ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Status

11 Feb 2023

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

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11/02/2023 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Saturday Morning Stories

Six months ago, I started posting a weekly short story to my Patreon account instead of throwing works in progress up there in a haphazard matter. Dubbed the Saturday Morning Story—a little something for folks to read over their morning coffee on the weekend—I figured it would have a shelf-life of a couple of weeks before I faltered and ran out of drafts. Twenty-six weeks later, I’m still going. The story for week twenty-seven is on my list of things to redraft over the next few days, and at this point, I’m determined to make a full year. Mostly, these stories go up as advanced drafts—they’re ultimately the stories that find their way into the Eclectic Projects magazine six months later, and there’s often a redraft and copyedit that takes place as part of that. Sometimes, those rewrites can be extensive—one of my early proto-posts, before I went weekly, went from an 800 vignette to a 4,000 word short story because I needed something very different to balance out the magazine issue (Patreon subscribers also get the magazine issues, if they’re curious to see the changes). Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve produced as part of this project: That’s twenty-nine stories or serial entries all-up posted through 2022, plus another horror story—On Meeting An Ex-Girlfriend For Drinks At the Cafe Trio—which appears in the first issue of Eclectic Projects that patrons got early access too. Coming up over the next few months I’ve got a novelette about giant robot

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07/01/2023 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

A Year of Reading: 2022

Goodreads, as is their tradition, have curated a list of all the books I read across 2022. The total number runs to 72 books, give or take a couple of titles that didn’t log properly, with another 10 books that I started across the year still “in progress” at the end. That’s a big of a slow year for me, but more than I thought, especially given I worked full-time for the first time ever through the bulk of 2022. The learning curve—and figuring how to use my time judiciously—proved to be a challenge. With that said, lets talk the highlights. 2022 was a year where the bulk of the new-to-me authors I picked up were romance-oriented, partially because Romance is my comfort reading and partially because Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and the Hot As F$ck Romance newsletter fed a continual supply of interesting reads my way. Big recommendations on this front are Penny Reid’s WINSTON BROTHERS books, Kris Ripper’s BOOK BOYFRIEND, Ruby Barrett’s THE ROMANCE RECIPE. The most oddly disappointing book of the year was Lucy Parker’s BATTLE ROYAL, but that’s mostly because it was good and her prior works I’ve encountered were outstanding, so it suffered in comparison. My Spec Fic read of the year was definitely Gareth Powell’s ACK-ACK MACAQUE, a maximalist SF trilogy with a very odd premise that just hit all my buttons as a reader. Enjoyed Django Wexler’s HARD REBOOT a lot as well, and I’m mystified as to why Xiran Jay Zhao’s IRON

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06/01/2023 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Reboot (Hulu/DisneyPlus)

I’ve been a fan of Steven Levitan’s TV shows for years without really being aware of it. I devoured episodes Just Shoot Me as a kid, went out of my way to watch Stark Raving Mad during its brief tenure, and slowly wended my way around to an appreciation of Modern Family after writing the sitcom juggernaut off for the better part of a decade. The same three traits unified his creations: incredibly smart casting, an interesting concept, and a thin seam of genre subversion running through a solid understanding of the core tropes. His most recent effort, Reboot, takes those traits and turns them up to eleven. The pitch is simple: an edgy young writer convinces Hulu to reboot an early 2000s family sitcom; as it comes together, we discover the original creator was her father, who walked out her mother and started a new family, then turned that new family into the core conceit of his hit sitcom. Rights issues mean father and daughter end up working together as co-showrunners, working out their issues as they create a new vision for the show. Meanwhile, the dysfunctional cast and crew of the original show come together to work out their issues. It is, as they say, very meta, and in the wrong hands it would be terrible. In the right hands…well, you have Reboot. The writing isn’t immediately in-your face funny, but it’s incredibly deft and willing to spend an episode building a joke so it lands just right.

