Project Notes: Death of a Nom De Plume Cover

PETERMBALL Works in Progress

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).

It takes work to be out of work

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts

We’ve had a few days of storms here in Brisbane, but today they’ve given way to blue skies and warm breeze and a very happy cat reclaiming her spot on the balcony.

I’ve spent a good chunk of yesterday morning answering email: replying to quote requests from folks interested in book and cover design; responding to authors I owe responses to for Brain Jar (alas, I’m still behind, for reasons that will be clear below); clearing some tasks on the NEIS training program that’ll eventually become the NIES assistance scheme helping the press along next year.

Then I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon trying to navigate the complex bureaucracies of Australia’s unemployment system for the fourth time this week, which is starting to feel a little like I’ve stepped into Kafka’s The Trial in the sheer absurdity of trying to get a simple problem resolved.

It’s become particularly frustrating because I first called because they’d overpaid me, and I let them know and suggested I’d rather like to pay back the extra before it became a source of stress. Now, four calls in, this starting point has largely been forgotten and the tenor of each successive conversation is increasingly “we’re going to fuck you up for this debt, son, if you don’t pay it back.”

Nobody, of course, will tell me how much I owe or how to pay it back because some switch has been flipped and cannot be unflipped and therefore they can’t actually move me to the debt repayment department until the black cock crows thrice after sunset and the devil rides into town on a white horse.

Nor, for that matter, pay unemployment benefits until this gets resolved.

I post this not to complain, but because there’s a mythology in Australia about the dreaded “dole bludger.” This fear that people will go on unemployment and stay there, feeding of folks tax dollars like a tick.

And the irony of it is: it’s fucking time consuming to be unemployed in Australia. I ‘bludged’ far more when I was a salaried employee than I ever have as an unemployed person.

The system is complex to navigate, the folks who run it are understaffed after years of successive right wing governments gutting any kind of public service, and the complexity is magnified by successive attempts to privatise parts of the unemployment services over the last few decades. Which means you need the right hand of a complex system to talk to the left hand of another complex system to keep everything rolling.

All of that takes hours of your life on the phone, then on terribly designed online user interfaces, and then back on the phone again, to get pretty basic things done.

And I’m a reasonably well-educated, polite, well-spoken, white male who struggles to jump through the various hoops–I can’t imagine what this system is like for the folks who don’t fit the demographic that gets to play through western culture on “easy.”

To say nothing of the fact that when you’re not doing all of this, you’re constantly managing the fact you’re unemployed. The sheer stress of managing on so little money is hardcore, and managing your mental health is a twenty-four seven project.

“Bludging” is a concept that only really makes sense when you’re employed, and the prospect of letting your guard down for a second isn’t an invitation for ongoing financial troubles.

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So why am I musing so much on my unemployment experience at the moment? Honestly, because I read this while checking twitter:

The entire thread that follows is, basically, people pointing out that the original Hellblazer run largely a response to Margaret Thatcher’s England and you’d have to be largely blind to miss it. John Constantine has a long history of being a political character, and a left wing political character at that.

Which is, yes, entirely true.

But also reliant on a context that is now forty years old, so I can understand how folks would miss it.

At the same time, the problems with Australian unemployment are largely descended from the wet dreams of the 80s political right. I often find myself working under the belief that Australia tends to lean left, for all that it has massive issues with racism and sexism.

In truth, that’s a hold-over from growing up in the eighties, when the political left was actually a powerhouse in Australia that had governed for twelve years. Since turning eighteen, and actually participating in the voting process, the country has predominantly been governed by a series of right-wing ideologues that started with 11 years of John Howard, took a six-year gap in which the Labor left started the revolving door of PMs, and then another five years of right wing majorities that were led by a batshit crazy ideologue that reminded me far too much of Patrick Batemen in American Psycho (Abbot), and a pair of palatable masks that were placed over an increasingly dangerous right wing ideology (Turnbull and Morrison).

And aside from a few brief years of the Labor Left’s run, their period in power was largely as a minority government that needed to navigate a complex balance of power.

People in Australia often argue that all politicians are the same, there’s no difference between the major parties, and nothing ever gets done. I would argue that’s hard to really assess when we keep electing right wing governments who believe governments should do less and big business should do more as a core ideology around 75% of the time.

Frankly, I would really like a twelve year run where we tried giving the alternative a shot.

SWOT Day

PETERMBALL Journal

We’re juggling home office spaces here in Casa Del Brain Jar, trying to find an optimal amount of space to get everything done on my end while also factoring in space for my partner to work from home a few days per week.

It’s interesting to sit down and interact with things from this perspective: the wireless keyboard which proved to be untenable for writing because the Shift key wasn’t reliable may find new life on the second desk; the upgrade from printer to printer/scanner back at the start of the pandemic proves itself to be a prescient decision; my old desk-top, only ever bought as a back-up if the laptops end, starts to show its age as my partner sizes it up as a potential second screen only to discover that it’s a relic of an era before HDMI ports, requiring a VGA connection.

I’m doing up a proper business plan for Brain Jar Press this week, guided through it as part of the New Enterprise training program. It’s a moderately intense experience for an artist who, despite being relatively business minded, still gets away with flying by the seat of my pants an awful lot when it comes to strategy and planning.

One of the tasks is doing an SWOT analysis, breaking down the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the business model. And while the biggest threat is always illness or incapacity on my part–such are the dangers of being a one-man shop–the real threat lies in the reliance on a single computer that runs the software I need to keep Brain Jar running.

And, because it’s a Mac, that computer will be pricy as heck to replace, which means there’s very limited redundancy in my systems. In an ideal world, I would have been purchasing a back-up desktop with my tax return this year, but then COVID hit and discretionary cash evaporated into the miasma of OH FUCK that settled over our finances.

Which made yesterday an anxious kind of day, all things considered, even if I’m pretty sure I’ve got a work-around if the main laptop gives up the ghost. It’ll be less efficient and likely eat up a lot more time than I’d like, but producing books will still be feasible in the long run.

But I have to admit, I’m eying the cost of a proper desktop that will be feasible for the work I’m doing, and quietly doing math on how many books we need to sell before I can replace the old PC clunker that only gets used for playing very old computer games.