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Release Day: A White Cross Beside a Lonely Road (Short Fiction Lab #3)

A ten-hour drive, a relationship on the rocks, and a ghost waiting for company on a lonely stretch of road.  The last thing Alex wants is a trip home with his boyfriend in tow, but when Brendan insists on coming there’s nothing for it but a ten hour drive and the dread of what might happen when they reach their destination.  There is nothing about the idea of being trapped in car with his lover that Alex is looking forward too, but a haunted stretch of lonely road is about to make him question everything he knows about his relationship and his life.  A White Cross Beside A Lonely Road is the third short story in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press—home to stand-alone short story experiments in fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fabulist literature. This experiment has been filed under: ghost stories, outback fantasy, supernatural encounters, and Australian weirdness. The third Short Fiction Lab release is now out in the world, and available from the usual suspects via this handy Books2Read Link: books2read.com/u/47EM6E The story will be on sale for .99 cents US until August 8th, so I’d encourage you to pick it up early. This is very much a story built out of two writing workshops. I wrote the first draft back in 2007, while I was at Clarion South. At the time it was a relatively straightforward ghost story about isolated roads, relationships going wrong, and taking corners too fast. It worked okay, but it

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Journal

InBox Blues

My inbox sits at 25 emails this morning, which is better than it was yesterday but still enough to make me twitchy. It’s a little reminder that my routines are off, and that we’ve been working at the edge of burnout here in Casa Del Brain Jar. It’s also a reminder that I won’t bounce back automatically, just ’cause I want too. Getting back to writing will take effort, as will clearing email and getting back on top of all my other projects. One of the downsides of working from home–particularly a small flat like ours–is the potential for the space you work and the space where you deal with the big things life throws your way bleeding into one another. The little distractions you embrace to cope with loss or distract yourself during periods of high stress linger around after the cause of those behaviours is gone. The housework you let slide because you didn’t have the bandwidth is still there, needing to be done, as you try to kickstart your work brain and force it to wrangle a list of project that have been backing up. Yesterday, I dealt with the deadlock by relocating and changing environments. Working from home wasn’t happening, so I buggered off to the local food court and did a quick 1,500 words before picking up some groceries. Today, that’s unlikely to be an option for a handful of reasons, but starting is often the hardest part and I’ve cleared space on the writing

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Journal

Vale Pepe, Best of Cavys

I didn’t really have pets as a kid. Not the kind who were around long enough that you remember them. My dad kept snakes for a time, and those terrified me. We had guinea pigs when I was three, and a budgie for a short while, but the phase where pets and my life intersected was largely done by the time I turned seven. When my partner and I started living together, she brought her guinea pigs with her. They occupied a corner of the flat and interacted with one another, interrupted quiet writing days at home with demands for food and attention. They were a constant source of distraction and joy. I told myself I wasn’t a pet person, but they suckered me in anyway. There were noses to boop and personalities to learn and a surprising amount of affection for a critter that only weighs a kilogram. We lost Pepe, one of the pigs, last Friday. He’d gone in to the vets for an ear infection back at the start of June, and they’d noticed there were problems with his teeth. We tried to fix it, and then tried to fix the fix, and it gradually became apparent he wasn’t bouncing back the way we’d hoped. His pain kept getting worse, and so it was time to say goodbye. And I was not a pet person. I hadn’t ever had to say goodbye to a sick pet before, especially not after two months of working to keep the

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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? We said goodbye to one of our guinea pigs on Friday, after six weeks of tending to the poor, sick little guy. The coming week is largely about finding a new groove–both work spaces in the flat and daily schedules are going to change as a result of Pepe going over the rainbow bridge, and I’ll be searching for a new equilibrium. On the docket this week is working on covers and copy for the August Short Fiction Lab release, getting a September release together for the series, and kicking off a new novella draft

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Smart Advice from Smart People

Pyramid Planning and Dan Blank’s “Be The Gateway”

