Category: Journal

On Staying Small and Going All In I’m up at 4:00 AM talking to D—  from tech support, trying to work out (for the ninth time since October) a weird glitch that means I can receive emails but not send them through some of my accounts. I’m very familiar with the tech support script at this stage: First, D— understands how frustrating this is for me. Then, he asks the same questions I’ve answered in the last eight rounds, gets me to delete my email software and set it up from scratch, and change some passwords. Then D—makes a change to the back end, asks me to wait 24 to 48 hours, and promises that this time it’ll be fixed for sure. By now, I ask for the log number of our call, because I know I’ll be contacting them again in 28 hours and going through the exact same script again with a different member of the tech support

Last week, I ran a bunch of writing workshops for Villanova College here in Brisbane. Four workshops spread over three days, focused on writing a crime story in 900 words. My year of producing original short fiction for Patreon came in incredibly handy, since I have a lot of thoughts on how to curtail your word count after doing that. An interesting side-effect of doing a lot of workshops: I do not go anywhere near a computer while running them. All my writing work gets done in notebooks, scribbling details by hand, rather than firing up a desktop and working in Word or Scrivener directly. Partially, this is a practical concern—notebooks are transportable and easier to flip open when you’re filling a half-hour between sessions in an unfamiliar space—but it has benefits beyond raw pragmatism. I made the switch because I operate from a baseline level of social anxiety, and it rages out of control when I break my routine.

Today I turn 45, and in lieu of the traditional god-awful birthday selfie, you get a semi-awful birthday close-up of my cat saying Good Morning. Gods, it’s been a year. The last twelve months have seen plagues and floods, a bunch of books getting published, a couple of ambitions projects started (and, currently, shelved for a restart once my schedule clears up in June). I got married to my beloved last Halloween, got a job with Brisbane Writers Festival, and have spent a good chunk of time trying to manage the ongoing whiplash of trying to figure out the rapidly changing landscape of existing in 2022. I rather failed to finish my PhD, but it’s getting close. Sooooo goddamned close. Tomorrow it’ll be three years since my dad passed away. It’s also three years since my sister went through the surgery that rendered her cancer free. I was already weird about birthday celebrations, but it’s been damn confusing since 2019,

Right, a quick one. I set myself three books to read this week, then promptly read two of them in the space of twenty-four hours. So I added another two books and promptly read one of those in the space of a few hours. I started August by doing a Patreon post about the relative dearth of reading as I hit the mid-year, but it seems I’m trying to solve that in a single weekend. Then there was an upset stomach and the discovery of Episodes, a 2011 sitcom featuring Tamsin Grieg and Matt LeBlanc, which makes a great job of utilizing the strength of both actors. And yet, oddly weird, because it feels like it should be a BBC comedy, but it’s…not. … I spent the start of Brisbane’s lockdown rescheduling a small stack of meetings. Now I’ve spent the end of lockdown rescheduling a small stack of meetings, because my stomach was iffy enough that sitting for an

It’s been an odd kind of Saturday. I woke up at 5:30 — a terrifyingly regular occurance these days — and stumbled out to spend a few hours reading on the couch. The cat decided to hang out with me, so I spent a few hours devouring books at a terrifying rate of knots. The last book on the pile was Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, all about the role the myelin sheaths forming over nerves play in the acquisition and refinement of skills, and the factors that contribute to certain schools, towns, or movements spawning an astonishing number of world-class talents, whether it’s in the field of art, sport, or science. Fascinating, fascinating book that’s going to have me thinking incredibly hard about my practice, and about the logistics of writing careers. Many old, well-worn bits of writing advice — write every day! If you want to write, you must read! — can be contemplated in a new light

Our not-so-beloved downstairs neighbours are moving out today, in the midst of the Brisbane lockdown. It’s a bizarre riot of sound compared to a very quiet Saturday, during which the cat slept on the laptop table for several hours and I engaged in a prolonged doomscroll following Australia’s current virus news, American post-election fall-out, and the rest of the world just basically figuring 2021 will roll on just like 2020. Brain Jar Press has new books to announce, but I held off figuring that last week was a bit too busy to compete for attention. This proved a smart choice, given the way our book sales (rightly) tanked as all eyes turned towards the news. But it’s also an inauspicious way to start my first week as a full-time publisher. There’s no real possibility of hitting the ground running this week, no easy tasks that could move the needle on sales and inch towards the kind of benchmarks I need

On the 30th of November I celebrate three years since Brain Jar Press launched its first book, the Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales. I’d been so focused on the upending Brain Jar birthday I overlooked another milestone—on the 27th it’s been twelve years since I started writing this blog and charting my progress as a emerging science fiction writer. It’s tempting to make noises about blogging less often than once did, and wish for the days when a blog post would inspire conversation and feedback, but the truth is I’ve already blogged more often in November 2020 than I did back in heyday of blogs back in 2008. It’s got me thinking about recurring pattern in my life, where November rolls around and I focus my sights on changing up my approach to a particular aspect of my writing and publishing career. In the past it’s manifested as starting a blog and publishing company, but also starting year-long writing

We’re juggling home office spaces here in Casa Del Brain Jar, trying to find an optimal amount of space to get everything done on my end while also factoring in space for my partner to work from home a few days per week. It’s interesting to sit down and interact with things from this perspective: the wireless keyboard which proved to be untenable for writing because the Shift key wasn’t reliable may find new life on the second desk; the upgrade from printer to printer/scanner back at the start of the pandemic proves itself to be a prescient decision; my old desk-top, only ever bought as a back-up if the laptops end, starts to show its age as my partner sizes it up as a potential second screen only to discover that it’s a relic of an era before HDMI ports, requiring a VGA connection. I’m doing up a proper business plan for Brain Jar Press this week, guided through

Interesting thing about putting a Now Page on the internet: you’ll put up things that are very much a work-in-progress line of half-baked thinking up there, and people in other timezones will will prod you for more information before you’ve had your morning coffee. At which point you will need an extra three shots of caffeine just to cope with the idea that you need to be human and articulate. Which also means I could be doing a long, thinking-in-progress series of posts about the “Structuring a prose-based publishing company around comic book publishing models” entry, trying to pin down exactly what I’m thinking beyond “reading too many Warren Ellis rants about the state of publishing.” Please send coffee. No, more than that.

I posted this to Facebook on Sunday, when I was still twitchy as fuck about everything that happened. Now I’m revisiting it, 48 hours later, because this shit has derailed things pretty badly on the writing front, given the way it spiked my anxiety.. The story begins like this: our local pharmacy was out of the medication my partner uses to ease their chronic arthritis pain. For our household, this qualifies as a very bad thing, so we made plans for me to try the pharmacy at the local shopping centre when I did the weekly shopping. That pharmacy has been locked down, with signs on the doors alerting everyone there was an active COVID patient on the premises over the last few days. I start doing the math, figure trying a third pharmacy is a better choice than doing shopping. So I hit Google, search for other small pharmacy outlets in my local area, and hie over to a