ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

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,

NEW WORK Three things I love in science fiction: giant robots, punk rock teens, and hostile colony planets. So it’s probably no surprise my SF novelette, ONE LAST SEASON, combines all three. Maya is a technically gifted kid on the ice planet Javal, the daughter of a punk afficionado and a passionate terraforming activist. When Maya’s dad pawns the one thing her dead mother left her—a battered Fender Stratocaster worth thousands of credits—Maya’s only hope of getting it back is winning first price in Javal’s racing mecha racing circuit. It should be easy: Maya’s built her own mech out of spare parts and rewritten code, and her best friend Alex is one of the hottest mecha pilots on the planet. Pity Alex’s kleptocratic family has their own ideas about the races, and their friendship will be tested when they race their own high-end mech in this year’s circuit. Maya and her mech Cee-Bee-Gee-Bee might be good enough to beat any other robot on the planet, but defeating Alex and her state-of-the-art racer Ruby-Go-Go will take something special. Maya’s got an idea that just might do it, but the price may be more than she’s willing to pay… ONE LAST SEASON is now live on my Patreon, accessible for patrons at the $1 a month level and upwards. The rest of the world won’t get a chance to read this one for at least three months, so if you’d like to access this and over thirty other speculative fiction short stories

It’s a season of change, in many ways. Two weeks ago, I lost my job, which began an immediate search for what comes next. Obviously, part of the answer is “writing” and “Brain Jar Press”, both of which got short shrift while I was dallying with full-time employment (for the first time) over the last twelve months. Neither writing nor publishing is enough to sustain us on its own, but it’s looking like I can assemble a Frankenstein’s Monster of a solution from various part-time and contract gigs that have come my way over the last few weeks. More recently, Elon Musk took over Twitter, which seems to have triggered a mass exodus of users and much thinking about what comes next. For all Twitter has been a pretty terrible place for the last few years, far less fun than it was in its heyday, it held traction as the one place where conversation spread in a way other social platforms of its era now refuse to do. It gave you access to a larger, discursive space where folks talked about their interests in your vicinity. I’m not saddened to see Twitter go by the wayside, but I see it as a potential problem point for those of us who relied upon it for outreach. Specifically, this line of thought explored by Michael Damian Thomas about the impact this will have on speculative fiction magazines. I’ve been doing the occasional consult and course on writing, publishing, and backlist over the