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03/11/2022 No Comments
Status

Ch-Ch-Changes: Status Update, 11 Nov 2022

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

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01/11/2022 No Comments
Stuff

Oh No

I’m currently writing a short essay on TikTok and Instagram Reels for my Patreon, which has meant I’m playing around with both platforms. I’m over at @PeterMBall on both, having a bit of fun and talking about books/writing, but I did want to share one creation here because… well, cat. And it amuses me way too much. @petermball Its always hard to explain the economics of what you do to your pets. #writertok #writerscats #fantasyauthortok #publishersoftiktok ♬ Oh No – Kreepa Brain Jar Press announced a fantastic new short story collection by Tansy Rayner Roberts this week. If you’d like to keep our cat in kibble, you can pre-order now.

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23/09/2022 No Comments
Works in Progress

Knock Knock: an interactive serial (Part 3)

This is part three of my occasional sci-fi serial about a science team dealing with an alien intruder on their romote research bate. After each installment, readers get a week to make a choice that will inform what happens next. You can read the first two installments on the series page. When last we left our intrepid heroes, one of them had snapped and elected to threaten the intruder with a gun. I asked the readers to vote on how things played out, and this is how things broke down. With 50% of the readership choosing the path of peace, we rejoin Captain Finn and the crew of Remote Research Station Denki as they try to calm things down. KNOCK KNOCK (A Serial With Reader Interaction) Part Three: Breaking Protocol Finn broke eight kinds of protocol and turned his back on the intruder. “Luce, I need you to put the gun down,” they said. “Tse’s hurting, but she’s in one piece. There’s no reason to escalate this.” The shotgun trembled in Lucy’s grip. Tears beaded in the corner of her eyes, and Finn figured the first signs of shock were setting in. They didn’t blame her; the looming presence of the intruder at Finn’s back hung there like a sword of Damocles, and they had no doubt all three would suffer if Lucy pulled the trigger. “Luce, we’re outclassed here.” Finn kept their voice calm and measured, trying to pull her focus off the intruder. “Whatever our visitor is, it’s

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10/08/2022 No Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

The 5-2 Focus List (A Useful To-Do List Alternative)

So here’s a neat variation on the to-do list I’ve picked up from Mark Foster’s Secrets of Productive People, where he replaces what I have to get done with what I’m going to focus on as the primary entries on your notepad. The 5-2 The process goes like this: Step One: Put five tasks you want to give your focus to on a sheet of paper. Works best with a mix of complex and simple tasks, but you do you, etc. Step Two: Work down the list in order. You don’t have to finish a task, just do something to progress it. Then: If you start a task and don’t finish it, cross the first entry off and add it to the bottom of your list.  If you finish a task, just cross it off. Step Three: Keep going through the tasks in order until you’ve whittled the list down to two, then add three new tasks to the end and repeat this process for the rest of the day.  Foster argues that five is the optimal starting length because it’s just long enough to pull your forward, without feeling like you can achieve everything without putting in effort.  The structure of the list means you’re often making small amounts of progress at a regular interval, rather than doing long stretches of work at once, so it’s both less intimidating to start and more likely to accumulate more work than you would have done.  IN PRACTICE For those who don’t

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08/07/2022 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Indie Publishing and Business To Business Thinking

A general frustration I’m having with self-publishing/indy publishing circles right now Indies are, by and large, a business-to-business endeavour that primarily exist to provide ebooks to distributors and retailers who then sell them to the customer. Many of those distributors and retailers give an extraordinary level of control to the authors around pricing and promotion, convincing them they’re actually business-to-consumer. It’s become a foundational assumption in the rhetoric around indie publishing, even if it’s not true. So many people’s frustrations stem from this misunderstanding once they’re past the initial learning curve. The idea that you adjust some part of your product to make it appealing *to the business that actually sells it* is frequently met with all kids of denial, particularly when the suggestion involves increasing your prices beyond the just-barely-making-a-profit baseline. Indie authors have been trained to focus on the customer above all else, and have stuck to the strategy that undercutting traditional publishing’s prices is the only viable path to success. Frequently, the argument seems to be, “readers won’t pay that” or “I don’t want to pay that for a book”, despite the fact that traditional publishing has made it clear readers will pay decent money for a good book they really want to read. (My rule a thumb, back when I first indie published in 2005, was “figure out how much you think a book is worth, then add a buck because you’re incredibly bad at gauging the value of your work”. These days, I’d probably add