I’m reading Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway at the moment, a book about author platform and writing that is probably as close to my own philosophy that I’ve come across thus far. There’s a focus on identities and how they shape reaction to our work, and why “just telling good stories that entertain people” is frequently a failure to understand what you’re really offering readers. What really caught me, reading through it this morning, was an exercise on judging the priorities in your life. In it, Blank advises getting a stack of index cards and writing down all the things that matter to you, whether it’s a single word (“Family”) or a long term goal (“Take better care of myself”). Once you’ve got everything down, try and arrange all your cards into a pyramid: one things goes at the top, representing your highest priority. Two cards go underneath it, then, three, then four. It may take time to get the order down–Blank suggests you’ll usually start with a square and then refine as you go along–but the goal is getting some clarity over what you value and where the connections may lie. It’s a great exercise for identity formulation, but right now I’m interested in how it can be used to get some clarity on a day-to-day level. I usually have a list of fifteen projects or so I’m working on at any given time. A combination of writing stuff, book production, uni work, and personal projects around the house.

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Glee-full Thoughts

We recently started watching Glee for the first time here in Camp Brain Jar. It’s not a choice I expected to fall into, given my dislike of the musical as a format and my partner’s dislike of autotune, but I was lured in by some smart writing, some really sly dialogue in the opening episodes, and their ability to sidestep the thing that I dislike about musicals for the first half of a season (to whit: everyone verbalising internal states through song, rupturing my feeling of verisimilitude). Also, Harry Shum Jr, who is the best part of the Shadowhunters TV series and criminally underused as a back-up dancer here. Of course, now we’re in the second half of season one and the musical conventions are seeping through a lot more often. I’ve grumped through the last two episodes, which have been very music-heavy and very light on plot as they work to get the conflicts for the second half of the season in place. It’s interesting, given my thesis topic, because we’re at the point where they spending goodwill they’ve earned without building up much to replace it. Anyway. I’m off to do another read-through and proof of A White Cross Beside A Lonely Road this morning, followed by an hour of feeding our poor, sick guinea pig critical care so he’ll keep his nutrients up. The classic goth playlist is on high rotation and I’ve reeled across the lounge room to Bela Lugosi’s Dead to wake myself up. With

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Sometimes, Pragmatism Wins

I finished The Artists Way over the weekend. It did less of the stuff that really irritated me in the back half of the book–a tactic that only served to irritate me more when it did intrude. I don’t necessarily regret reading it–there’s plenty of useful points to noodle over–but I don’t know that it’s a book I’d ever recommend. The most useful part of it was comparing the spiritually tinged processes laid out with something like The Accidental Creative, which gives you a toolkit for much the same kind of focusing-in-on-process and refilling-of-the-well in a much more pragmatic (and, to my mind, sustainable) way. I’m following Cameron’s book full of frothy writing-and-spirituality with Lilith Saintcrow’s collection of writing posts, The Quill and the Crow. It’s an interesting contrast–Saintcrow’s very much from the school of “So you want to be a writer? Have you tried, say, actually writing? This shit is work” school of advice, but it’s undercut by a genuflection towards the idea that the stories are an external force that show up when you create space for them. Process is just a way of inviting them in when they show up. The Saintcrow is the more useful book for me at the moment, as the idea that I should just write and finish things is one I need reminding of when I get derailed by life events. It’s a simple, pragmatic solution, but it’s just crazy enough to work.

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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? All the last-minute things that need to be finalised before A White Cross Beside A Lonely Road goes live on the 31st, which includes the final proofs, uploading advances and sending them out, updating the back matter with a list of Short Fiction Lab releases thus far, and a handful of other small stuff. Once that’s finalised, I’ll be kicking off work on the Short Fiction Lab release for August, which is drafted and awaiting some last minute tweaks, and seems likely to go out under a new title.  Around that, the usual mix of

