ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

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

Putting on my editor hat for a moment: The latest release at Brain Jar Press is Matthew R. Davis’ Bites Eyes, a deliciously disturbing assemblage of thirteen flash fictions and short horror vignettes. Available now through the Brain Jar Press store or all good bookshops. Editing short story collections is one of my favourite things to do, and there’s a deceptive amount of depth you can bring to the process to the editor. Probably the most fun I’ve had designing a cover in the last year as well. ON THE DOCKET Thursdays are usually my meeting-free day each week, but today is all about seeing folks. I’m catching up with an old friend via Zoom in the morning and have a rescheduled mentee meeting in the afternoon. This is very much a notebook week on the writing front. I recently doubled down on bullet journaling as my default organisational system, and it’s working moderately well, and the natural next step is doing all my planning and drafting away from the computer. I’ve got about three-quarters of a truly terrible short story draft down over the last two days, after nearly a week of trying to write it in scrivener and stalling out. The redrafting process for this one will be brutal, but that’s what tomorrow’s for. There’s also a bunch of design work on deck, and a little catch-up on the Brain Jar admin I didn’t get to yesterday. It’s nearly five months since I lost my job and went

An off-hand comment from my beloved wife and a weekly vegetable box delivery has sent me down a rabbit hole of experimenting with my method of cooking roast potatoes, looking for techniques I can use to level up my roasties. Yesterday, I experimented with par-boiling the potatoes in slightly acidic water before roasting, then brushing them with a little melted butter to add some flavour as they roasted. The results were deliciously crisp potatoes with a fluffy core when eaten hot, but the texture of the leftovers was disappointing when eaten cold the following day. Leftovers are important to us, given the haphazard balance between deadlines and spoons that runs our household, so figuring out the perfect tater roast now has a dedicated project page in my bullet journal to track future experiments and their results. I did a long podcast taping with the PratChat folks last night – my first real “be a writer in public” thing in over a year, and only my second since the pandemic started, and I’m feeling it today. I’ve got a definite out in public hangover today – reserves a low, and largely diverted to wrangling the brain weasels my social anxiety throws my way after any public appearance or teaching gig. There shall be many cups of tea in my future. GO READ Cory Doctrow’s recent Wired article on the enshittification of technology spaces is also available to read on his website, and it’s highly recommended reading for anyone working in the

OUT TODAY: ECLECTIC PROJECTS 002 The second issue of Eclectic Projects is out today, featuring four original short stories, one serial entry, and one long essay about the worst job I’ve ever worked, digital publishing technology, and the evolution of publishing scams in the age of the internet. Available from all good bookstores, via a Patreon subscription, or right here on the Eclectic Projects store in ebook and print. STATE OF THE PETER What started as 400-odd fraudulent orders over on Brain Jar Press has now escalated to a flurry of 3,000+ attempts, which basically means my email is a hellscape of notifications and chat messages. Our payment provider is still doing their job—none of the fraudulent purchases have gone through and I’m spared the mass refunding that would follow if they did—but it’s still a time-consuming process to stay on top of things. Worse, today, because it’s release day for Matthew Davis’ Bites Eyes over on the Brain Jar site, so I’ll have to keep a wary eye out for the legitimate orders that come through. ON THE DOCKET Dealing with some personal stuff today, alongside the fraud orders, but the nice thing about release days is that a large chunk of my to-do list can be run from a phone (it’s all triggering newsletters and commenting on social media posts). Later tonight, when things calm down, I’ll be recording with the fine folks at the PratChat podcast where we talk about Terry Pratchett’s non-fiction collection. PETER M. BALL

Extraordinary number of fraulent orders hit the Brain Jar Press store over the weekend, transforming our usual trickle of notifications into a mighty torrent as I was notified by payment failure after payment failure. On the plus side, our filters caught all the bogus orders as they were sent through and didn’t process them, which means I don’t have to spend my day refunding 400+ orders and talking to our payment provider about each one. On the downside, my email and the order system is a disaster zone that will need a few hours to clean up. Meanwhile, there are definite signs I need to reset my desk, especially given the number of books stacking up on the side table because I referenced them while working. NEW WORK This week’s Saturday Morning Story on Patreon was It’s Not A Job, a short tale about Chosen Ones, Monsters, and the Late Stage Capitalism that may also be a metaphor for art if you squint and look at the story sideways. Currently slated to appear in the September issue of Eclectic Projects, so Patreon backers get a really early look in addition to new issues as the magazine comes out. Here’s a sample: So it’s a Thursday and the three of us, me and Wiki and Cady, we’re up on the roof smoking cigarettes before we go clean the twenty-third floor. Our manager would ream our asses if she knew, pitch a fit over the maid service showing up stinking like an

There’s a work philosophy in Dan Charnas’ Work Clean which boils down to “slow down in order to speed up.” The mistakes you make by trying to get things done fast often end up costing you time in the long run, because things will end up needing to be redone or you’ll have to double-handle things somewhere along the way. It’s a good philosophy, and one that I’m thinking about a lot as I go back and fix the various mistakes of earlier this week, which include setting up print copies of a book using the wrong type of paper and needing to adjust all the cover layouts once we discovered the mistake. I’m also thinking about it with regard to rough drafts this week. February through March is typically the stretch of the year where my normal writing process stops working for a bit, since my ramshackle “make it up as I go along” approach tends to rely on having lots of thinking time and writing time to iterate work in various formats and pick up mistakes. I don’t have the spoons for that at present, given the various other stressors that kick in, but it always makes me twitchy about not working fast enough. My anxiety brain keeps pushing me to write all the words right fucking now, so I’m reminding myself that slow doesn’t mean that I’m doing it wrong… ON THE DOCKET There are no meetings or mentorship sessions today—a rarity at the moment—so I’m I’m

In March, I’m going to be a gust on the Pratchat: The Terry Pratchett Bookclub Podcast hosted by Ben McKenzie and Elizabeth Flux. Here’s some details from their recent announcement: For our March episode, we’re going where Pratchat has never gone before: into Pratchett’s nonfiction! Author, publisher and roleplayer Peter M. Ball joins us for a collection of Pratchett’s scribblings about genre, fandom and Neil Gaiman. The specific pieces are “Kevins”, “Wyrd Ideas”, “Let There Be Dragons” and “Notes From A Successful Fantasy Author”, plus “Neil Gaiman: Amazing Master Conjuror” and Neil’s foreword to the book in which all of these were collected, 2014’s A Slip of the Keyboard. You’ll find all of those (except the foreword) in the book’s first section, “A Scribbling Intruder”. Send us your questions about them via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com, or on social media using the hashtag #Pratchat65. From the announcement for this month’s episode I have a lot of thoughts about this collection, and these entries in particular, as you might expect from someone who started an entire product line dedicated to preserving the writing about writing generated by Australian speculative fiction authors. I’m really intrigued by writers like Gaiman and Pratchett alike, who rarely get positioned as exquisite craftsmen because that’s not the persona they often present to the world, yet actually leave an astonishing amount of great writing advice out there when you start to filter through for the gems. Plus, of course, Pratchett’s a writer who rose to popularity alongside the internet in many ways, which makes for