Category: News & Upcoming Events

A ten-hour drive, a relationship on the rocks, and a ghost waiting for company on a lonely stretch of road.  The last thing Alex wants is a trip home with his boyfriend in tow, but when Brendan insists on coming there’s nothing for it but a ten hour drive and the dread of what might happen when they reach their destination.  There is nothing about the idea of being trapped in car with his lover that Alex is looking forward too, but a haunted stretch of lonely road is about to make him question everything he knows about his relationship and his life.  A White Cross Beside A Lonely Road is the third short story in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press—home to stand-alone short story experiments in fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fabulist literature. This experiment has been filed under: ghost stories, outback fantasy, supernatural encounters, and Australian weirdness. The third Short Fiction Lab release is now

Not Quite The End of the World Just Yet is an Aurealis Awards Finalist The short-lists for the 2018 Aurealis Awards went up yesterday, posting the finalist lists that bring together some of the best Australian sci-fi and fantasy of the year. Not Quite The End of the World Just Yet is one of four finalists in best collection this year, and shares the list with some pretty distinguished company: BEST COLLECTION Not Quite the End of the World Just Yet, Peter M Ball (Brain Jar Press) Phantom Limbs, Margo Lanagan (PS Publishing) Tales from The Inner City, Shaun Tan (Allen & Unwin) Exploring Dark Short Fiction #2: A Primer to Kaaron Warren, Kaaron Warren (Dark Moon Books) I’m largely off social media these days, so I’ve missed the frenzy of posting that took place yesterday as everyone started with the congratulations. This makes me very, very late in offering my own felicitations to all the finalists, including an incredible

I shall not bury the lede here: you can pick up a copy of Exile for free on Amazon until the end of the month, delivering you a novella’s worth of Gold Coast based urban fantasy for the princely sum of FREE. They’ve also discounted the ebook of the whole Flotsam omnibus to $3.49 until the books go out of print at the end of April. The omnibus contains all three novellas in the sequence, plus a handful of bonus short stories set in the Flotsam universe. These are just two of the deals Apocalypse Ink is running on my books, and a bunch of their other authors, in the lead up to their shift in business model. As a reminder, the series will be unavailable after April 30 and I’m still not sure what I’ll be doing with it when the rights revert, so this is your last chance to get copies for a long stretch. You can find

When I started releasing short fiction through Brain Jar Press, I knew I was going to end the year with a flurry of new releases. It’s inevitable, when you’re a short story writer, that you end up with a bunch of previously published work that’s either hard to find or now out of print. Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called The Band is one of the latter, despite being one of my more recent stories. This was one of those those stories that surprised me when I first wrote it–it’s a story about bands and belonging and growing-up-in-places-that-are-not-good-for-being-an-artist. It’s also about nostalgia–one of the catalysts was hitting up old university friends of mine to grab memories of the Dog House Bar–and mysterious happenings that involve entire audiences dying off in a single moment. It may be a horror story, depending on your taste. I largely think of it as weird-ass fantasy, but I think that about pretty much everything I write. It first appeared in the Speculate

So last week I put out Black Dog: A Biography, which is not a new story in the Brain Jar Press Short Fiction Lab, but a reprint of a somewhat experimental older story that I’m using as a free sample of the kind of short fiction I write. It contains fiction. It contains biography. It contains large, girlfriend-eating dogs that may or may not be an imaginary friend.  And your sample: The first time the Black Dog showed up I was five. We were living in Miriwinni and it lurked behind the low, chain link fence that marked out our backyard, hunkered down in the long grass filling the space between the fence line and the train tracks. No-one else could see it, not even my parents. It was good at hiding when other people looked. I don’t remember much about our house back then. My parents were teachers, so we moved a lot. I was five, and that means

Apocalypse Ink Productions–the fine folks who published the Flotsam series–will be shifting their focus in 2019. They recently made the public announcement on their google group: Apocalypse Ink Productions will be changing focus in 2019. We will no longer be publishing books by other authors, instead we will focus on books written by Jennifer Brozek and her collaborations. Our current publications will be available until March of 2019, so you still have time to pick up copies of your favorite series. But after March, all titles will be released back to the authors. News over at Apocalypse Ink Announcements As a writer who knows a whole bunch of writers, I’ve occasionally been privy to those conversations where we gather around and talk about our experiences with small presses. Most of us love the small presses we work with, but there’s always the little hiccups that irritate the hell out of us–by virtue of being a small press, there’s usually a

I released The Birdcage Heart and Other Strange Tales on November 30th last year, which makes this the official first birthday of Brain Jar Press. Over the last twelve months I’ve put out two short story collections, one essay collection, and a pair of short stories in the new Short Fiction Lab series. For those who would like to catch up on everything we’ve done real fast, I’ve put together a discounted mega-volume of everything Brain Jar released over the last twelve months: The Brain Jar Press Year One Box Set (Amazon US | Amazon Australia | Amazon UK).  It’s an Amazon-only release for the moment, courtesy of the fact that some of the content is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited and can’t be uploaded elsewhere until the exclusivity period is done. I’d overlooked that while putting it together, and I’m kicking myself a little. Still, one year in, and it’s the first really irritating mis-step in my process, which isn’t bad. This

Well, then. This weekend did not go to plan in any way. My dad went into hospital on Friday, courtesy of a fall where he bumped his head in the kitchen. He’s okay, but it made for an anxious few days given his other health issues, and I ended up focused on learning new skills and long-ignored admin instead of writing. Initially, that meant doing updates of old Clockwork Golem products, preparing to get the backlist on sale. Lots of transferring of files and getting up to speed with the new version of Photoshop and InDesign. Useful busy-work for keeping me occupied, but I also wanted to put something new into the world. And I had a few weird, off-kilter stories kicking around that I’d drafted with the half-hearted idea of doing a Patreon (set aside when I realised I’m unlikely to maintain a regular pace long-term). And I had a few weird, off-kilter stories kicking around that I’d drafted

So my latest book, Not Quite The End Of the World Just Yet: Short Stories & Strange Futures, is out now. Use this link to get your copy at the ebook retailer of your choice The twelve stories in this collection touch upon science fiction, horror, and fantasy, but all see people brush against the sublime and discover who they truly are. In “One Saturday Night, With Angel,” a young man staffing a convenience store frets as angels hunt his customers. In “Say Zucchini, and Mean It,” the world is overrun by a plague that robs us of three very important words. In “Clockwork, Patchwork, and Raven,” a clockwork man dreams of a fairy-tale ending while trying to protect those he loves from a dangerous gang of genetically engineered crow boys. In “Dying Young,” the psychic son of a lawman must re-evaluate the deals he makes in order to keep his town safe from cybernetic marauders and a dragon seeking

So I have a new book out there in the world, a collection of essays and blog posts titled You Don’t Want To Be Published (And Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing). It’s available for sale at all good ebook retailers as we speak, but I’m going to suggest you hold off on purchasing it for a moment. Because I don’t want you to buy this book. I want you to subscribe to my newsletter, Notes from the Brain Jar, where I’m giving the book away as a special bonus to all new subscribers. If that sounds like a deal you’re interested in, you can sign up here and you’ll get your copy of the book mailed out all neat-and-easy. If you’re not the newsletter type, you can still purchase the book. Or, if you’re so inclined, read everything for free by copy-pasting the titles into Google and finding the original blog posts or essay publications, almost