Author: PeterMBall
Journal

Sunday Is Weird

Our not-so-beloved downstairs neighbours are moving out today, in the midst of the Brisbane lockdown. It’s a bizarre riot of sound compared to a very quiet Saturday, during which the cat slept on the laptop table for several hours and I engaged in a prolonged doomscroll following Australia’s current virus news, American post-election fall-out, and the rest of the world just basically figuring 2021 will roll on just like 2020. Brain Jar Press has new books to announce, but I held off figuring that last week was a bit too busy to compete for attention. This proved a smart choice, given the way our book sales (rightly) tanked as all eyes turned towards the news. But it’s also an inauspicious way to start my first week as a full-time publisher. There’s no real possibility of hitting the ground running this week, no easy tasks that could move the needle on sales and inch towards the kind of benchmarks I need

PeterMBall 10/01/2021
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

The Egg-Splat of Screen Time in 2020

I’ve used RescueTime to track my computer and phone usage for a few years now, and it continues to be a surprisingly underrated tool in my kit. Today they sent in my year in review for 2020, showing me how I spent my screen time throughout last year, and it was really interesting to note some of the ways the data is different to previous years. Case in point, the little egg-splat they produce that visually represents your time by month and category. I’m used to these being an irregular shape, but the April-through-May bulge is one of those aberrations that tells me just how different 2020 was to a regular year. There’s a massive blow-out in “general utilities” time, which proves to be the endless hours spent learning to use Zoon and teaching online when the university closed the campus. It’s accompanied by a bulge in my purple “research” hours, which is basically how RescueTime logs “hours spent reading

PeterMBall 05/01/2021
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Small

I spent the dying days of 2020 making lists of habits I’d like to establish (or, in most cases, re-establish in the wake of 2020’s unpredictable daily routines). Stuff like I’d like to start blogging everyday, and maybe turn the blog into a monthly zine or chapbook’s worth of content or post a free short story to every month or release 52 chapbooks over the course of the year. All of them fell victim to my inability to pull the trigger on a year-long commitment, and thus risk the body-blows to my ego. Because they were all ego projects, to some extent or another. Attempts to stay in contact with my self-perception as someone who writes as my plans for 2021 looked increasingly focused on editorial tasks. 365 days is a daunting timespan, just as 100,000 words is a daunting amount of words to write if you’ve never written a novel. There’s always the danger that ambition outstrips ability, that

PeterMBall 02/01/2021
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Mapping the Uncertainty (Or Why I’m Logging My Way Through 2021)

It’s New Year’s Day here in Brisbane. January 1st, 2021. The hell year of 2020 is in the rear view, and the coming year is shiny and new and only a little splattered by the ongoing shit it inherited from the previous 365 days. I woke up this morning, wrote three pages, then spent an hour walking around the neighbourhood to check out the damage New Year’s wrought. Here, in my neck of the woods, it’s mostly roadside vomiting and evidence of some kind of car accident at the intersection near my house. More than I expected, as we seemed to be taking things quietly last night, but nowhere near the New Year’s record. Once home, I made a coffee and fired up a fresh logbook for the year. I picked up the logbook habit from Austin Kleon, who advocates for the practice on his blog and in his book Steal Like An Artist. The process is basically what it

PeterMBall 01/01/2021
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Line When Soup Becomes Soup

I spend a lot of time fascinated by the mutability of words, which is one of those things that’s seeped into my fiction from time-to-time. This made me a sucker for Something Something Soup Something, a concept that’s part-online game and part philosophy experiment about the mutability of a simple concept like “soup”. The narrative behind the game is simple: it’s the future; aliens are making soup and teleporting it into your kitchen, but their understanding of soup is often flawed and needs a level of oversight. You stand by the teleporter and look at their creations, saying yes or no to each, and after a round of 20 or so serves the game will put together your personal philosophy of soup based upon your choices. It’s a really simple concept and a similarly simple bit of coding, but the gameplay is secondary to the experiment going on behind the scenes – while there’s a general consensus about certain elements that make

PeterMBall 29/12/2020
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Readers Ought To Know About What Writers Ought To Know About Die Hard

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series What Writers Ought To Know About...

