Status Post

Picking up the weekly Status Post thread this week, if only so I remind myself that I’m the kind of person who does this (I’ve been reading Atomic Habits this morning, and it’s affecting the way I think about things).

Sneaking this in quickly before we head South to visit family for the rest of the day, but adding in a new category for those who enjoy kitten-based hi-jinx on the internet.

CURRENT FEELINGS ABOUT THE CAT: Positive.

Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Wittingstall has been part of our household for nearly three weeks now, which is about the point that the shelter we adopted her from is willing to concede she’s become part of the family. I continue to be enchanted by some of the bizarre poses she adopts as she lazes around the flat.

On the other hand, she has just spent the morning hunting everything. Her felt mousey. The doorstop. My hands. My feet. My leg. The blanket. My phone. Goblins from beyond space and time.

CURRENT WRITING STATUS: Regrouping. Deaths in the family after an anxiety week mean my process has gone out the window, but I’ve been spending a good chunk of my time setting myself up to return to regular progress now that things are calming down.

CURRENT EARWORM: Helmet’s Milquetoast has been stuck in my head for the better part of a week, and I’ve routinely found myself putting the entire Betty album on for a spin as a result.

CURRENT READING: Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century: Essays on Novels, Children’s Books, Online Writings, Comics, and Other Works–a collection of academic papers on various aspects of Gaiman’s work. The early run-through of essays about American Gods has been fascinating, but it’s really picking up as I move into the essays about Gaiman’s kid’s books.

BEST SCREEN MEDIA OF THE WEEK: My partner and I have started picking up specific movies to watch on a Friday night, rather than cruising Netflix to see what’s there. It means there’s a bit more intent behind the films we’re watching, and we can catch up on stuff that we really wanted to see.

That said, this week we flicked through the films on sale and spotted Seventh Son–a film that scripted like it’s straight out of the heyday of 80s B-Movie fantasies, but embraces digital effects. It’s an odd film: weirdly paced with a fifteen minute prologue before introducing it’s actual protagonist; plagued by an all-too-short appearance by Kit Harrington, who is largely used poorly; Jeff Bridges playing a pompous demon-hunting knight, adopting a truly bizarre accent but committing to it 100%.

I’m obviously taking a very loose definition of “best screen media” this week, but Seventh Son is straight-up cheese blended with a D&D rules manual and a handful of great actors really committing to their scenery chewing. It’s not going to be everyone’s taste, but when we’re in the mood to make goofy D&D jokes the entire way through the film, it’s the perfect Friday night film for the Brain Jar Compound.

INBOX STATUS: 10 Emails. I had it down to one before I closed up shop yesterday, but everything came in overnight.

WHAT I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO RIGHT NOW: There’s some jerk chicken in our fridge, waiting to become dinner later this week. I’m totally there for that.

ACHIEVEMENTS THIS WEEK: I’ve set up my workspace to deliver really loooooong stretches where I have no internet, just to see how it reshapes things. It turns out, quite a bit. I cleared my average weekly draft count in the space of three days, and I’ve started rethinking what that might mean for workflow.

I also hit the point in Project Stairwell where I needed to stop throwing words at the draft and actually stop to figure out what I’m doing. I was sixteen thousand words in at the time, and still not heading towards anything approaching a structure, so I broke down what I’d done and rebuilt it.

Definitely not a short story anymore. When I sat down and looked at what I’d done, then extrapolated outwards to figure how every subplot could be expanded and resolved, the result was approximately 37 major scenes I’d need to hit over the course of the story. At time of writing, there are 32 scenes left to write.

CURRENT EARWORM: Runway by Stunna Girl, the first four lines of which have been permanently embedded in my subconscious courtesy of being nearby when my partner goes on a TikTok binge. It’s kinda weird to look it up on youtube and hear the rest of the song.

CURRENT READING: I’ve midway through a whole bunch of novels at the moment, but the most interesting is reading though the original Jaws novel by Peter Benchley. I’ve been taking an interest in this particular subgenre of animal-attack thrillers of late, and it’s surprising how many writers seem to pull from Benchley’s playbook.