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

A Solid Way Through, With Terrible Scenery

So I’m reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way for the first time this week, following close to two decades of people recommending it. I’d been resisting it for a long time because the first person to recommend it to me was a friend with rather undiscerning tastes when it came to self-help books, the kind of person who’d press books about becoming a millionaire into my hands then seem put out when I argued that it was basically a ponzi scheme wrapped up in woogy language and siphoning expertise from others like a vampire, while the writing engaging in rhetorical cheats on par with Who Moved My Cheese. So I was primed not to like The Artists Way, despite the fact that it seemed to help an awful lot of people over the years. Right now, I’m about three chapters into the book, and I’ve thus far come to two conclusions: the first is that I really, really hate the book, even more than I assumed I would; the second is that it will probably do exactly what it advertises, in terms of getting people creating and working on projects after years of feeling stuck. I hate it because Cameron deploys several of the rhetorical devices that I so loathe in self-help books. It’s not quite at the Cheese level of creating a parable and immediately showing someone being helped by the parable within the narrative, but it’s got a second chapter where the subtext is all about how following

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Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Cover Stories

I logged to Amazon this morning to see how pre-orders were going for A White Cross On A Lonely Road. The nice thing about the dashboard they offer is the way it lines up a whole lot of books you’ve published in a row. If you’ve made a decision to adopt a standardised layout, that means you get a neat little visual when you log in. I’m still working through some of the older releases, bringing them into line with the standardised approach, and I’ll admit that I’ve gone back-and-forth between this and trying for a more genre appropriate cover for certain kinds of work. Today, though, was the first time I looked at them as a whole and felt satisfied with the effect. The approach is very much an approach that is designed to work with my relatively limited graphic design skills and keep the production side of things fast, but theres just enough scope to try new things and tweak the design as I go and while they may not always scream “fantasy story’ or “horror story” or “science fiction,” I’m pretty pleased with the way it makes it clear that you’re looking at something Brain Jar has published. The next stage is setting up something similar for print editions. The You Don’t Want To Be Published hardcopy is very much the prototype for a similar approach to back cover copy, but this could be the place where I start looking for a bit of differentiation between my

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

In Which I Shall Sell You On Things That Are Not the Next Brain Jar Press Pre-Order

So I’m gearing up to release the next Short Fiction Lab release in two weeks, and the pre-orders are going out with a 99 cent price-tag in the US. Naturally, this meant today started with me dropping a Macklemore Thrift Shop reference while writing up the promo for the newsletter, because that song always gets in my head every time I price something at 99 cents. Given that song was everywhere in 2012 you probably don’t need a refresher, but here’s a link in case you were very young, trapped in Antarctica for a few years, or you’re just feeling nostalgic. Going down the youtube hole obviously led me to the Post Modern Jukebox cover, which deploys Thrift Shop in a swing jazz style and is just all-around fantastic. You can go listen to it here, and I recommend you do. Which, of course, now means I’m reading Kelly Link’s The Faerie Handbag because it’s the greatest thrift-shop-based fantasy story going. And while I should be trying to sell you on picking up a pre-order copy of Short Fiction Lab 3: A White Cross Beside A Lonely Road, I’m just going to quietly point out you can read (or re-read) The Faerie Handbag over on Kelly’s website for free. I mean, I’d still dig it if you went and pre-ordered my story and all. It’s a road trip, and a ghost story, and a story about things falling apart when you’re expected to adult without clear guidelines for what that

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Journal

Dress Shop Dog

A new dress shop has opened down by our local pizza place, and yesterday I noticed a giant ball of carefully manicured fur hanging out by the entrance while stopping in to pick up dinner. I found myself wondering why a dress shop needs a dog, and the answers I came up with will probably be the seed of a new story down the line. The photo really doesn’t do justice to the epic, real-life fuzziness, but it’s hard to get a good shot when you’re hungry and the pepperoni is calling you. We’re in week five or six of caring for sick pets here at Camp Brain Jar, transferring our attention from the first sick guinea pig to the second, who is having things much worse than his younger brother. The stress is starting to take its toll–I spent a good chunk of my day having the self-care-isn’t-easy-and-it-isn’t-just-indulgence talk with myself, trying to shake off the increasingly-negative headspace that’s settling in. Doing my best to ward off the temptation to do things that are mildly fulfilling and easy, rather than legitimately-good-work and requiring effort. I’d be tempted to drop a quote from Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art about shadow careers and real work here, but I fear the book is in storage and its got that weird mix of 50% helpful advice about mindset, 50% bug-fuck crazy magical thinking about art curing cancer that makes me ish-ish about recommending it.

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