ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Sunday Circle

A Circle, Closed

The TLDR version of this post: I’m taking a time-out to rethink the Sunday Circle and how it functions in 2020, which may see it either migrate to a new platform or have the shutters pulled down entirely. I started the Sunday Circle a few years back, inspired by a write-up of the idea in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative and an idea that it might be possible to replicate the process online. Over the years we’ve had a number of writers, voice actors, and others drop by on a Sunday to check in with each other, laying out their various projects and inspirations for the coming week. At the time I kicked off the Sunday Circle, it was part of a long-term strategy for the blog. A natural fit for the kinds of topics I blogged about and talked about in the long term. These days, not so much. My focus has shifted away from the long conversations about writing and business, and blogs posts don’t get the numbers they once did (largely, I suspect, because they can no longer cross-post to a personal Facebook stream). And one of the other big take-aways from the Accidental Creative is this: It’s easy to assume that because something has always been done a certain way, that must be the one and only right way to do it. We sometimes develop the assumption that because a system or method brought us success in one instance, it will always do so. Or we

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29/12/2019 1 Comment
Stuff

Twelve Months On

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor crept onto the top 100 free downloads in the Contemporary Fantasy section of Amazon Australia over Christmas, snagging a position at #16. This occurred twelve months after I first republished the story via Brain Jar, on the heels of nearly 300+ downloads in various storefronts. It’s interesting to look at the books that surround it in that section—one of these things is very clearly not like the other ones. Not just in terms of being a short story, but in the choices around cover arts and fonts that position it within the genre. This pleases me. One of my great issues with the indie publishing scene lies in the rush to conformity. The conversations that dominate forums are how do I produce fast and earn some sweet kindle money, and familiarity is a powerful tool for achieving that goal. The advice always boils down to the same core principles: hit the genre tropes, use a cover concept that speaks directly to genre, publish fast and find a profitable niche to mine it for all it’s worth. I don’t begrudge the folks who do it—making money from your writing is an important and powerful thing—but for me it fritters away the true joy at the heart of the indie publishing world: Every madcap idea is feasible & nobody can stop you. It’s a space where you can take chances without fear of wasting time and effort, because everything has the potential to find its audience

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28/12/2019 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Newsletters and Kintsugi

I’ve put my weekly newsletter on hold for the holidays season, scheduling a return date in 2020 that just so coincides with the release date of These Strange & Magic Things on January 8. One of the recurring features in my weekly missive is a list of seven interesting things I wanted to share with people. Sometimes they’re round-ups of things I’ve posted here, or capsule reviews of books that I’ve read. Quite often, of late, they’ve been links to Austin Kleon’s blog where he talks about creativity and process in some really nuanced ways. If I were writing a newsletter this week, you can bet that Kleon’s latest post about the new Star Wars film and the Japanese art of Kintsugi would be going front-and-centre. For the record, if you want to subscribe and get the newsletter when it returns (in addition to a starter library of neat ebook swag you see below), head this way.

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23/12/2019 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

I drink from the keg of glory

A year ago, around Xmas time, I released Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Black Dog: A Biography as reader magnets for Brain Jar Press. For those not immersed in indie pub terminology, reader magnet is short-hand for books/stories I give away for free, so as to entice readers into paying for other work/signing up for your newsletter. Nick Stephenson has an entire book about the strategy which you can download for free (and I’ll let you put two and two together about the reasons behind his choice). The two stories have served me well since then—Hornets Attack, in particular, has picked up a couple of hundred downloads on various sites—but Amazon has been a sticking point. Unlike every other site, the big river isn’t a fan of letting you upload a book and making it free straight off. They are willing to price-match with other stores, if a book is available for free elsewhere, but it’s at their discretion and you largely have to ask for it to happen. For a long while, that wasn’t happening with the two stories above. I’d point an suggest bringing the Amazon price in line with everyone else, and they wouldn’t budge. Not a big deal, but it made for an awkwardness—it’s hard to do a “hey, free stories!” post when you have to add a caveat about Amazon being the exception. Fortunately, the latest request seems to have paid off (or the ‘zon’s price-match algorithm finally seems to have kicked in).

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21/12/2019 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Automation

Two years ago, when I kicked off Brain Jar Press, I dropped a bunch of cash on tools designed to streamline my processes. It started with a shiny new MacBook Air, breaking years of I-don’t-use-Macs ideology so I could run the mac-only Vellum software. That was something like two grand of expenses right there, coupled with an ongoing Adobe subscription and access to delivery tools like BookFunnel. I knew I’d struggle to earn back that money in the first year, and I was totally fine with that. The point wasn’t making the money back, it was making every project I took on a little cheaper to publish. For instance, there was software that did everything Vellum did, but it was a pay-per-project concern or an ongoing subscription. There are tools that could create covers instead of using Photoshop, but those tools aren’t as advanced or had a steep learning curve. I would be investing time and subscriptions fees to get advanced features, and the net result seemed likely to deliver slightly less than I wanted long-term even if I conquered the learning curve. You can talk people through the process of side-loading ebooks onto their reader, but it takes time and it takes tech support and I’m happy to outsource both and take the time and attention I saved to future projects. Because I’ve had those tools in place since Brain Jar launched, it’s been easy to forget how much time they save until external reminders show up. This last

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17/12/2019 No Comments
Journal

Blurred & Indistinct

One of the weird things about living in the twenty-first century is having these incredibly powerful, multi-purpose microcomputers in our pockets that don’t necessarily turn off the way you expect. Ergo, you occasionally find weird photographs on your feed: blurred images snapped as the phone gets slid into the pocket; or snapshots taken while trying to set up the phone to navigate with GPS. I like to think they’re glimpses of another universe, one that makes less sense than our own, trying to get out.

