Category: News & Upcoming Events

It’s the eighteenth of March here in Australia, which means I’ve just turned another year older. We’re still fixing things up after the cyclones and floods in our neck of the wood, so it’s going to be a quiet one this year. While I’m skipping the customary birthday selfie this year, I’ve still got a celebratory thing for you all. Turns out I’ve written a bunch of stories about birthday parties over the year, and I’d largely forgotten about this one until my “on this day” log reminded me.  It’s a story about birthdays and parties and social media, and probably a pretty good argument for why I should never be trusted with any of the three. It also feels a lot more plausible than it did a few years back, when I first wrote it. THE BIRTHDAY PARTY Leitner’s birthday is sponsored by Cuervo and livestreamed on Facebook, Jitterbug, and A26. Vintage socials because Leitner’s whole brand is retro,

I didn’t watch zombie movies as a kid. We lived in a small town with limited TV reception, and the nearest cinema was hundreds of kilometres away. Movies were hard to find, and horror movies were always way down the list of things to see. Particularly after a series of school camps, where my 4th grade teacher scared the bejesus out of us by describing the horror of Halloween and Friday the 13th as campfire tales. Not terribly scary for the kids who’d seen the films, but terrifying for a weird nine-year-old with an overactive imagination. I avoided horror movies for years, despite loving horror fiction. My first zombie movie was Paul W. S. Anderson Resident Evil, which a friend pitched to me as “Aliens, but with zombies”, in late 2002. I was twenty-five years old, and damn near crawled over the back of the couch as I imagined what could happen.   Still, I loved it. I wanted more. And so, my zombie education began. I’ve watched a metric

I recently posted my 40th weekly Saturday Morning Story to Patreon, which is a patently absurd sentence to write given I started this project under the belief I could no longer finish anything. I honestly believed I’d have a burst of enthusiasm, produce stories for six weeks, then I’d curl up in a ball and whimper for mercy. Maybe pack this whole writing thing in for a lark and start a new career in a fromagerie (not that I’m qualified to do that, but knee-jerk reactions to hard things are never entirely rational). Today’s a considerable milestone, though. See, I’ve actually posted 41stories to Patreon—one story in Eclectic Projects 001 went straight to the magazine, so patrons had to download it instead. Today is the point where there’s original short fiction on my Patreon than in all three of my short story collections combined. I’ll admit that I haven’t put a lot of thought into this project—again, I expected it

Today’s my forty-sixth birthday, so I’m kicking off today’s post with the traditional unflattering birthday selfie. I gather these have long been robbed of their power to horrify my mother, but I kinda dig having an ongoing archive of my rarely-photographed face to reflect on as the years go by. This year, my birthday falls on a Saturday, which is also when I post an original story to the Eclectic Projects Patreon every week. I honestly thought this week would be the first time in thirty-eight weeks I skipped a day because I didn’t have a story done—the week before my birthday is always rough for me, and rougher still now the 19th of March is the anniversary of my father’s death—but the weekly short story project has changed my relationship with writing. First, because I don’t actually want to skip a week after thirty-eight weeks of showing up without fail. Second, because writing a story a week will change

I opened up for Freelance Cover Design Work last week because our cat had an unexpected vet visit and it wiped out my emergencies fund. However, with my small business grant running out towards the end of October, I’m also preparing to open up a few more side-hustles to keep things afloat while I’m looking for a new day-job and keeping Brain Jar Press running. Which brings us to the secondary side-hustle on the design front: pre-made book covers folks can pick up slightly cheaper than getting me to design stuff from scratch. The proper launch for this will likely come in October, when I’ve had time to set up a proper web store to streamline the buying process and built up a decent catalogue (the aim is about 5-to-6 covers for each genre I want to cover at time of launch). Meanwhile, here’s the preview gallery of what’s coming: Like I said, the full store is coming in October.

Brain Jar Press is now shipping print editions of my short story collection, Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet. The book contains twelve science fiction stories, including my sci-fi dragon western Dying Young and the Aurealis Award winning cyberpunk fairytale Clockwork, Patchwork, and Raven. It also features two stories, 52 Pick-Up and and Inside An Egg, Inside A Duck, that are original to the collection. Customers who pre-ordered already have their books. Copies have been showing up on Twitter. This wonder arrived this afternoon. Thank you @BrainJarPress snd @Petermball pic.twitter.com/Q08xzSgEJj — Trent Jamieson (@trentonomicon) August 25, 2021 Some books are events — launched and celebrated, pushed hard to find their readership — but increasingly I fall back on the default of making books available. The launch is a product of an older sales environment, where you needed all the attention on a book right now, before the sales window closed and a mass of new releases swept

Over the weekend Brisbane became the third Australian state capital to lock down because of a Delta-variation outbreak of Covid-19, and we’ve already hit our first extension because the contact tracing did not go well. Some folks are cheerfully making plans for after the current deadline expires, while others are merrily settling in for a much longer wait before things open up again. Not that a lockdown means much when you’re running a publishing company from your couch. I’ve rescheduled a bunch of important-but-not-urgent meetings, and tried to think of ways I could turn the lockdown into an opportunity. Weeks like this are typically bad times to be announcing and releasing new books — any time attention is on the news, I’ve struggled to move the needle on sales — but that means it’s a great time to be working on some “when I get time for it” projects. Such as, for example, the print release of Not Quite The