Author: PeterMBall

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Morning Person

I never intended to become a morning person, but health issues pushed me into it. Evenings were a time of exhaustion, diminishing resolve, and brain fog, and so the first four hours after waking became the time of day when I brought my best self to a project. For the first year, I fought against that. Loathed the early starts, focused on all the pop science write-ups about the research into larks and night owls, embraced the snooze button and the long sleep in. I was nostalgic for the kind of writer—the kind of person—I’d been before evenings became a nightmare. I convinced myself the problems with evenings were a temporary aberration, soon to be conquered. One day, I my creativity would fire up around 10 PM and I’d spend the next eight hours writing into the wee hours. One day, I would set my routine to the rhythms of a night owl and all the work would get done.

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Narrative Assumptions in the Binge-Watch Era

Avengers: Endgame is a thoroughly unsatisfying movie as a stand-alone piece of cinema, but full of heart-in-your-throat payoffs if you’ve invested in the 22 Marvel movies released over the eleven years prior to its release.   The Witcher on Netflix never really grabbed me on an episode-by-episode level, but it became remarkable when I we finished the season and pulled all the disparate narrative strands and timelines together.   Trying to engage with either of these works as a stand-alone is to read against the grain. The creators are playing by a fresh set of narrative expectations, once that started with home-video and repeated viewings. They’re film and TV of the binge-watch era, with narrative payoffs no longer confined to a singular arc or instalment. Their ambition is far-reaching and long-term.   And now, with Spiderman: No Way Home in 2021, the ambitions are more audacious. Marvel lays claim to two prior iterations of the character, bringing in actors and

News & Upcoming Events

Brain Jar News: Little Labyrinth Pre-Orders

WE’RE BACK, BABY! Brain Jar Press has been quiet for a few months now, courtesy of some ill-timed computer issues back in May that turned into ill-timed internet issues in June (publishing is weird – the problems of May don’t manifest until August, at the earliest). But now? Guess what? We’re BACK with a new book from SEAN FRICKEN’ WILLIAMS that you can go PRE-ORDER! Here’s the pitch: Matter transporters, dead worlds, and ghostly encounters. Parallel worlds, time-travel, and dangers that lurk in the shadows.  Little Labyrinths brings together 17 vignettes and microfictions from one of Australia’s premier authors of science fiction and fantasy. Collected together for the first time, these brief tales and startling asides cover territory that is playful, experimental, and infused with speculative wonder. Once dubbed Australia’s Lord of Genre Fiction, Williams’ work will remind you of the strange, exciting, and mysterious pleasures that come from losing yourself in the smallest stories. The really interesting thing about editing

Works in Progress

The Gulf Between Conception and Execution

Back in my teenage years, as a young comic book fan, I copied a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and stuck it on my wall. I wasn’t a kid given to this kind of behaviour, but this fragment where Gaiman’s protagonist, Dream, describes the creation of the first Corinthian spoke to me even then: Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person, whom you slowly perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from black metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection. But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still… A dark mirror… That was always the intention… But the gulf between conception and execution is wide and many things can happen along the way. Sandman #57, Neil Gaiman My admiration for this passage came in two parts. The first, unsurprisingly, lay

Status

Status: Friday, 3 September, 2021

LOCATION: Windsor, Brisbane, Australia. THE QUICK-AND-DIRTY NEWS Just launched the print editions of Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet. Preparing to launch pre-orders for a chapbook collection of microfiction from Sean Williams — stay tuned for details next week CURRENT INBOX: 38 (Gah!) WORKING ON Finishing Median Survival Time, a science fiction novella produced for my PhD thesis. Two chapters left to go on the current draft, and it’s an emotional project to finish. It was first derailed by my father’s death in March 2019, and there hasn’t been much “normal” time to get back on track since then. Final page proofs of the Exile print release, scheduled for the end of this month. Working the title development process for a series of fairy tale retellings Brian Jar Press will be releasing in 2022. Covers exist in rough form and rough layouts are progressing, which means I’m up to writing the cover synopsis for each. Catching up on

News & Upcoming Events

Now Shipping: Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet

Brain Jar Press is now shipping print editions of my short story collection, Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet. The book contains twelve science fiction stories, including my sci-fi dragon western Dying Young and the Aurealis Award winning cyberpunk fairytale Clockwork, Patchwork, and Raven. It also features two stories, 52 Pick-Up and and Inside An Egg, Inside A Duck, that are original to the collection. Customers who pre-ordered already have their books. Copies have been showing up on Twitter. This wonder arrived this afternoon. Thank you @BrainJarPress snd @Petermball pic.twitter.com/Q08xzSgEJj — Trent Jamieson (@trentonomicon) August 25, 2021 Some books are events — launched and celebrated, pushed hard to find their readership — but increasingly I fall back on the default of making books available. The launch is a product of an older sales environment, where you needed all the attention on a book right now, before the sales window closed and a mass of new releases swept

