ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

The long-delayed delivery from my printer arrived yesterday and I finally got the chance to see both issues of Eclectic Projects side-by-side for the first time. In a lot of ways, these magazine issues are my platonic ideal of a book: 80 to 100 pages, self-contained, with a standardised design creating unity as things progress. Individually, the issue doesn’t seem like something of value, but stack two issues together and they become interesting objects. Stack twelve together, and they’ll like like an impressive body of work. In other news, we’re on the countdown to my Birthday on the 18th and the anniversary of my father’s death on the 19th, and I’ve hit the traditional stretch where my mental health is wobbly. Taking it very easy on myself this week, and reminding myself that it’s not the week to be making big decisions. ON THE DOCKET Off to catch up with my weekly Write Club crew this morning, followed by an afternoon of graphic design and movving computers around as I try to tame my desk. PETER M. BALL INBOX: 20 BRAIN JAR INBOX: 17 BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 5 RECENT READING March tends to be the month where I catch up on romance reading, and I’ve been powering my way through a ten-novel boxed set I picked up a few months back. The highlight so far is Sarina Bowen’s The Year We Fell Down (not a surprise, as I’d loved her True North series back in 2020, but hadn’t clicked

As ever, you can read the story over at Patreon for as little as a buck a month—which gets you all thirty-eight of the stories thus far—or grab it when it comes out in a forthcoming issue of the Eclectic Projects magazine. ON THE DOCKET Today is an admin and chores day, where I run the profit and loss for the last few months and figure out what the next three months will look like. It wouldn’t be a lie to say February was grim from a publishing point of view—it’s not my best sales month at the best of times, and selling books is a lot harder when the economy is bad—and the teaching/mentoring income definitely shored up the weaknesses on the publishing side of the business. March promises to reverse that trend, thanks to the duel release of Bites Eyes and Gorgons Deserve Nice things on the Brain Jar side of things. Also on the list today: newsletter drafting, some website tinkering, continuing on with the proofing. The flat needs to be vacuumed and the kitchen needs cleaning. Laundry, and thinking through next week’s routine, as I’m getting worse at managing what gets done when with the constant switching of tasks during my week. My spouse is off taking care of family today, so I’m mostly trying to get as much done as possible before they return. PETER M. BALL INBOX: 38 BRAIN JAR INBOX: 16 BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 5

This week has been an embarrassment of riches regarding writing and publishing news, and just as I was thinking about how strange it would be to write a blog post with nothing big to share… BAM, the Aurealis Awards shortlists dropped with two Brain Jar Press titles included among the finalists (and many more authors who have published with Brain Jar nominated for work they’ve done with other companies). Congratulations to Kirstyn McDermott, who wrote the fantastic Never Afters series these two books came from. It was an incredible honour to publish them, and it’s great to see the series get the recognition it deserves. You can see the full Aurealis Awards finalist list here, and it’s full of great aussie speculative fiction for you to try. You can grab copies of the Never Afters novellas from Brain Jar Press or wherever good books are sold. ON THE DOCKET Today, I need to write the last scene in tomorrow’s Saturday Morning Story on Patreon, finish the copyedits on the third issue of Eclectic Projects, get a new Angela Slatter book laid out, and get cracking on a freelance design project now the client has delivered all the details I need. There’s also a mentorship meeting around midday, my beloved is home sick, and I’m running on just a few hours sleep. I’ll be summoning all my resources to keep things on track, and full expect something to go off the rails before lunch time. Meanwhile, I’ve got the detritus of

