ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

Status

Status: Apr 14 2020

LOCATION: Windsor, Brisbane, Australia. RIGHT NOW I’M FEELING Pent up and restless, generating ideas faster than my writing process can keep up. About 55% of optimal. Satisfied that I’ve had more good writing days than bad over the last week. CURRENT INBOX: 11 (plus 3 outstanding emails I need to send) WORKING ON Hacking together a Now page system I can actually maintain. Writing a Black Sails, Black Magic novelette Drafting a serial about bunny head gunmen to run on the blog through the Pandemic lockdown. Editing Crusade (Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thriller #3) Recruiting established writers for a line of non-fiction chapbooks about writing Establishing online homes for Brian Jar Press as an entity seperate to Peter M. Ball Multiple sets of contracts that need to be finalised. Developing a new mindset around blogging and online engagement, designed to recapture some of the shit that’s gone missing since social media became the dominant appraoch. THINKING ABOUT Structuring a prose-based publishing company around comic book publishing models. A vignette-based writing project that might go on social media. A future series about a post-Atomic Age city, after all the science heroes like Doc Savage have crested and rusted away. How to pull apart the tools of self-publishing to utilise it in more interesting ways. How to plug terrifying holes in my budgets as a result of Covid-19. ON HAITUS Disposable Bodies, a novella being drafted for my thesis (resuming work on May 1) A supplementary Keith Murphy series about life on

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Works in Progress

Research Links 20200413

Years ago, when I first discovered Tumblr, I’d intended to use it as a public dumping ground for research links and images I might want to use later. Resurrecting the idea here, since virtually nobody comes to blogs anymore, but the folks that do probably share my obsession with seeing how ideas manifest some five to ten years after a writer first discovers them. NEW BLUETOOTH SPEAKER WITH A WAR ROBOT AESTHETIC Gravstar unleash a new bluetooth speaker design which looks like a battle-scarred war robot from an episode of Doctor Who you haven’t got around to watching yet. Watch the accompanying video for a full sense of their commitment to the motif, and ponder what these choies say about human ideas of authenticity and aesthetics. SPORTS STADIUMS ARE REPLACING CROWDS WITH ROBOT MANNEQUINS DRESSED AS FANS As sports stadiums prepare for the resumption of play amid lockdowns, some of them are replacing the crowd experience with robotic stand-ins. Some of them are being given fan’s faces in Belarus. Freaking me out, because I’ve been writing scenes like this for an upcoming project about MMA in space. ALL THE WAYS FUNGI ARE SAVING THE PLANET Every SF writer who reads this is probably making Mythos jokes right now. Flagged because I need to steal the line “Fungi are basically the digestive track of the plant” for something. AI TRAINING HELPS A BUGGY NEGOTIATE DIFFICULT TERRAIN Think about the amount of difficulty into getting an SF-concept like self-driving cars to work,

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Tell Me Of Your Favourite Blog Reads

It’s been about five years since I last did a serious scouring of my RSS feeds, which means a lot of the regular incoming information is largely focused on topics that were of interest to me from 2010 to 2015. Things have changed since then, and the signal to noise ratio is becoming a little more unacceptable, so it’s time to start culling feeds and adding new stuff. Kathleen Jennings dropped by earlier this week and noted that she’s in the process of setting up a new RSS reader, after years of working without one, so I figured I’d create a space where folks who may be doing the same can talk up the feeds that are meaningful to them. One of mine remains Inhabitat, a blog about using design to create a better world, which is a glorious mine of story ideas and setting details. A newer site I’m adding in is SF writer Trent Jamieson’s new online space, where a recent redesign has seen a short burst of online blogging in which Trent writes about recent obsessions and process in his considered and meditative style. And I’m still on the search for a good architecture blog, after a lot of the places I follow went dormant over the last few years. Which sucks, because I’ve missed glorious things like Oki Sato’s glorious staircase-driven house design .

