Brain Jar 2.0: One Year On

A cold morning here in locked down Brisbane. The heater is definitely on and the cat has taken up residence in a conveninent patch of sunlight. The writing brain is protesting the return to work like a reluctant starter mower on the last dregs of fuel; it’s a “40% of optimal” day here, first thing in the AM. I’ll get things up and running, but it’s not going to be terribly smooth.

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Many moons ago, at the 2016 Brisbane Natcon, I was on a panel with Cat Sparks and someone whose name eludes that turned to the character of Jack Reacher. Cat noted she didn’t think Jack Reacher would work as a woman — a thought that stuck in my head for a long while, and slowly evolved into a novella I’m working on for my thesis. I’ve got the big beats of the story more-or-less locked down at this point, so I’m into the interstitial scenes: negotiations; investigation; the occasional stare-down with a henchmen. Procuedral beats where the character of Reacher really lives, far more than the action scenes, because Reacher’s appeal is that he’s got a knack for hypervigilance without any of the PTSD or Anxiety symptoms that usually accompany it.

I wasn’t meant to working on this at the moment, nor the rough draft of a non-fiction book that I’m scribbling for the folks over on my Patreon. This week was meant to be spent finalizing a conference workshop I was going to present a little later in the month, but lockdowns in other parts of Australia saw that conference rescheduled for sometime in December. And so I wrote about Miriam Holst tearing apart her dead friend’s apartment, then I wrote a quick draft about writing being a surprisingly sound career when you look past all the rhetorick about artist being broke.

And then I did the monthly accounts for Brain Jar Press, logging all the income and outgoing expenses for July. Continuing to make a profit, which is good. Still not enough to live on long-term, which means there’s going to be some interesting decisions to make around the end of October when I have to scale my involvement back to part-time.

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Since we’re on a nostagia kick, Angela Slatter reminded me that we announced Red New Day around this time last year. It was the first book of Brain Jar 2.0, transitioning the core business from self-publishing my work and towards a fully-fledged small press publishing schedule. Here’s how we kicked things off:

Looking back, I vastly underestimated how well this would sell. I knew Angela had some ardent fans, but I figured the chapbook format and the price point would discourage a lot of them. I spent an awful lot of time trying to set expectations before we’d even signed the contact, noting that Brain Jar’s strategy is a slow accumulation of sales over time rather than the focused, one-month burst of sales that’s the focus of traditional publishing. I figured fifty copies were a reasonable target. Seventy-five would be a wild success.

We cleared those numbers in the first three months, which is largely how Brain Jar Press got a small business development grant to begin with in the heart of the pandemic.

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To the surprise of absolutely noone, George R.R. MArtin has gone on record stating the end of A Song of Fire and Ice probably won’t resemble the final season of A GAme of Thrones. The weirdest part about his statement is the realisation he was 5 books ahead of the TV show when it started in 2011, and they still caught up with him. There’s a small chunk of my thesis devoted to Martin’s books and the clash between reader experctations and publishing realities, but I would be having a field day with this sort of stuff were I doing a longer critical work.

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Near as I can tell, all the usual promotion systems for this blog are offline at the moment. No auto-posts to Twitter or Tumblr, no mail-outs via the old system. Despite being the most public and accessible form of online presence I have — Twitter and Facebook require accounts, Patreon and the Newsletter both require sign-up — it may have the smallest possible readership.

Which is, frankly, something in it’s favour for the moment. For years I approached this blog like a miniature zine, showing up to write proto-essays as often as I’d update folks on the goings-on in my little neck of the writing world. These days the zine-like content is routed through my patreon, then my newsletter, which frees the website up as theis archaic bit of tech that can re-discover its own identity.

And I do miss the blog as journal approach, which fell out of favour after RSS readers were swept away by the newfangled social media feeds. One of my favourite books on writing remains Neil Gaiman’s Adventures in the Dream Trade, which devotes a huge number of pages to Gaiman’s journal circa 2004/2005.

It doesn’t utelise any of the tools of content-focused blogging, but it’s an intriguing historical document to look back on and trace the trajectories of the man’s career.