BEST SCREEN MEDIA OF THE WEEK: It’s been a surprisingly light week on the screen media front this week, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the first two episodes of The Order because it’s basically hoovered up a bunch of Spec-Fic property names and cast them as secondary characters.

I am down for anything that casts Matt Frewer as an obsessive lunatic. I will be even more down if he turns out to be werewolf by the time the series is done.

Good enough that the rest of the season has been set aside until I’ve got time to watch it with my partner in trash crimes.

INBOX STATUS: 3 Emails. Mostly reminders of fees due in the coming weeks. Which is a terrible idea, as the inbox is a terrible place to store such things, but I’m being lazy.

WHAT I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO RIGHT NOW: We’re heading into the tail end of a ten year RPG campaign in a few months, and my brain has started to ponder what I’d like to do next. With that in mind, I poked around at some of the newer RPGs on the market to find something interesting and bought my first non-superhero RPG books in a decade.

Right now there’s a copy of Blades In the Dark sitting on my to-read pile, waiting for me to poke around at the rules, but its whet my appetite incredibly well with this description of the setting:

You’re in a haunted Victorian-era city trapped inside a wall of lightening powered by demon blood.

I’m incredibly excited by the possibilities of that set-up, and really want to run this game now.

Another week draws to a close and the next week is being planned, which means it’s time to break out another Status Post as I survey the state of things here in Brain Jar Headquarters.

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: Some weeks the achievements are the big list of things you did above-and-beyond the list of things you set out to do. Some weeks the achievements are the things you kept on track despite the drawbacks. This week is one of the latter, with my fiction writer suffering but my PhD word count and a lot of goals on the non-writing side of writing were all met.

And I did sneak in shiny new website redesign during the week, when it was clear creative work wasn’t going to stay on track. That lets me tick a task of the “one day’ list, and opens up a bunch of opportunities that weren’t there under the old layout.

Also, there was this:

YES! This is what I've been saying for years, and why I was so disappointed with what was done to my script for #Sharknado 4. @petermball hits the nail squarely on the head.

Sharkandos, Zombie Tidal Waves, and Verisimilitude https://t.co/pZgKMrXFF2 via

— Thunder Levin (@ThunderLevin) August 22, 2019

CHALLENGES, MET & UNMET: I’ve had a pretty good run of getting stuff done of late, but got caught in a someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet discussion earlier this week that derailed me midweek. I also ran into the dark side of productivity–the part were anxiety sinks its teeth in and starts coaxing me into trying to do even more, which is usually a sign that it might be a good idea to scale back and do slightly less.

CURRENT EARWORM: Fuck knows where it came from, as I’m not a fan of the band, but I’ve spent the morning singing the same four lines from the Doors Touch Me that my brain has managed to dredge up from somewhere.

Brains are fucking weird, man.

CURRENT READING: Shades of Milk and Honey, the first book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories. I gave my partner a copy of Kowal’s The Calculating Stars as a birthday gift, and the level of enthusiasm as she read through was a good reminder that i’ve been reading to read Milk and Honey for years.

BEST SCREEN MEDIA OF THE WEEK: Wu Assassins stole our hearts this week, and likely will retain its hold until we run out of episodes and scroll through Netflix in a forlorn daze wishing we could find something just as good. some really nice action scenes, great use of cinematography and colour, and just really nice attention to detail in every part.

INBOX STATUS: 8 Emails awaiting my attention, but I just glanced over and at least half of that is either newsletters that will be quickly processed or random emails about cars that are probably meant for a different Peter M. Ball who lives in the UK.

WHAT I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO RIGHT NOW: I saw the Mandalorian Trailer and instantly found myself wanting to see by a project that I was dimly aware of, but not that interested in. I mean, look at this thing:

So, yeah. Bring on November, even if I have to subscribe to a new streaming service to get it. I’m fucking sold.