Peter M. Ball

Happy Caturday, Patreon Fam! This week’s cat photo is Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Whittingstall enjoying a little sunshine. One of the few shots I’ve got of her sleeping of late, and one of the rare interactions we’ve had this week where she hasn’t tried to bite me in a bid for attention. 

Spent more time than is healthy on Threads this week, having realised it’s less a Twitter replacement and more low-key blogging platform with a mildly irritating interface. Spent a goodly chunk of the week firing off threads about writing and publishing, much as I used to when I blogged regularly, and it’s been interesting to see things get the kind of response they used to circa 2012. It won’t last, but it’s been fun.

I also revised my newsletter system, which I’ve been threatening to do since 2019, only to constantly the job put aside in favour of giving more focus to Brain Jar’s systems instead of promoting my own books. No regrets, but leaving it this long turned it into a bigger job than initially thought—virtually everything about the old newsletter rolled out worked best in a pre-pandemic, pre-publishing other people world.

So I’ve been rebuilding from the ground up, and thinking through pathways in which I’d like to introduce folks to my books. This resulted in an interesting little publishing insight that I’m tucking down at the end of this post.

The Venn diagram of people who follow this Patreon and subscribe to my newsletter are almost, but not quite, a circle, so if you’d like to download the free subscriber library you can get the books here: https://books.bookfunnel.com/pmbstarterlibrary

WARHOL SLEEPING

The sole project that’s running on track this week. Structurally, the first chapter of the second act is always one of my favourites—you get to kick off the subplot and typically introduce new story elements that further disrupt the status quo of the first act. 

A chunk of the folks who found me on Threads came over to read the free entries in this series, and one of them mentioned a Gibson meets Kerouac vibe through the first four chapters. Startling moment, as I would have been deeply immersed in Kerouac’s work when I wrote the first draft of these stories and he was undoubtably an enormous influence on where I was going with the poet-writing-prose aspects. Twenty years wore away that memory, though, and it wasn’t until someone pointed it out that it all came rushing back.

Interesting thoughts to have in my head as I work on next week’s chapter 6.

THE SHACKLETON JOB

An inauspicious start given that I lasted one week before blowing my regular posting day. I usually have two days set aside for the serials – Tuesday and Wednesday – where I do the bulk of my writing and cleaning up of chapters before they go live. I specifically avoid taking coaching or mentorship calls those days, but this week, one of my clients contacted me in need of urgent help. They’ve got a book coming out in February, and the printer isn’t playing well with their cover designer’s work.

This triggered four days of trying to find a solution and hosting emergency catch-ups instead of writing and editing.  Most of it has just been a reminder that I’m really glad I learned the basics of book design for my work and Brain Jar’s releases—when things go wrong, it’s way easier to fix one’s own mistakes than take wild guesses at what’s going on at a designer’s end and try to negotiate a fix. 

My main goal for the coming weeks is to get ahead of this serial, so I’ve got. bit of a buffer when unexpectedly complicated weeks crop up. 

OTHER WORK

Lots of publishing work on my end this week, including getting Joanne Anderton’s The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories to the printers and reworking all the promo graphics because we’d made a few tweaks to the covers.

BEHIND THE SCENES: COVER DESIGN & FONT CHOICE

Earlier in the week I’d done a short Threads essay on doing cover design on a budget, leveraging the lessons from Penguin to keep costs down on your early books (See the thread here). Ergo, issues of continuity and design were top of my mind as I reworked my newsletter offering and pulled together a new starter library to introduce people to my work. It really came to a head at the final moment, when I uploaded the starter library graphic and thought “Hmmm. That middle book’s showing its age”.

Most folks aren’t going to notice it, I suspect, but The Birdcage Heart is one of my earlier designs from prior to 2020. It’s a solid enough cover, but at the time I used a lot of Gothic fonts in my designs, and I now use a lot of Futura-based fonts for my own work as a default. it’s the font that appears on the core design of the Eclectic Projects magazine, and the secondary font on the Exile cover, used for the author name and the series branding at the top.

It took me about three hours to get so irritated at The Birdcage Heart standing out from the other two that I decided to give it a make-over. The results are below.

I’ll note – I didn’t hate the old cover. It just looked like a Brian Jar Press book (where I still use gothic fonts a lot) and I’ve spent the last three years adding some distance between my work and Brain Jar. Plus, when presenting three books as a starter library, tt makes a small-but-startling difference to have the same fonts on all three books. I’ve also intentionally pulled the layout of the Eclectic Projects cover over and repeated the placement and font sizes in The Birdcage Heart. Subconsciously, the three books look like they belong together, rather than having the short story collection as the odd man out.

I spend so much time talking folks I’m coaching through the cover process, and a huge part of that conversation is “spend less on the art, spend more time picking your repeating elements.” 

It’s nice to put my money where my mouth is in this instance. 

