Status: 2 Mar 2023

Putting on my editor hat for a moment: The latest release at Brain Jar Press is Matthew R. Davis’ Bites Eyes, a deliciously disturbing assemblage of thirteen flash fictions and short horror vignettes. Available now through the Brain Jar Press store or all good bookshops. Editing short story collections is one of my favourite things to do, and there’s a deceptive amount of depth you can bring to the process to the editor. Probably the most fun I’ve had designing a cover in the last year as well.

ON THE DOCKET

Thursdays are usually my meeting-free day each week, but today is all about seeing folks. I’m catching up with an old friend via Zoom in the morning and have a rescheduled mentee meeting in the afternoon.

This is very much a notebook week on the writing front. I recently doubled down on bullet journaling as my default organisational system, and it’s working moderately well, and the natural next step is doing all my planning and drafting away from the computer. I’ve got about three-quarters of a truly terrible short story draft down over the last two days, after nearly a week of trying to write it in scrivener and stalling out. The redrafting process for this one will be brutal, but that’s what tomorrow’s for.

There’s also a bunch of design work on deck, and a little catch-up on the Brain Jar admin I didn’t get to yesterday. It’s nearly five months since I lost my job and went back to being the primary on-deck person running the press, but I’m finally hitting the point where it’s feeling like I’m almost caught up and ready to get things running smoothly.

(The gods will, of course, smite me for saying that, but let’s celerate the win, eh?)

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 15

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 13

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 6

I read Tiago Forte’s One Touch Email system yesterday and immediately applied it to my personal email, and the results were pretty extreme. It helps a lot that I already had the infrastructure he talks about between my journal, my Evernote set-up, and my tasks manager, so it was mostly a reminder that system that I typically think of as a waste of time to learn how to use (‘Email to’ functions, keyboard shortcuts) typically have a big effect when you figure out how to use them properly.

Not going to lie: creating a “Task” and “Reference” email that forwards things to the appropriate system did a lot of the heavy listing in cutting down my inbox of doom.