The latest short story collection from Brain Jar Press, Tansy Rayner Roberts’ Gorgons Deserve Nice Things, went on sale yesterday and the response has been phenomenal. Gorgons is our most pre-ordered book in two years, and while we shipped the bulk of those over a month ago, there’s also been a steady stream of first day sales to keep things bubbling along. By the standards of small press publishing—or, at least, my little corner of it—it’s on the road to being our smash hit for 2023. Here’s the blurb, for the curious: Right, then. Now that I’ve done my bit to pay the bills and keep the cat in kibble… ON THE DOCKET Shipping books will be a big part of my day, obviously, but I’ve also got the soft launch of the next Brain Jar Press book and a bunch of other titles to push forward. At some point, I definitely need ot sit down and work on this week’s short story for Patreon, and prep Eclectic Projects 3 to go to the printer. PETER M. BALL INBOX: 27 BRAIN JAR INBOX: 23 BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 4 Release days—particularly big release days—always blow out my email numbers as there’s a chaotic stream of emails coming in alerting us to new orders, books going live on various sales platforms, and checking in on folks to make sure everything’s running smoothly. I’ll be attempting to winnow those numbers down before the end of the day.

We cleaned out the storage space chaos at the top of the wardrobe over the weekend and assembled an impressive list of rubbish, old clothes to be donated, and a graveyard of dead and unused modems to transport to a recycling centre. Among the detritus was a promotional postcard for 2009s Interfictions II anthology that’s been blue-tacked to the wall of multiple offices, but never found its way onto the walls of the current flat because there’s no actual office space. I loved this anthology series and the sponsoring org, the Interstitial Arts Foundation, which always seemed to be a place where I found interesting work that pushed boundaries. Both strike me as an artifact of a very different era, where conversations about art and digital publishing focused on what you could do with the new tools and distribution methods. These days, I feel like the voices focused on what you should do typically drown out everything else, and the focus lies on replicating the space once occupied by mid-list titles. There’s still some excitements there—digital publishing spaces seem to grow new cult-hit subgenres that boom out of nowhere—but it’s harder to find the wild, experimental stuff. (This, of course, assumes that I’ve not become so old, isolated, and spoiled-by-algorithms that I simply miss the wild experimental stuff. Odds are, this is the stronger possibility…) ON THE DOCKET Today there are copyedits to process and a new book announcement to organise on the Brain Jar Press front, and we’re definitely

My beloved and I went out to the movies last night, having decided the opportunity to see Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear on the big screen was worth the stress of being out among large crowds of people. It was definitely our kind of movie, and delivered exactly what we’d hoped: a drugged out bear pulling people apart, enough subplot to keep the action meaningful, and the occasional over-the top moment. Cocaine Bear is a movie that knows exactly what it’s doing. It knows you’ve come in to cheer to the bear on, not care about any of the human characters. My primary fear going in was that it’d break the internal verisimilitude of the world in the name of ‘humour’ (aka the Sharknado 3 issue), but it was more restrained than I expected on that front (although my definition of restraint is not going to be shared by everyone). NEW WORK My latest short story, Or For Eternity Hold Your Piece, goes live on Patreon in a little under two hours. It’s not the piece I’ve been working on all this week, but another I’ve been tinkering with in the background where I played with the kind of maximalism that permeated James Wan’s Aquaman. A pair of monster hunters go to disrupt a wedding between two otherworldly entities, but their plans go awry when more than one guest objects to the impending nuptials. You can get this and—Gods, this is adding up—thirty-five other stories by signing up for as little

Sent out my first newsletter since switching my provider away from Mailchimp, so it’s a bit of a nervewracking morning spent watching analytics and trying to figure out if I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m pretty sure I haven’t, because Mailchimp was making it increasingly clear I wasn’t the kind of customer they were trying to keep. I’ve been meaning to pull the trigger on the switch for a while, but yesterday’s “go out and be an author in public” hangover pushed me onto my zombie mode task list for the first time in a long while. ON THE DOCKET No meetings today, which means today is 100% devoted to getting tomorrow’s story ready for Patreon. The current draft lives in two different notebooks, scribbled around the edges of other tasks this week, so today is spent figuring out what I’m trying to do and how to make it good. Time remaining will be spent getting two books ready to go to the distributors, and doing my weekly review of tasks to ensure I’ve not lost track of too many things as the week wound on. BRAIN JAR INBOX: 13 PETER M. BALL INBOX: 15 BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 6