Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

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
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Recommended: David Tennant Does a Podcast…

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 in terms of creative advice always seems to come from an unexpected angle. For example, season one is awash with fantastic interviews with great actors like Tina Fey, John Hamm, Olivia Coleman, and Ian McKellan, but the episode I’m most likely to re-listen to for a creative boost is inevitably the one with James Corden talking about the lesson he learned from Tom Hanks. In the current season, the best episode thus far is the interview with Cush Jumbo. The entire thing is worth it, but I honestly think the section where she talks about the dark periods of her acting life and the sheer

PeterMBall 28/10/2020
Works in Progress

Picking Places to Exist: Writing, Publishing, & Social Media

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 Angela’s Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales out in paperback and ebook for the first time, and I released the second issue of the Kaleidoscope’s Children series, Unauthorized Live Recording. Meanwhile, things chug along behind the scenes. I’m gearing up to announce a big project that will run through 2021, incorporating work from a half-dozen different writers. There are individual releases all the way through the year, including a nice mix of reprint projects and original works. Which means this week is all about contracts, doing a short course on micro-business management, and figuring out the current thorny problem du jour: where do I want

PeterMBall 27/10/2020
Works in Progress

Process Journal: Immutable Laws of the Brain Jar

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 a lot more on wrapping my head around what I’m doing with Brain Jar Press. This week, I tried the Immutable Laws exercise from Mike Michalowics’z The Pumpkin Plan, which aims to break down the three core, non-negotiable beliefs at the heart of what you do as a business. Essentially, the codes you live by, and the strictures you don’t go against because it’s pulling you away from the reasons you do what you do (it is, in essence, a very you don’t want to be published kind of exercise, applied to businesses instead of writing). They’re also the three things that other people should

PeterMBall 05/10/2020
News & Upcoming Events

New Release: Unauthorized Live Recording

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 Called the Band. We switch to third person, mess with the timeline and bring in a new protagonist. This was by intent. The series is a kind of mosaic built up around a central conceit, which means we skip ahead five years and introduce a younger protagonist who grew up with YouTube and Spotify rather than CD stores and songs taped of the radio. You can grab copies cheap at the Brain Jar Press website and slightly less cheap at Amazon (US | UK | AUS) or Kobo. And, of course, if you haven’t read issue one you can still pick it up for free.

PeterMBall 02/10/2020
Stuff

Notes From the Brain Jar: A Zine (001)

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 other interesting things I came across while working. Basically, all the things I used to blog about back in the days when folks read blogs. And it turns out I wrote long newsletters. They average about two thousand words a pop, plus a handful of graphics. A lot of the time, my clumsy attempts to sell books either got lost amid more interesting elements or felt like an awkward intrusion. I haven’t been happy with that balance for a while, so I did something about it. A few weeks ago, I decided to pull back on the overt marketing in my weekly emails and embrace

PeterMBall 10/07/2020
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Privilege is often called luck

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 survive, and thrive, you need to be tough. You need to believe in yourself and trust your gut. You need to see through smoke and mirrors. You need to shut out all the noise, and find your own path. But it’s just not that simple, because that takes resources and support. You need a solid platform in life in order to get a really good leap. I know that. I struggle with the reality that there are a lot of asterisks on good advice. Mental health, physical health, financial stability, access to opportunities—they all factor into our ability to do what someone else has done.

PeterMBall 13/06/2020
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

This End Not An End Point

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 the HBO television series made from his work; writing blog posts all of the above, rather than working on the now overdue fifth volume which turns out to be two-and-a-half years away. A phrase rolls across the internet, a little viral moment shared by booklovers: George RR Martin is not your bitch. We know this, because Neil Gaiman told us so, responding to a fans question about what readers are owed when a series is plagued by delays and gaps the Martin’s series is. It’s still another two and a half years before A Dance of Dragons drops in June, 2011. The final two volumes

PeterMBall 30/04/2020
Status

Status: 29 April 2020

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 Ellis blog posts in the space of ten days it’ll do weird things to your brain.   CURRENT INBOX: 14 (plus 4 outstanding emails I still really need to send) WORKING ON Editing Crusade (Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thriller #3) Finalising contracts that crashed into marking deadlines Writing a sci-fi novella for my thesis, Disposable Bodies. Drafting a short story in the Black Magic, Black Sails universe Thinking out loud with an ongoing series of blog posts about comic books and fiction publishing. Uploading the Brain Jar backlist to the BundleRabbit system and Google Books THINKING ABOUT Rebuilding daily routines and bringing my focus on short-term writing goals.

PeterMBall 29/04/2020