Status

My beloved and I went out to the movies last night, having decided the opportunity to see Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear on the big screen was worth the stress of being out among large crowds of people. It was definitely our kind of movie, and delivered exactly what we’d hoped: a drugged out bear pulling people apart, enough subplot to keep the action meaningful, and the occasional over-the top moment.

Cocaine Bear is a movie that knows exactly what it’s doing. It knows you’ve come in to cheer to the bear on, not care about any of the human characters. My primary fear going in was that it’d break the internal verisimilitude of the world in the name of ‘humour’ (aka the Sharknado 3 issue), but it was more restrained than I expected on that front (although my definition of restraint is not going to be shared by everyone).

NEW WORK

My latest short story, Or For Eternity Hold Your Piece, goes live on Patreon in a little under two hours. It’s not the piece I’ve been working on all this week, but another I’ve been tinkering with in the background where I played with the kind of maximalism that permeated James Wan’s Aquaman. A pair of monster hunters go to disrupt a wedding between two otherworldly entities, but their plans go awry when more than one guest objects to the impending nuptials.

You can get this and—Gods, this is adding up—thirty-five other stories by signing up for as little as a buck a month, with new work coming every week.

ON THE DOCKET

Saturdays are a bit of a wildcard on the projects front, as my beloved is home and it’s nominally the day to catch up on chores. The rest of the day will be spent doing all the distributor uploads I didn’t have time to do yesterday.

After the success of implementing Tiago Forte’s One Touch Email system earlier in the week, I’ve looped around to his Second Brain system and started plotting how to integrate it with my workload a little better. This mostly means revising his book and looking at my current process, noting problems to solve (how to integrate a physical journal and electronic note system) and weaknesses in my approach (great at capture, terrible at processing), then logging things to try.

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 10

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 14

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 6

Sent out my first newsletter since switching my provider away from Mailchimp, so it’s a bit of a nervewracking morning spent watching analytics and trying to figure out if I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m pretty sure I haven’t, because Mailchimp was making it increasingly clear I wasn’t the kind of customer they were trying to keep.

I’ve been meaning to pull the trigger on the switch for a while, but yesterday’s “go out and be an author in public” hangover pushed me onto my zombie mode task list for the first time in a long while.

ON THE DOCKET

No meetings today, which means today is 100% devoted to getting tomorrow’s story ready for Patreon. The current draft lives in two different notebooks, scribbled around the edges of other tasks this week, so today is spent figuring out what I’m trying to do and how to make it good.

Time remaining will be spent getting two books ready to go to the distributors, and doing my weekly review of tasks to ensure I’ve not lost track of too many things as the week wound on.

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 13

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 15

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 6

Putting on my editor hat for a moment: The latest release at Brain Jar Press is Matthew R. Davis’ Bites Eyes, a deliciously disturbing assemblage of thirteen flash fictions and short horror vignettes. Available now through the Brain Jar Press store or all good bookshops. Editing short story collections is one of my favourite things to do, and there’s a deceptive amount of depth you can bring to the process to the editor. Probably the most fun I’ve had designing a cover in the last year as well.

ON THE DOCKET

Thursdays are usually my meeting-free day each week, but today is all about seeing folks. I’m catching up with an old friend via Zoom in the morning and have a rescheduled mentee meeting in the afternoon.

This is very much a notebook week on the writing front. I recently doubled down on bullet journaling as my default organisational system, and it’s working moderately well, and the natural next step is doing all my planning and drafting away from the computer. I’ve got about three-quarters of a truly terrible short story draft down over the last two days, after nearly a week of trying to write it in scrivener and stalling out. The redrafting process for this one will be brutal, but that’s what tomorrow’s for.

There’s also a bunch of design work on deck, and a little catch-up on the Brain Jar admin I didn’t get to yesterday. It’s nearly five months since I lost my job and went back to being the primary on-deck person running the press, but I’m finally hitting the point where it’s feeling like I’m almost caught up and ready to get things running smoothly.

(The gods will, of course, smite me for saying that, but let’s celerate the win, eh?)

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 15

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 13

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 6

I read Tiago Forte’s One Touch Email system yesterday and immediately applied it to my personal email, and the results were pretty extreme. It helps a lot that I already had the infrastructure he talks about between my journal, my Evernote set-up, and my tasks manager, so it was mostly a reminder that system that I typically think of as a waste of time to learn how to use (‘Email to’ functions, keyboard shortcuts) typically have a big effect when you figure out how to use them properly.

Not going to lie: creating a “Task” and “Reference” email that forwards things to the appropriate system did a lot of the heavy listing in cutting down my inbox of doom.