Category: Works in Progress

It may only be nine months since it came out, but I just gave the second Brain Jar Release a fresh lick of paint in the form of a cover re-design. Here it is, all shiny in its new iteration: I’ve been doing this sort of thing a lot recently, starting with the refurbishing of the Short Fiction Lab covers and the more recent decision to reformat the cover of The Birdcage Heart. it’s never a huge change–different fonts, same cover, small tweaks to the way things are presented–but it can have a big impact on the way the book looks. The original, off-centre design for You Don’t Want To Be Published was a function of the tools available. I’m largely pulling Brain Jar Press up by its bootstraps, which means working with the tools I can afford based upon the limited monthly budget I’ve allowed and whatever’s come in with book sales.  When I started up, twelve months back,

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: Aside from the release of The Early Experiments (available now, but free for all newsletter subscribers), this week’s achievements have largely been progress on projects-where-I-would-oridinarily-drag-my-feet. The short-list looks like this: I wrote a good chunk of my conference paper and started condensing the research into a formatted argument I wrote the advertising copy for a pair of short-story reprints I’m releasing as stand-alone reads for people who want to get a taste of my fiction I put together a whole new newsletter on-boarding sequence and did a forward plan for how that will change over time.  Designed four seperate covers for upcoming projects, including next year’s Warhol Sleeping release.  Not the sort of thing that sounds exciting, but they’re projects where I risk showing my ask as an amateur, which means they’re ordinarily delayed.  CURRENT STATUS OF WARHOL SLEEPING: Stuck on a thorny bit of the final act, bridging towards the final stretch. I’ve done something in

I spent some quality time in the nearest food court this morning, drinking terrible coffee and fleshing out the draft for the next Brain Jar Press novella: Warhol Sleeping.  In theory, the food court is a terrible place to work. The shopping centre it’s located in is undergoing renovation, so there’s an incredible amount of construction work going on in the vicinity. The coffee shop is hideously expensive, the local shoppers frequently intrusive, and the food options surprisingly limited. There’s also a two-hour cap on parking, which means I’m always watching the clock while I’m there.  In practice, it remains a useful place to work for two reasons: there’s no Wifi to distract me, and it breaks me away from the usual habits that have built up around the house.  The food court forces me to be intentional about what I’m doing with my time, instead of falling into routines. After a few days where my focus has been off,

Whenever I go deep into notebook mode, there’s inevitably a point where someone catches a glimpse of my bag and comments on its contents. This, it should be noted, is completely understandable – I’m working relatively light at the moment, and when I emptied my backpack and pockets this morning I was still carrying around 9 different notepads and an assortment of pens. They make for a pretty impressive wodge of works-in-progress. For those curious about such things, here’s a rough breakdown of what I’m carrying around at any given time, starting at the bottom and working my way up: WAIL NOTEBOOK (Brand X 80 page Pressboard Notebook, Blank): . It’s being used to draft the third Miriam Aster novella, and I wanted something cheap and relatively durable to use instead of my usual hardcovers. The logic behind this was simple – I’ve started and failed to write a third Aster book for a decade now, and the weight of all

I’ve fired up the laptop for the first time in three days and find myself slightly baffled over how to make my brain work in concert with a keyboard. I’m immersed in redrafts this week, kicking the tyres on a couple of novellas, and I’ve switched up my usual process by doing the rewrites by hand instead of glaring at the computer screen. The process I outlined on Monday proved significantly useful that I’ve stuck with it for the bulk of the week – get out, find a nook or cranny to hide in, scribble a few words before tramping my notebook to the next spot. It’s been a while since I’ve drafted in handwriting alone, and as always I’m kinda surprised by how efficient it is. The work doesn’t look finished when it’s done – nowhere near – but I suspect that’s a feature rather than a flaw. The inability to delete and tinker with a line means I

So I’m working on this book at the moment, You Don’t Want To Be Published. It’ll be finished and released in February, and it’s basically a collections of essays and posts I’ve pulled from this blog and other publications that you can get for free if you sign up for my newsletter. Basically, the stuff people have pointed to over the years and said it would be useful if this was in a book or something. Technically, I already had “or something” covered by the existence of the blog, so I’m doing the other half of that statement. There were fifteen essays/posts originally, but the incredibly smart Kate Eltham made the case for including a sixteenth after I wrote about Patreon and digital tools back in December. Kate’s considerably smarter than me, given that she has four brains and was thinking about digital publishing long before I got my shit together, so I listened to her and included the post she