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07/07/2022 No Comments
Works in Progress

Knock Knock: an interactive sci fi serial (Part 2)

Part two of my sci-fi serial where readers get to choose what happens next. When we encountered the three-person team manning Remote Research Station Denki back in part 1, they were surprised by a mysterious knock on the door…and no details appearing on any scans. Readers go to vote on how they responded, and I’ve included the results below! Two readers had very specific suggestions (one bloodthirsty, one polite), but overwhelmingly, the response was opening the door and letting the visitor in. With that, it’s time to kick off part two. KNOCK KNOCK (A Serial With Reader Interaction) Part 2: Boarding Procedures Tse raised the first tentative hand, stealing a glance at the airlock door as she did so. “Not sure how long that’ll hold,” she said. “Whatever’s out there might not be hostile, but we know a breach will mess us up.” Finn squared their jaw, masking the gut-rending surge of fear beneath a veneer of command stoicism. “Luce?” “No way in hell,” Lucy said. Finn expelled a long breath, fingers clawing at the armrest of their chair. No majority meant the decision fell to them, and the guilty voice inside their skull smugly reminded them they were in charge—it always should have been their call. Finn screwed their eyes shut, blocking out Lucy’s pleading look and Tse’s wary anticipation. Denki’s hull could withstand meteor impacts at velocities up to 55 meters per second, and the design had survived worse in testing. Tse’s fears had merit, but the shell

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06/07/2022 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Action, Reaction, Jackie Chan, & Gunpowder Milkshake

I often start workshops on story structure with the warning, “after this, you’ll never be able to go to the movies with non-writers again.” Lots of folks think I’m joking, but it’s essentially true: the three-act structure is the source code for an awful lot of TV and movies, and understanding its core beats means you can map out the bulk of a plot from a handful of details.  For me, this resulted in a different kind of enjoyment, more focused on teasing out the how-and-why of creative choices and where things go wrong, but there are plenty of folks who don’t enjoy that. Like, for example, my beloved spouse, who was so irritated by my response to the first three episodes of Star Trek: Next Gen that we’ve basically agreed to watch nothing Trek-related together for the sake of our marriage. They love the TV show unconditionally, and I…um…let’s say “sit there marveling at just how far TV storytelling has come in the decades since.” So, consider this a warning: the rest of this post is very much me meditating on a particular thing films and TV shows do, and once you know it, it’s impossible to unknow it. It’ll change the way you watch films and TV, affect some of your favourite action flicks, and potentially irritate people who watch things with you, Still with me? Cool, then let’s talk about choreographing action.  Back in June, we watched Gunpowder Milkshake for the first time. My beloved had been

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05/07/2022 No Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Bullet Journals Revisited, And A Defense Of Rapid Logging

A few weeks ago, I read Ryder Carroll’s book The Bullet Journal Method. I’ve been using bullet journals for years at this point. Not the pretty art-pieces that you’ll find on the internet, full of scrolling calligraphy and Washi tape, but a series of beat-up journals that are filled with messy handwriting and scribbled notes. Notebooks with no interest in being beautiful objects, but plenty of practical use as a tool. I picked it up around 2012, after being impressed by the way my friend Kate Cuthbert organised her work at Harlequin Australia. Ten years of relatively consistent bullet journaling is a long time. Over the years, I’ve gotten large chunks of my family into the habit — there’s often a family Leuchtturm shop around the end of the year. I’ve experimented with different approaches, from one dedicated bullet journal for everything to bullet journal by project to bullet journal by context (writing/work/life). I’ve researched and experimented with layouts and approaches, and found stuff that really worked for me (elements of Tobias Buckell’s hacks and showrunner John Rodgers hacks have both been useful). All of which is really a prelude to saying I wasn’t expecting much from Ryder Carroll’s book. I picked it up because the Bullet Journal method has been a lifeline for me in recent years, and I wanted to throw some cash his way for sharing it so freely back in the early days, but I worked on the assumption I knew what I was doing. Turns

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04/07/2022 No Comments

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