Works in Progress

It may only be nine months since it came out, but I just gave the second Brain Jar Release a fresh lick of paint in the form of a cover re-design. Here it is, all shiny in its new iteration:

I’ve been doing this sort of thing a lot recently, starting with the refurbishing of the Short Fiction Lab covers and the more recent decision to reformat the cover of The Birdcage Heart. it’s never a huge change–different fonts, same cover, small tweaks to the way things are presented–but it can have a big impact on the way the book looks.

The original, off-centre design for You Don’t Want To Be Published was a function of the tools available. I’m largely pulling Brain Jar Press up by its bootstraps, which means working with the tools I can afford based upon the limited monthly budget I’ve allowed and whatever’s come in with book sales. 

When I started up, twelve months back, that involved some quality time with Canva whenever I wanted to make a cover. Now I’ve upgraded to Creative Suite, giving me access to my preferred tools in Photoshop and InDesign, and I’ve got options that weren’t really available with the original tools.

This may not be the final cover for this book either–when you look at the other books in the market category, there’s a definite design aesthetic there and this version is a little too busy to look like it belongs there with them. My core goal with this particular redesign was to incorporate some of the trends in the market right now, and pull the focus away from the left-hand side of the cover before I started putting together a print edition and needed to worry about how it interacted with the book’s spine.

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: Aside from the release of The Early Experiments (available now, but free for all newsletter subscribers), this week’s achievements have largely been progress on projects-where-I-would-oridinarily-drag-my-feet. The short-list looks like this:

• I wrote a good chunk of my conference paper and started condensing the research into a formatted argument
• I wrote the advertising copy for a pair of short-story reprints I’m releasing as stand-alone reads for people who want to get a taste of my fiction
• I put together a whole new newsletter on-boarding sequence and did a forward plan for how that will change over time. 
• Designed four seperate covers for upcoming projects, including next year’s Warhol Sleeping release. 

Not the sort of thing that sounds exciting, but they’re projects where I risk showing my ask as an amateur, which means they’re ordinarily delayed. 

CURRENT STATUS OF WARHOL SLEEPING: Stuck on a thorny bit of the final act, bridging towards the final stretch. I’ve done something in the previous scene that isn’t sitting right, which means I need to figure out whether the fix is going back and fleshing out earlier scenes to justify the current one or making a different decision. 

CURRENT LISTENING: Lover, You Don’t Treat Me No Good No More by Sonia Dada. Coles Radio has been bringing the ear-worms of my youth in recent week, which I suspect is a sign that I’m officially middle-aged. 

CURRENT READING: 1000 Yards, Mark Dawson. 

BEST SCREEN MEDIA OF THE WEEK: The most recent episode of Doctor Who, which is one of the best they’ve released in the current season. 

EMAIL INBOX STATUS: 32. Including a whole bunch that came in this morning, and need to be culled. 

WHAT AM I LOOKING FORWARD TOO RIGHT NOW?: I’m starting to populate my bullet journal for 2019, as I’m working through the final 31 pages in my current notebook. There is a very nerdy part of me that’s extraordinarily pleased with my timing. 

I spent some quality time in the nearest food court this morning, drinking terrible coffee and fleshing out the draft for the next Brain Jar Press novella: Warhol Sleeping. 

In theory, the food court is a terrible place to work. The shopping centre it’s located in is undergoing renovation, so there’s an incredible amount of construction work going on in the vicinity. The coffee shop is hideously expensive, the local shoppers frequently intrusive, and the food options surprisingly limited. There’s also a two-hour cap on parking, which means I’m always watching the clock while I’m there. 

In practice, it remains a useful place to work for two reasons: there’s no Wifi to distract me, and it breaks me away from the usual habits that have built up around the house. 

The food court forces me to be intentional about what I’m doing with my time, instead of falling into routines. After a few days where my focus has been off, that’s worth any amount of construction noise, bad coffee, and nosy bystanders that might come with my choice of work space.