Let There Be Gaimans (9 Mar 2023 Status Post)

OUT IN THE WORLD

I recently guested on the Pratchat podcast hosted by Ben McKenzie and Elizbath Flux, talking about Terry Pratchett’s non-fiction collection A Slip Of The Keyboard and the writing advice within. You can find the episode online now, or at any of the mysterious services that bring podcasts to your phone. Here’s the episode pitch:

Liz and Ben are joined by writer and publisher Peter M Ball for Pratchat’s first foray into Pratchett’s nonfiction! We discuss fandom, genre, Sharknado, figgins and even fit in six pieces from “A Scribbling Intruder”, the first section of Pratchett’s 2014 nonfiction anthology A Slip of the Keyboard.

Pratchett writes about the letters he receives from various kinds of fans as a popular genre author in “Kevins” (1993), before revisiting the same topic in the email age and explaining why he quit his own newsgroup in “Wyrd Ideas” (1999), both for The Author magazine. Then its time to discuss fantasy as a genre – both advice for writing it in “Notes From a Successful Fantasy Author: Keep It Real” for the 2007 edition of The Writers and Artists Notebook, and reasons why children should be reading it in “Let There Be Dragons”, a speech given at the Booksellers Association Annual Conference in 1993. Finally, best mates Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman tell us how they feel about each other, Terry in “Neil Gaiman: Amazing Master Conjuror” for the Boskone 39 convention booklet (2002), and Neil in his Foreword for A Slip of the Keyboard (2014).

As we’ve discussed before, Pratchett was never one to let a good idea only be used once – and you may have heard him talk to some of the themes in these pieces when being interviewed. Short stories may have cost him blood, as he used to say, but he never lost his journalistic mojo for writing fact and opinion – or replying to reader mail!

It’s been years since I got to go out and talk about stuff as a writer, rather than a publisher or an even organiser, and I had an extraordinary amount of fun nattering out about Pratchett (and more).

ON THE DOCKET

As predicted, I’ve spent the bulk of the last forty-eight hours shipping orders for Gorgons Deserve Nice Things (and other Brain Jar Press books—this seems to be the release where everyone caught up on releases they missed). We also announced the last book in Meg Vann’s InSecurity Triptych, Crawlspace, which will come out in May.

Brain Jar store got hit by another round of fraudulent orders yesterday. Once again, none of them are being processed as actual orders, but there’s the whole time-consuming process of clearing out the back end and dealing with the our payment processor to see if we can stop things from happening. There’s a chance it may involve investing in new and not-entirely-cheap services, which is probably the point where I need to rethink the current set-up.

Going a bit bonkers because our printer apparently shipped a recent order of books back on the 23rd of Feb, but the tracking is showing one of those codes that could mean “we forgot to process this properly, and the books are nearly there” and could mean “we’ve left this sitting on the dock, waiting for pick-up, for the better part of two weeks.” One of these is a frustrating annoyance, the other is a catastrophic problem that I should be fixing now, so not knowing which is in play is frustrating.

There’s also a mentee meeting this afternoon and I still need to finish a story for this week’s Patreon entry, plus I’ve almost got the March issue whipped into shape and ready to send to the printer (although, given the above, I really need to be expanding my lead time on these).

“Become a publisher,” they said. “It’ll be fun.” (And it is, mostly, but some days it’s all just a bit much to manage).

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 29

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 22

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 4