ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

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

We’re one week out from the release of Matthew R. Davis Bites Eyes over at Brain Jar Press, ergo this week is going to be a little more promo focused than others. There’s a bunch of Brain Jar projects in the hopper at the moment, slowly advancing as I figure out how to balance the various tasks now I’m back in a more-or-less freelance state. Matthew’s book excites me because it’s one of our first releases with an author I didn’t know personally when their work appeared in the submission queue. ON THE TO DO LIST TODAY PETER M. BALL INBOX: 33 BRAIN JAR INBOX: 23 BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 15 Very minimal movement on the email front this week, as I’m still trying to get back on top of things after being out for a week. Basically aiming to keep my head above water until I’ve cleared the backlog.

I didn’t feel sick for much of the last week, but my contact time with the keyboard dropped from 40+ hours a week to a little under 10. The week consisted of doing what needed to be done — getting my spouse to work, meeting with mentees who’d booked meetings — then collapsing in a heap and racking up an extra eight or nine hours of sleep. Odds are, I’d picked up some dread sleeping lurgy, although the RATs suggest it wasn’t the obvious culprit. Either way, I’m now behind on all the things and my Omnifocus list is screaming a daily alarm about balls dropped. NEW WORK The early reader version of the short story I’m Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf went live over on Patreon yesterday. Final version will appear in an issue of Eclectic Projects in the second half of the year. It’s a story inspired by the Mark of Cain’s cover of Degenerate Boy, made popular back in late nineties Australia when it appeared on the soundtrack of Idiot Box. I wrote a good chunk of this story back in 2009, left it to sit fallow for the rest of a decade, and wrote the second half while half-delirious from exhaustion this week, and it gets another file out of my seemingly endless folder of half-finished stories. ON THE TO-DO LIST TODAY PETER M. BALL INBOX: 35 BRAIN JAR INBOX: 23 BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 15 READING Read R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War this week,