Every December, around this time, my blog goes a little crazy as folks discover the What Writers Out To Know About Die Hard series of posts and start asking particularly sensible questions like, “wait, we’re only halfway through, were’s the rest of the series?” and “so you’re going to finish writing this, right?” And much as I always nod and promise I’ll get back to it one day, the odds of it making it to the top of my to-do list have always been low for a couple of complex reasons, most of which I fell into the habit of not talking about in public. So, with that in mind, here’s the current state of play: I wrote these back in 2013/2014, when I wasn’t in the best of physical or emotional health. They were powered by a clinging-on-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth energy that fueled all my writing at the time, trying to bang things out before my sleep condition left me falling

PeterMBall 17/12/2020
Journal

Pattern Recognition: The November Resolutions

On the 30th of November I celebrate three years since Brain Jar Press launched its first book, the Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales. I’d been so focused on the upending Brain Jar birthday I overlooked another milestone—on the 27th it’s been twelve years since I started writing this blog and charting my progress as a emerging science fiction writer. It’s tempting to make noises about blogging less often than once did, and wish for the days when a blog post would inspire conversation and feedback, but the truth is I’ve already blogged more often in November 2020 than I did back in heyday of blogs back in 2008. It’s got me thinking about recurring pattern in my life, where November rolls around and I focus my sights on changing up my approach to a particular aspect of my writing and publishing career. In the past it’s manifested as starting a blog and publishing company, but also starting year-long writing

PeterMBall 26/11/2020
Stuff

An Important Publishing Lesson: Don’t Launch Your Company in November

Ah, the holiday season is almost upon us. All the signs are there: Brisbane is turning into a sweltering slow cooker of humidity; Netflix swarms viewers with terrible Christmas movies (and, frankly, the temptation to watch them all is oddly overwhelming); NaNoWriMo is in full swing; and the sales of Brian Jar books evaporate into the ether as everyone waits for the Black Friday deals at the end of the month. There are many lessons I’ve picked up the hard way in this publishing gig, but one of the biggest I’d pass on to aspiring indie publishers or writers is this: don’t launch your goddamn publishing company in November. If you attempt it, you’re launching a new book into a maelstrom of distractions that will make it hard to nab the attention of readers. You’ll end up drowned out by the Black Friday promotions, American thanksgiving, the swarm of NaNoWriMo deals aimed at writers, and that lingering awareness everyone has

PeterMBall 25/11/2020
Journal

When a Fluke Gives A Moment of Respite From the World

If you haven’t not seen any of the articles about an out-of-control train being caught by the fluke of a whale sculpture, I can heartily recommend it as a temporary respite from the stress of the world right now. Go check it out. Personally, I’ve hit the point where I’ve removed all forms of social media and news from my phone, turning it into a very expensive ebook reader with my Ebook app positioned where my browser used to be. Every time I reach for the phone to fill a few minutes, I’m reminded to read instead of spending the next hour doomscrolling Twitter, The Guardian, or checking FiveThirtyEight. If you’ve never actually gone through the process of removing web browsers and social media from your phone, this is a damned good week to try it.

PeterMBall 03/11/2020
Works in Progress

Project Notes: Death of a Nom De Plume Cover

One of the weirder side-effects of going all-in on doing print projects with Brain Jar Press was the increased number of folks who hired me to do layout and cover design in other places. It turns out small chapbooks make for very effective business cards. I kinda put some long and hard thought into accepting these gigs. Design is very much not-my-specialty — everything I know about pulling covers and layouts together is largely the product of short courses and teaching myself things as I go — and I have a good deal of imposter syndrome about saying yes and ruining someone else’s project. At the same time, these freelance gigs typically push me to learn how to do stuff I normally wouldn’t, and I’m generally happier doing projects that push me to learn new things (and, despite having imposter syndrome, I do actually enjoy the creative challenge of cover design). Weirdly, the project I finally said yes to ended

PeterMBall 01/11/2020
Big Thoughts

It takes work to be out of work

We’ve had a few days of storms here in Brisbane, but today they’ve given way to blue skies and warm breeze and a very happy cat reclaiming her spot on the balcony. I’ve spent a good chunk of yesterday morning answering email: replying to quote requests from folks interested in book and cover design; responding to authors I owe responses to for Brain Jar (alas, I’m still behind, for reasons that will be clear below); clearing some tasks on the NEIS training program that’ll eventually become the NIES assistance scheme helping the press along next year. Then I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon trying to navigate the complex bureaucracies of Australia’s unemployment system for the fourth time this week, which is starting to feel a little like I’ve stepped into Kafka’s The Trial in the sheer absurdity of trying to get a simple problem resolved. It’s become particularly frustrating because I first called because they’d overpaid me, and

PeterMBall 31/10/2020
Journal

SWOT Day

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: the wireless keyboard which proved to be untenable for writing because the Shift key wasn’t reliable may find new life on the second desk; the upgrade from printer to printer/scanner back at the start of the pandemic proves itself to be a prescient decision; my old desk-top, only ever bought as a back-up if the laptops end, starts to show its age as my partner sizes it up as a potential second screen only to discover that it’s a relic of an era before HDMI ports, requiring a VGA connection. I’m doing up a proper business plan for Brain Jar Press this week, guided through

PeterMBall 29/10/2020

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