Cat Sparks

Brain Jar 2.0: One Year On

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A cold morning here in locked down Brisbane. The heater is definitely on and the cat has taken up residence in a conveninent patch of sunlight. The writing brain is protesting the return to work like a reluctant starter mower on the last dregs of fuel; it’s a “40% of optimal” day here, first thing in the AM. I’ll get things up and running, but it’s not going to be terribly smooth.

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Many moons ago, at the 2016 Brisbane Natcon, I was on a panel with Cat Sparks and someone whose name eludes that turned to the character of Jack Reacher. Cat noted she didn’t think Jack Reacher would work as a woman — a thought that stuck in my head for a long while, and slowly evolved into a novella I’m working on for my thesis. I’ve got the big beats of the story more-or-less locked down at this point, so I’m into the interstitial scenes: negotiations; investigation; the occasional stare-down with a henchmen. Procuedral beats where the character of Reacher really lives, far more than the action scenes, because Reacher’s appeal is that he’s got a knack for hypervigilance without any of the PTSD or Anxiety symptoms that usually accompany it.

I wasn’t meant to working on this at the moment, nor the rough draft of a non-fiction book that I’m scribbling for the folks over on my Patreon. This week was meant to be spent finalizing a conference workshop I was going to present a little later in the month, but lockdowns in other parts of Australia saw that conference rescheduled for sometime in December. And so I wrote about Miriam Holst tearing apart her dead friend’s apartment, then I wrote a quick draft about writing being a surprisingly sound career when you look past all the rhetorick about artist being broke.

And then I did the monthly accounts for Brain Jar Press, logging all the income and outgoing expenses for July. Continuing to make a profit, which is good. Still not enough to live on long-term, which means there’s going to be some interesting decisions to make around the end of October when I have to scale my involvement back to part-time.

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Since we’re on a nostagia kick, Angela Slatter reminded me that we announced Red New Day around this time last year. It was the first book of Brain Jar 2.0, transitioning the core business from self-publishing my work and towards a fully-fledged small press publishing schedule. Here’s how we kicked things off:

Looking back, I vastly underestimated how well this would sell. I knew Angela had some ardent fans, but I figured the chapbook format and the price point would discourage a lot of them. I spent an awful lot of time trying to set expectations before we’d even signed the contact, noting that Brain Jar’s strategy is a slow accumulation of sales over time rather than the focused, one-month burst of sales that’s the focus of traditional publishing. I figured fifty copies were a reasonable target. Seventy-five would be a wild success.

We cleared those numbers in the first three months, which is largely how Brain Jar Press got a small business development grant to begin with in the heart of the pandemic.

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To the surprise of absolutely noone, George R.R. MArtin has gone on record stating the end of A Song of Fire and Ice probably won’t resemble the final season of A GAme of Thrones. The weirdest part about his statement is the realisation he was 5 books ahead of the TV show when it started in 2011, and they still caught up with him. There’s a small chunk of my thesis devoted to Martin’s books and the clash between reader experctations and publishing realities, but I would be having a field day with this sort of stuff were I doing a longer critical work.

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Near as I can tell, all the usual promotion systems for this blog are offline at the moment. No auto-posts to Twitter or Tumblr, no mail-outs via the old system. Despite being the most public and accessible form of online presence I have — Twitter and Facebook require accounts, Patreon and the Newsletter both require sign-up — it may have the smallest possible readership.

Which is, frankly, something in it’s favour for the moment. For years I approached this blog like a miniature zine, showing up to write proto-essays as often as I’d update folks on the goings-on in my little neck of the writing world. These days the zine-like content is routed through my patreon, then my newsletter, which frees the website up as theis archaic bit of tech that can re-discover its own identity.

And I do miss the blog as journal approach, which fell out of favour after RSS readers were swept away by the newfangled social media feeds. One of my favourite books on writing remains Neil Gaiman’s Adventures in the Dream Trade, which devotes a huge number of pages to Gaiman’s journal circa 2004/2005.

It doesn’t utelise any of the tools of content-focused blogging, but it’s an intriguing historical document to look back on and trace the trajectories of the man’s career.