And again, while you can sign-up for my newsletter to get these, I’m perfectly happy for Patreon folks to go grab them directly: https://books.bookfunnel.com/pmbstarterlibrary

Morning, Patreon fam. Happy Caturday. Today’s image is one of those rare pictures where both cats are in the same general vicinity, pretending they like each other. Long time readers who remember how quickly things fell apart when we adopted the tiny ball of terror (aka the one in the front) will know how rare these shots are. As predicted, my “I can totally do this” writing schedule fell apart the moment the world resumed its normal operations this week. I had a four-meeting day on Friday, and a lot of mentoring work throughout, although I’ve still been chugging along on new projects. There’s a new story drafted, two new stories half-drafted, and one-third of a new Shackelton Job entry produced. Not bad for a week with intermittent writing time and a lot of distractions.

In the meantime, I’ve also processed a hundred and twenty-seven Brain Jar Press submissions which flooded in over new years courtesy of a “how to get published” blog putting a spotlight on our guidelines. We normally get about two subs a week, so it was a bit of a hell storm that’s dominated my free time this week. I then wrote a Threads series about Submission  Guidelines  based upon the experience, which promptly went insane and got a terrifying number of comments in twenty-four hours. So it’s been a chaotic and unpredictable week where things I didn’t expect to require a lot of attention suddenly demanded a lot.

THE ART OF MISE-EN-PLACE

I’ve been re-reading Darn Charnas Work Clean (now reprinted under the title Everything In Its Place), while also reading Michael Ruhlman’s The Making Of A Chef. Both have me thinking about systems and workflow and where processes fall apart, while also giving me a framework for thinking about how I’ll get all the stuff I’m behind on out the door.

While this week’s been hectic, all this system-thinking and focus on processes has ensured it hasn’t been particularly stressful. Huge chunks of necessary work got done, and projects I didn’t expect to advance (*cough* Eclectic Projects 5*cough*) actually made it out the door. Usually I feel like advancing on one project means leaving another to lag, and while I definitely didn’t meet my writing goals this week, I don’t feel like I’m lagging yet because I kept making progress on them. I’ve been going back to old habits that really help, like cleaning and straightening my desk every morning and focusing on keeping my inbox clear rather than letting email build up (I cleared 300+ emails on Tuesday, which isn’t much for some, but felt like a millstone dragging me under given my usual preference for keeping inputs clear). I’ve been working to Greet the Day and Slow My Processes Down to Get Things Done Faster.

All of which has helped have one of the best work-weeks I’ve had in a long, long while. The start of the year is a great time to check out Charnas’ book. I’m pretty sure my re-reads are into the double digits, but it always seems to help.

WARHOL SLEEPING

The second act of the Warhol Sleeping serial kicks off this coming Friday, but keep an eye out for a special interstitial entry tomorrow morning. Warhol Sleeping is a bit of a fix-up novel aand the middle part of this week’s entry, where the RPD are in the intercom, is actually one of the first stories to earn me money as a writer. Alas, it sold to a small Canadian magazine who paid a cent a word, then cut the cheque in American dollars. This created a logistical paper trail for my bank, which meant depositing the cheque would have cost me three times what it was worth in fees, so I ultimately didn’t get paid for the gig. Writing careers were very different before PayPal became a thing.

THE SHACKELTON JOB

The Shackleton Job returned this week with a new format. Originally this serial was going to be a haphazard thing, little vignettes of pulp fiction maximalism that took shape around a series of writing prompts. This made perfect sene for the way my writing was going back during the days of 2022, when I wrote things around long shifts at the Writers Festival office, but I felt myself craving more direction and focus.

It didn’t help that I’d started reading copies of old pulp magazines at the Internet Archive, actually looking at how the pulps managed their serial content. Far from being long-running, un-ending things they’d typically get them over and done with in four issues, delivering readers a 15,000 word chunk every issue. In my weaker moments I daydream about actually doing that with Eclectic Projects, bumping the word counts up 65,000 per month and mimicking the pulp format with one novella, one-or-two serial works, and a bunch of stories every month.

Definitely beyond my reach with my available time at the moment, but it got me thinking about doing more with the serial format, and ultimately led us to the current approach. Talulah’s adventures are working towards a definite end-point now, roughly designed to coincide with the end of this year’s run of magazines. Should producing Eclectic Projects prove unsustainable long-term, it’ll mean there’s a point I can cut things off without leaving a story unfinished. Should it prove something that will keep going, I can start a new Talulah Wyndham-Pryce serial to occupy that spot in the magazine. Currently writing the coming week’s entry and working to get a little ahead of the posting schedule.

ECLECTIC PROJECTS 006

With issue 5 live and available for sale, attention turns to the upcoming February issue of the magazine. The fiction side of this one is largely done at this stage, but I’ve still got a non-fiction spot to fill. Still a little behind my timelines, but not egregiously so. If I can get the next Shackleton and the non-fiction piece drafted this week, I’ll be in good shape .

BRAIN JAR PRESS

Over on the publishing side of my career, we’re gearing up for the first announcements of 2024. The reprint of Joanne Anderton’s The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories is available for pre-order now, and I’m doing the final design and title development work on a vampire project from Jason Nahrung. There’s a strong 90s vibe to Jason’s project, which makes it an interesting challenge to design a cover for it.