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16/12/2019 No Comments
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

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 blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? I’m ten thousand words into a crime novella at the moment, and in another two thousand or so I’ll hit a natural stopping point in the structure and set it aside to do spend some quality time on thesis novellas. Specifically, Project Bug, which I’d like to have done to submit to my supervisor before the end of january. What’s inspiring me this week? Kathleen Jennings sold me on Tessa Dare’s Romancing The Duke via the suggestion that it’s a regency romance about Star Wars fandom. I couldn’t picture such a thing, but dove into the

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15/12/2019 No Comments
Gaming

Current Gamer Kit

I’ve spent the last five or six years running Marvel Heroic at our weekly game sessions, which usually meant carting around a buttload of dice and ten years worth of game notes every time we had a session. When that campaign ended last month, we transitioned to John Harper’s Blades in the Dark–a game about gangs of scoundrels in a pressure-cooker fantasy city where every bit of turf needs to be fought for with a scrap. The group built themselves around the conceit of being a a cult devoted to an ancient cat goddess, the three core members consisting of an immigrant lawyer dealing in ghost rights, an immigrant academic who is basically Indiana Jones with feline features, and an immigrant locksmith whose turned into the crime-savvy burglar of the crew. In the space of three sessions they’ve got involved in a gang war, pissed off a local consulate, found themselves embroiled in the affairs of several vengeful ghosts, and attacked people with ghosts, ghost-bombs, spectral honey badgers, and impressionable college students. I’ll give the system this: it excels at generating hooks from play, and what seems like relatively straightforward system is surprisingly complex when you start playing. I’m really digging the tone–we’re a little more anime action than the default system seems built for, but the slow sense of the characters miring themselves in the muck as they try to do good is definitely seeping in. The the thing that really pleases me is how lightweight the whole system

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13/12/2019 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Hanging at the Book of Face for a Stretch

For the past few years, I’ve largely left my Facebook Author Page as a secondary concern. It was a place to re-post links to blog posts after Facebook ceased allowing these to go to a personal feed, and occasionally served as the site for announcements of new covers or books. This was partially a function of time—I invest a lot of energy in not being online, most days—and partially a function of a mindset where I wanted to keep processes controllable and focus as much energy at possible on writing new things. As I’m getting some bandwidth back, this week, I’ve started trying to change that a little. Facebook is getting its own little stream of content rather than repeating things that appeared here or over on twitter. Basically, there’s now a version of me that’s increasingly Facebook Specific. A professional version of me, that gets a moderate amount of attention, as opposed to my increasingly diminishing personal presence on the book of face. One of the intriguing exercises, leading up to this, has involved sitting down and figuring out a plan for the kinds of content I want the page to focus on. My first version ran something like this: Great science fiction and fantasy books/stories. Insight into my writing and publishing process. Book recommendations and interesting links for fans of SF and Fantasy, plus content about other genres that might be relevant to Speculative Fiction fans (My heart belongs to Spec Fic, but I’m a non-denominational genre fan

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12/12/2019 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Anger Is An Energy

The most bewildering comment I’ve ever gotten on social media, from an old family friend: “Who knew you were carrying around so much anger?” To me, the answer seemed obvious: “Anyone who was paying attention.” But it wasn’t the anger that caught them off-guard, it was the decision to do something with it. To use anger as an impetus, not just a feeling. To speak about the anger, and why it existed, rater than staying politely silent. They reacted to the use of anger as a spur to look at the state of the world and say this is not good enough, rather than a flagellum turned against the self to diminish your expectations. Do not diminish the anger. Use it to get shit done.

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11/12/2019 No Comments
Journal

10 Dec 2019

I’ve been watching a motorized scooter helmet migrate around the neighbourhood for the last few weeks. It started out in the neighbour’s yard, moved to a spot behind another neighbour’s rubbish bins, and now exists in the liminal space beside the trainline that the public can’t access. My guess is that it will stay there until the next round of track work, or somebody needs it bad enough to jump the high fence and recover it. The days are long and hot here in Australia. Two states are basically on fire courtesy of the Summer bushfires. Our government has largely shirked the issue, as treating bushfires like this as serious seems to suggest that they may be wrong on issues of climate change. I keep thinking of a quote from a recent news article over on the ABC: “If anything, this Government is more ideologically driven than Abbott. They want to win the culture wars they see in education, in the public service, in all of our institutions, and they’ll come for the ABC too, of course. There will be a big cleanout at the top of the public service, but Morrison will wait for a while to do that. They believe the Left has been winning the war for the last 20 years and are determined to turn the tables. Morrison will just be craftier about the way he goes about it.” Sourced from: Inside the Public Service Shakeup, Laura Tingle, ABC.net.au As someone who, frankly, wishes the culture

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10/12/2019 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Judging Books By Covers

It’s been just over a year since my second short story collection came out, and it did pretty well for itself. It made the shortlist for Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards, and had some pretty strong sales for one of my ebooks in a year when my attention was mostly on other things. At the same time, it’s lagged behind my first collection in a lot of milestones. Most notably, getting a print edition together, and attempting to refine the messaging and branding. Last week I started to change that: taking a bunch of newly acquired skills from some dedicated research into making better book covers, plus a workflow that is better suited to going from ebook cover to print, I made the revamped cover you can see above (and, if you want, contrast against the old cover to the right). They’re small changes, but just repositioning things and strengthening font choices has a big impact in setting reader expectations about genre and content. The original cover left the image to tell the story of what’s coming; the new version says it with the whole cover. More importantly, it was easy to import the design into a print book cover, rather than redesigning everything from the ground up as I did previously. This drastically cuts down the design hours needed to get a book up-and-running, and makes the time invested in learning-to-do-things-better considerably more valuable. All of which means Print Editions are now available via the ‘zon, while the

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09/12/2019 No Comments

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