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Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Playing it Smart and Calm

One question I keep coming back to right now is “what does it mean to approach the pandemic in a calm way, as an artist? How do we play it smart?” Because calm is going to be a valuable commodity for the next few months, as writers and artists of every stripe pivot and adapt. Everyone seemed to launch sales at the start of the pandemic, a knee jerk response to try and stimulate interest in the face of everyone getting hit with financial anxiety at the same time. But sales are a tactic, not a strategy, and they’ll only last so long. Especially when the sales are pitched as “the ass has just dropped out of our industry, so support us if you want this all to continue,” which is largely speaking to a) your existing fans who, b) want you to continue, and c) are likely to be motivated by a discounted price. The really interesting responses to the pandemic will start emerging in the next few weeks, as folks lean into what gets them interested in writing to start with and how it can be hacked to fit the state of the world. Interesting case study, on this front: Alan Baxter leaning into Twitter as a storytelling medium to connect with his readership. You can read the entire thing over on his blog, but it loses a little something with the transition. To get the full effect, go read the story in the twitter thread that starts

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Journal

Gods, I miss drinking right now.

A few years back I went through a bad time, psychologically speaking, and my doctor quietly pointed out my tendencies towards depression and anxiety, then suggested a series of treatments that might get me back on an even keel. We cycled through the usual suite of pharmaceutical treatments, discovered I had an adverse reaction to most SSRI inhibitors, and eventually settled on a serotonin drug that’s a) hideously expensive on my monthly salary, and b) will make my liver pop like a balloon if I get funky and mix it with booze. All in all, it was a good motivation to do the hard yards in counselling to get a handle on things and get off the antidepressants. Then 2019 hit, and my toolkit for coping wasn’t quite up to the task, and when my partner quietly suggested that my mental healthy might be suffering I went back to the GP and signed up for a fresh prescription. Now it’s 2020. The personal shitstorm of 2019 has given way to a global shitstorm of epic proportions. And the antidepressants help. A whole fucking lot. As evidenced by the days where I take them and get shit done, versus the few days where I forgot and ended up having panic attacks over email. Basically, compared to the relief that mainlining scotch might offer right now, there is no real measurable advantage to the booze. But years of cultural indoctrination trains the brain to think that drinking is the right response to

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Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

James Stewart vs. Kubrik

Via the often excellent Grant Watson on Facebook: Honestly, this is the most interested I’ve ever been in Kubrick’s work.

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Big Thoughts

Permeable Membrane Blogging

Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and WiFi hadn’t yet migrated to phones, blogging used to feel like the first step of an interactive process. You’d post something, and other folks would respond on their blogs, setting up a slow moving conversation as other folks joined in on their blogs. Interactivity was part of the appeal, and even in the absence of interactive responses, the potential of interactivity remained. The membrane between you and the readership was thin, and highly permeable. Over the years permeability feels like it’s fallen away. Conversations sped up as responses moved to tools like Facebook and Twitter, or became siloed to the comments section because folks weren’t maintaining their own feed of information. The nature of blogs transformed as folks figured out how to take this weird conversation platform and monetise it as a content publisher, setting off a boom of increasingly focused blogs devoted to tightly constrained topics, evergreen content generation, and content marketing for further services or products. There’s less of a temptation to use blogs as a weblog under that model, because the membrane grows more resilient. Then the tools that enable the original permeability–RSS feeds, interlinked communities–fall by the wayside. Facebook eliminates the ability to stream your feed to a personal page, thus ensuring the only way to get a blog on the platform is professional Eventually, you’re no longer speaking to an audience who shows up on the regular, but folks who follow a link from

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Journal

7 April 2020

Right, then. Tuesday. It is Tuesday, yes? The weirdness is setting in. I’m sitting in my flat pondering ways to break every rule I know about publishing, and marvelling at the fact I’m coaxing folks to come along for the ride. My inbox is filled with freshly signed contracts, my messenger services filled with chats about future projects. And for all my bluster about breaking rules, I’m going back to resources from 2005 when the publishing paradigms of RPG gaming splintered thanks to ebooks and thinking about the ways to transplant them into 2020. This has largely involved picking up an idea that’s been kicking around my computer since 2008. The nice part about everything going mental is that there’s really no reason going full tilt at ideas that seem interesting, rather than second-guessing whether they’ll pay off. Brain Jar Press is on the verge of getting its own online identity. The webpage is getting some attention. We’ve launched a new Facebook Page, seperate from my own feeds. It’s all a big seat-of-the-pants, making the best use of The Great Pause we can, but it’ll pick up speed as our household figures out the new work dynamic with both of us home.

