Works in Progress

Back in my teenage years, as a young comic book fan, I copied a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and stuck it on my wall. I wasn’t a kid given to this kind of behaviour, but this fragment where Gaiman’s protagonist, Dream, describes the creation of the first Corinthian spoke to me even then:

Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person, whom you slowly perceived to be yourself.

Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from black metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection.

But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still…

A dark mirror…

That was always the intention…

But the gulf between conception and execution is wide and many things can happen along the way.

Sandman #57, Neil Gaiman

My admiration for this passage came in two parts. The first, unsurprisingly, lay in my youthful terror of exactly that kind of experience. Even at an age when I should have known better, I harboured a lingering fear of empty spaces and the uncanny moment when something familiar became strange and dangerous.

But the part that really resonated was always the last line. Even at fifteen or sixteen years old, where my narrative focus was RPG games rather than fiction, I knew, acutely, that the conception of a project rarely matched the final outcome. Intentions changed, signals were misread, and paths could get diverted by all manner of blockages and side-routes.

In many ways, fiction (and particularly short-fiction) came as something of a relief once I started writing, because the projects were so self-contained. RPG campaigns have a tendency to go on for years, constantly metastasizing as you negotiate the contributions and digressions as your own voice and the voice of your players evolves and changes over time.

Which leads to a kind of truism — the longer the wait between conception and execution, the further you stray from the original intention and goals of the project. Some days this is for the best, with bad ideas becoming good ideas as additional complexity and theory builds up around them.

Other times, the gulf obliterates your original intent and you have to rebuild from the ground up.

When I launched the Eclectic Projects Patreon back in March, one of my intentions was getting back into the rhythm of regular blogging (which, in turn, would lead to future resources and possible books as I collated themed content together and fleshed out ideas). I set the goals and rewards to fit those intentions, trying to find the right balance between ambition (because I like ambition) and focused (so I wasn’t over-committing to the point of getting nothing done).

For thirty breif, shining days intention and execution seemed to work in sync.

Then, shit went wrong.

It started with laptop problems, which were followed by a long period of internet issues that left our household unable to get online. All up, I had about twenty-six or twenty-seven days of being offline or working on a back-up computer that didn’t play well with the internet, my default writing program, or any of the tools I used to publish books through Brian Jar Press. Then the next round of Australian lockdown hit, and my plans to make use of this blog got thwarted by some serious back-end issues that made it inaccessible, and anxiety over catching up on the massive backlog of work that built up while the computer was out and…

Well, the gulf between intention and execution is wide, and many things can happen along the way.

Last month, I was notified the theme/design I used for the previous iteration of PeterMBall.com was going to be archived. It would still work, but the designers were no longer maintaining it and making sure it ran perfectly on the latest iterations of the Worldpress platform.

My initial response was a moment of mild irritation—one more fucking thing to fix—but it was also an opportunity to re-think. A lot of the things I originally set up PeterMBall.com to do were now better handled by the Brain Jar Press site, and that allowed me to re-think decisions and approaches to an online presence.

The last few days have been a whirlwind of hassling tech support at my web host, experimenting with new designs, and re-imagining the look and feel of the site. Gone is the static front page and host of sidebars, and in their place is a scaled back approach that puts the blog front-and-centre.

It’s very much a statement of intent.

The next few weeks will be dotted with occasional posts, but I should hit cruising speed around September 18 and maintain posts at a fairly regular clip. Right now, there’s a small crew of Patreon supporters who are getting treated to an early preview of the coming blog posts and ideas I’ve been tooling with, and I’ll make no bones about the fact that I’m getting back into blogging because of their backing and enthusiasm.

Admittedly, it’s not quite the vision of the relationship between blog and Patreon I’d pitched them back in March of this year, but the gulf between conception and execution is vast, and many things can happen along the way.

One of the weirder side-effects of going all-in on doing print projects with Brain Jar Press was the increased number of folks who hired me to do layout and cover design in other places. It turns out small chapbooks make for very effective business cards.

I kinda put some long and hard thought into accepting these gigs. Design is very much not-my-specialty — everything I know about pulling covers and layouts together is largely the product of short courses and teaching myself things as I go — and I have a good deal of imposter syndrome about saying yes and ruining someone else’s project.

At the same time, these freelance gigs typically push me to learn how to do stuff I normally wouldn’t, and I’m generally happier doing projects that push me to learn new things (and, despite having imposter syndrome, I do actually enjoy the creative challenge of cover design).

Weirdly, the project I finally said yes to ended up being the most ambitious and pushed me way out of my comfort zone in terms of genre–pulling together the cover for Death of a Nom-de-Plum, a cosy 50s police procedural that was recovered from documents of the late Australian playwright Dorothy Blewett by UQ’s teaching-focused Corella Press.

The first real challenge with doing a design gig for someone else, rather than a Brain Jar project, largely came down to control and familiarity. This was the first time I’d designed a cover to someone else’s brief instead of having final say on the look and feel. Also, the first project I’ve designed where I wasn’t intimately familiar with the MS, and largely worked from someone else’s notes and comparative title research when pulling together early iterations and approaches.

It proved an interesting exercise in trying to nail the genre: cosy mystery leans towards illustrations of characters in one branch of the genre, and big country houses in another, and this book wasn’t-quite-a-cosy given that it had a lot of the hallmarks, but also features a procedural element with the DI main character. We went through a few potential approaches, both illustrated and country house and a few other types in between, and in the end, the touchstone for the book became the TV show Midsummer Murders, which meant I spent half a day investigating the layouts and font choices that went into their DVD covers as well as a bunch of other English country murder mystery shows.

The other problem with the big landscape/country house conventions is that a lot of the stock art that’s easy to drop into an image is often already in use, particularly if you’re talking about a very particular area or era. Which meant getting an image that felt like it belonged to this book, rather than a half-dozen other books, meant editing together a composite out of component parts.

This isn’t unusual for a small press book, but most of my Brain Jar Press covers are pretty straightforward with a maximum of two or three images going towards the final composite. As the design process for Death of a Nom De Plume wore on, and we started to settle on the kind of imagery that would best represent the book, the final cover ended up being assembled out of five or six seperate images of the Cornwall coast that were edited into a single whole. That’s a lot of cutting and blending together, and thinking about the way light works in the image to make sure none of the shadows are subtly out of place.

The perfectionist part of me keeps looking at the cover and dreaming about what could have been done with an extra day or two, but that’s true of any creative image. I often salve myself with the great irony of cover design: About 80% of the heavy lifting in terms of genre are done by the font and colour scheme; the image just needs to look appropriate enough to get by.

The other major request for the job was for a full wrap cover, with an image extending from front cover to back in a seamless whole. This is something that’s pretty rare in many parts of the book world, and having gone through the process of pulling one together I understand why. It’s finicky to do, eats up enormous amounts of time, and makes redesigns considerably harder if you have to, say, re-do the cover because extra pages have been added.

I pretty much hit the end of this job and swore “never again.” Then promptly turned around and did the exact same thing for the cover of Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales and ran into the exact same issues, which goes to show that writing detailed notes after you finish a project is not exactly helpful if you’re not going to pay attention to them.

(Seriously, though. NEVER DO A FULL WRAP COVER AGAIN. If Brain Jar ever attempts it, it’ll be because I’ve hired someone else to do the heavy lifting).