Talking Writing and Publishing on Stark Reflections

Back in April I stayed awake until 1:00 AM and recorded an hour-long chat with for Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s Stark Reflections podcast. It went live last week, and over the course of the interview we tackle many writing and publishing topics, including my start as an RPG publisher in the pre-Kindle days of the early 2000s.

One thing I dig about Stark Reflections is Mark’s habit of ending every interview by reflecting on the things he can take away and apply to his own practice as a writer/publisher. It’s possible one of my own reflections is “don’t do interviews at 1:00 AM”, because oh wow, I was getting a big loopy towards the end, but such is the curse of writing and publishing in a different time zone to the vast majority of your contemporaries.

Check it out on the Stark Reflections website.

Here’s the summary of what we cover:

Peter being a night owl who is most comfortable starting to write at about 10 PM at night and working through the nightHow, through necessity with a regular life schedule, Peter will get the writing done first thing in the morningPeter having wanted to be a writer since he was quite youngThe way that most of the work he has taken on in his life has been somehow affiliated with the writing worldDescribing the Gold Coast of Australia as Miami with slightly less charmThe undergraduate degree focus which mostly avoided genre fictionHow you can never escape poetry once you’ve done it, even years later being introgued as “Peter the Poet”How in the early 2000s Dungeons and Dragons open-sourced their rules, allowing people to provide material within their realmGetting involved in DriveThruFiction back in 2005The hunger for content that came out in that time periodHow changes in the RPG industry that happened were later echoed a few years later in the eBook fiction publishing spaceThe issues Peter recognized in 2006 in creating role playing game material where somebody else held the licensce for itChallenges of submitting fiction to markets from a country like AustraliaSpending six weeks at an Australian branch of the Clarion Writers Workshop and how that dramatically changed the perspective forced on him from his university educationContinuing to submit his fiction to the traditional markets but paying attention to what was going on in the self-publishing, digital publishing, and indie publishing spaceLaunching Brain Jar Press in 2017 largely as a vehicle for publishing his backlistWhy cutting your teeth in short fiction can be greatHaving a plan to indie publish his own books for about ten years, make all the mistake on his own books, rather than someone elses, and getting solid learning and experience from it to benefit his pressWorking with Kathleen Jennings on a poetry collection right at about the time her first book with Tor went hugeThe idea for a series of short chapbooks with four or five essays per writer in order to bring these remarkable articles the authors had already written back into availabilityBorrowing the cultural capital of all the people they’re publishing so that they can grow and eventually launch new writersHow Peter fell in love with print quite accidentallyThe requirement of having to have an online store for the pressThe joke that it’s cheaper to get things to Narnia than it is to get them to AustraliaThe thought exercise Peter does regarding how many books he has to sell to make it to $100Understanding the market base that you’re likely selling to as a small specialized indie pressPeter’s impatience for just replicating what midlist are publishing is doing in the face of such wonderful, free, and dynamic digital tools when one can be breaking the model, expanding, and forming new ideas and new productsether Peter has been doing much of his own writing since launching Brain Jar Press 2.0The flash fiction writing Peter has been able to do during a few 8 minute breaks at workWhat Peter is most optimistic about with what’s happening in the publishing world nowAnd more…