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Ugly Cover, Great Book: go read The Captured Ghosts Interview with Warren Ellis

The great irony of Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews is this: it’s an interviewer with a comics writer who thinks very carefully about the design and packaging of the written product, and yet it’s released with an incredibly ugly , half-arsed cover that’s seemingly designed to discourage purchasing. Which is a pity, because the contents of the book offer some fascinating insights into Ellis’ mindset, work processes, and usage of the internet, circa 2010/2011. We live in an age where access to interviews with creators are at an all-time peak right now, what with the plethora of websites, podcasts, and livestreams devoted to archiving creative insights. What marks The Captured Ghosts Interviews as something special is it’s origins: these are the full transcripts of the interviews Meaney and Thurman did while making a documentary about Ellis and his work, which means you’re getting all the messy asides and digressions rather than the best sound-bytes. It also means they have time, in a way most interviews don’t. There are whole sections devoted to Ellis’ origins as a writer, and formative experiences that helped shape his mindset. Stuff that would be glossed over or summarised is explored in detail. Which leads to some choice insights into his feelings about design in comics: The package is very, very important. It’s a piece of visual art, so it should be attractive. It should be something you want to own and something that gives you pleasure when you look at it. And for all

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Smart Advice from Smart People

Emotions Need Motion

Interesting post about the omnipresence of grief here in the age of contagion, over at the Harvard Business Review. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims. That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief, Harvard Business Review It’s a useful thing to consider as I’m figuring out the impacts of the pandemic. Life has changed, and keeps on changing. Plans are in a state of flux. For the first time in four years, my future feels dangerously uncertain and allows for very little space in which to take risks on the financial or the creative front. It’s a familiar mindset from mu freelancing days–and gods, it feels like the whole word is coming to grips with the freelancers insecurity around work and finances–but I thought those days were behind me. I celebrated those days being behind me for a stretch, and

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Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writing in the Age of Contagion

I’d like to talk a little about writing (and, really, just surviving) in the age of contagion we find ourselves in. This is a tricky subject because I loathe the impetus that capitalism puts on being productive at all costs, especially when you’re sick or stressed out. It’s the same impetus that makes COVID-19 so tricksy, because we’ve all spent far too long soldiering on at work while ill, and that’s seeped into the western mindset. On the flip side, writing’s important to me. It’s a big part of my self-identity and it’s the thing that keeps me calm. And, as I wrote in my newsletter today, a goodly part of the challenge in writing through the age of contagion isn’t working while sick, it’s working while the world is trying to scare the pants off you. The tactics that make it possible for me to write through the age of contagion largely coincides with the tactics I use to manage general anxiety, so it’s useful to give myself a pep talk as the world goes askew. So strap yourselves in, because this is going to be a long one. FIRST, LIKE AN INTERNET RECIPE BLOG, LET ME TELL YOU SOME BACKSTORY BEFORE WE GET TO THE MEAT OF THIS POST We’re going through a stressful period in our society, rife with anxiety and uncertainty, and the ability to recognize and acknowledge fear is actually good for our mental health (For more on dealing with mental health challenges during the

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Journal

Amusing Things and Cancelled Events

A short list of things that have amused me today: A Facebook writing thread where someone referred to their graveyard of unfinished projects, and I’m so tempted to write a blog post titled “All Writers are Necromancers” The email sign-off “With Kindness,” which seems like an aspiration act in 2020. The emerging wave of apocalypse marketing showing up in my social media feed, advising me to transfer all my assets into Gold and Diamonds (I’m, like, dude, your targeting is off-base…) Folks starting to ponder their two-week lockdown reads. My cat trying to play with the cat in the mirror. Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet having a weird, print-only resurgence of sales over the last four weeks. In less amusing news, this twitter thread from SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowall is worth a read: I’ve run big events a few time in the past, working for both profits and non-profits, and I’ve got a lot of empathy for this situation. The profit margins on events are small and don’t have a lot of buffer space at the best of times. Cancelling a GenreCon on short notice would have effectively killed the possibility of any future conference, and left a huge black hole in the operating budget of the parent organisation. Basically, I’m very, very glad I’m not running any kind of event right now, and feel awful for the folks who need to make those calls.

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