Journal

Reasons to be a luddite

Right, a quick one. I set myself three books to read this week, then promptly read two of them in the space of twenty-four hours. So I added another two books and promptly read one of those in the space of a few hours. I started August by doing a Patreon post about the relative dearth of reading as I hit the mid-year, but it seems I’m trying to solve that in a single weekend. Then there was an upset stomach and the discovery of Episodes, a 2011 sitcom featuring Tamsin Grieg and Matt LeBlanc, which makes a great job of utilizing the strength of both actors. And yet, oddly weird, because it feels like it should be a BBC comedy, but it’s…not. … I spent the start of Brisbane’s lockdown rescheduling a small stack of meetings. Now I’ve spent the end of lockdown rescheduling a small stack of meetings, because my stomach was iffy enough that sitting for an

Journal

A Saturday Spent Reading (with a little TV)

It’s been an odd kind of Saturday. I woke up at 5:30 — a terrifyingly regular occurance these days — and stumbled out to spend a few hours reading on the couch. The cat decided to hang out with me, so I spent a few hours devouring books at a terrifying rate of knots. The last book on the pile was Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, all about the role the myelin sheaths forming over nerves play in the acquisition and refinement of skills, and the factors that contribute to certain schools, towns, or movements spawning an astonishing number of world-class talents, whether it’s in the field of art, sport, or science. Fascinating, fascinating book that’s going to have me thinking incredibly hard about my practice, and about the logistics of writing careers. Many old, well-worn bits of writing advice — write every day! If you want to write, you must read! — can be contemplated in a new light

Journal

Brain Jar 2.0: One Year On

A cold morning here in locked down Brisbane. The heater is definitely on and the cat has taken up residence in a conveninent patch of sunlight. The writing brain is protesting the return to work like a reluctant starter mower on the last dregs of fuel; it’s a “40% of optimal” day here, first thing in the AM. I’ll get things up and running, but it’s not going to be terribly smooth. … Many moons ago, at the 2016 Brisbane Natcon, I was on a panel with Cat Sparks and someone whose name eludes that turned to the character of Jack Reacher. Cat noted she didn’t think Jack Reacher would work as a woman — a thought that stuck in my head for a long while, and slowly evolved into a novella I’m working on for my thesis. I’ve got the big beats of the story more-or-less locked down at this point, so I’m into the interstitial scenes: negotiations; investigation;

News & Upcoming Events

Lockdown Projects

Over the weekend Brisbane became the third Australian state capital to lock down because of a Delta-variation outbreak of Covid-19, and we’ve already hit our first extension because the contact tracing did not go well. Some folks are cheerfully making plans for after the current deadline expires, while others are merrily settling in for a much longer wait before things open up again. Not that a lockdown means much when you’re running a publishing company from your couch. I’ve rescheduled a bunch of important-but-not-urgent meetings, and tried to think of ways I could turn the lockdown into an opportunity. Weeks like this are typically bad times to be announcing and releasing new books — any time attention is on the news, I’ve struggled to move the needle on sales — but that means it’s a great time to be working on some “when I get time for it” projects. Such as, for example, the print release of Not Quite The

Stuff

Some Updates From the Brain Jar

Greetings, Lost and Lonely Blog Readers. It has, as they say, been a while. It’s the curse of having a lingering affection for an older, largely superceded form of online communication, plus the sheer pant-shitting terror of trying to launch a successful publishing company in the midst of global chaos. A good deal of the stuff that I used to blog about now finds its way into the weekly newsletter, which is itself supported by the Eclectic Projects Patreon where a lot of the conversations about what I’m posting tend to take place. I’m also trying some new forms of online presence at the moment, which is a little terrifying in and of itself. I’ve fired up the ringlight and the webcam to start doing a little more video over on Facebook (itself a response to going offline for a week, and realising that a phone would still allow me to talk books and writing if people were used to

News & Upcoming Events

And Now We Are 44

Today I turn 44, and I’m returning to one of my most enduring birthday traditions: posting god-awful birthday selfies designed to worry my Mother about the kinds of content that gets put up on the internet. It’s the first of these that I’ve done in a log while, largely because 2019 and 2020 where incredibly shit years for birthday celebrations. In 2019, I spent the day sitting vigil while my father passed away and my sister prepared for cancer surgery. I had plans to try and reclaim the day with happier memories in 2020, just so I didn’t spend the run-up to each birthday getting lost in memories and grief, but 2020 delivered us a global pandemic and the first wave of Australian lockdowns in March, so it proved to be the exact opposite of what I was hoping for. Still, it’s another year, eh? And this year I’m going in with a plan. While I normally avoid having any