Thursday Linkfest

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Yesterday was busy and thus thesis-less, plus I got very little sleep thanks to some very unfomfortable shoulder pain, so odds are I’ll be saying little of interest today. Instead, I’ll entertain you with links to stuff that I’ve found interesting over the last week (or so):

  • My good friend Chris Slee reflects on the Edisonade (aka the pre-history of Science Fiction) and what was the best thing *before* sliced bread.
  • The ever-stylish Ben Francisco cherry-picks the SFnal highlights of the authors@google youtube series and gathers them together in a single handy post (although he’s missing Neil Gaiman in the line-up). If you’ve not seen these, particularly the John Scalzi, I recommend going and taking a look.
  • The Aurealis Awards are announced and the results posted on their website. Cat Sparks has posted photographs of the night, in which a bunch of writer-types have scrubbed up pretty well (and I show up looking marginally less shabby than usual in the vast flicker list of the night.).
  • Mick Foley (aka Cactus Jack, Mankind, Dude Love) reviews Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.
  • Steve Kenson on the lack of randomness in contemporary RPG character creation. (My first reaction to this post? To go roll up a Marvel Superheroe’s Character and convert it over to the point-by driven system of Kenson’s near-perfect supers RPG Mutants & Masterminds)
  • And, as if there’s not enough of me on the internets already, I sneak on over to Lee Battersby’s blog and guest-post my memories of the first week of Clarion South 2007.
  • John Klima bids farewell to the recently shut down Realms of Fantasy over at Tor.com, but also wonders where all those stories that used to go RoF’s way will end up (For my money, you can’t go past Fantasy magazine if you’re looking for fiction with an RoF-like feel)
  • Scientists discover that fiction can drive social evolution – which seems a little like overcomplicated the obvious, to me, but there you go.

It’s a Slow News Day, so you get a Meme

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It’s the day after the Aurealis Awards and I’m basically running on fumes at this point (courtesy of an early start for the official recovery breakfast, an industry seminar, lunch, and a reading by Margo Lanagan this afternoon). With that in mind, I’m suspending any pretense of coming up with original content and embracing the ancient art of memeage.

The Rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me!”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And thus the endless cycle of the meme goes on and on and on and on…

Current Interview Questions courtesy of Jason Fischer (If you want to ask your own questions of me in the comments, feel free; I’m rushing the thesis draft deadline this week and the questions could make for a good warm-up of a morning)

1) You’ve recently sold a novella to Twelfth Planet Press, with the working title of Unicorn. For those of us who don’t know the sordid tale, how did this masterpiece come about? Are you looking at continuing the story?

Well, I think it’s titled now – the inimitable Cat Sparks suggested the title Horn at one point over the weekend and it’s the first suggest that’s gained any traction with folks who’ve read it since “That Uniporn Novella.”

It started at Clarion – Lyn Battersby mentioned that her husband Lee (who tutored our second week) hated stories about Unicorns, and I took that as a challenge to try and write one he liked. I succeeded, kind-of, but the idea didn’t quite fit into the five-thousand word story I’d put together, so the novella got written courtesy of some very strong encouragement from my Clarion ’07 peeps and the ever-awesome Angela Slatter (who pushed for me to get the damn thing finished and submitted two years after I’d finished the first draft).

There should be a second novella using the same character, only this time I’ll be tackling the magic-talking-cat genre.

2) What do you think about the recent spate of authors bemoaning reviews that they’ve disagreed with? What do you think about the practice in general terms, and when does professionalism outweigh a right of reply?

I might have missed the outbreak, but as a general rule I’m against an approach that can be described as bemoaning when it comes to reviews.

I’m not sure its possible to speak about the practice in general terms, although my first instinct largely comes down “don’t.” The ability to respond to any review without looking like a complete tool is largely a function of the writer’s personality and public persona, and I can certainly think of a few people who have been able to address concerns raised in reviews without seeming combative or defensive. Respect for the reviewer and the effort they’ve gone to probably has a lot to do with it, as does the ability to both pick your battles and trust readers to recognise when a review has got it blatantly wrong. The big problem in making a blanket statement may be that the instances of writers responding poorly and making things worse tend to be spectacularly visible, while those who have learned to respond well tend to pass without notice.

3) If you had to pick one genre or sub-genre, and only write in that style for the rest of your days, where would you pin your hopes?

Speculative Fiction 🙂

I find it hard to think of genre as something closed, to be honest, but I normally think of myself as a fantasy writer. If you squint hard enough, nearly everything I’ve written fits under the fantasy aegis somehow.

4) Who are the three authors that most excite and inspire your writing?

It depends on the project, but of late: Neil Gaiman, Raymond Chandler, Caitlin Kiernan.

5) If there was a televised combat show, where you could get a zombie anything to fight another zombie anything, what kind of zombie would you reanimate and send in to kick arse on your behalf? What stage-name would you give it?

A Zombie Otter named Giggles with a straight-edged razor clenched in its tiny paws. He’s not going to win all that often, but I figure his loses would be spectacular to watch (and who doesn’t want a zombie otter?)