work rather than just tooling around on […]
The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own […]
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 […]
I’ve taken to doing a Friday Status Update here on the blog, recapping where I’m at and what’s going on in various parts of the world, which means that Thursdays are rapidly becoming the day when I review projects and make decisions about the coming week. I started today by doing a brain dump of […]
