PeterMBall.com

Today we have The Unicorns singing I Was Born a Unicorn. Tangentially driven though it may be, I’m sure y’all are smart enough to be making the connection as to why I’ve been humming this song all week.

I’m having one of those “rebuild your process” kind of weeks where I remember how this writing thing actually works. That includes some long-delayed redrafting of Horn in an effort to produce an “other people can actually read this one” kind of draft. I’m back to remembering my issues with the first scene: so much back story, so little desire to explain it in one long dump. Things would be easier if I wasn’t dead-set on starting the story with a fight between the detective and the talking cat, but I like that opening a lot and it does something different to the opening pages of Horn.

There’s a taste of the current (re-written) opening behind the cut, warts and all, for those who are curious:

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By this time next week I’ll be all packed up and in the grip of an “oh-my-god-I-hate-flying” panic in preparation for my trip to Adelaide.

Now I’m going to wander off and enjoy my final week of television before the cable is gone forever. I expect there will be far more regular posting once I’m back from the con in two weeks.

The latest news out of the Twefth Planet Press camp is that Horn is off to the printers and available for prepurchase – you can now reserve a copy and pick it up at Conjecture in Adelaide or have it posted to you.

Horn by Peter M Ball

Horn (Postage within Australia) $12.00 Horn (Prepay and Collect at Conjecture) $10.00 Horn (International Postage) $15.00

Yesterday I was driving around and I heard the new Regina Spektor single on the radio (not the song, “On the Radio”, that I’ve elected to post here. A different song. On the radio). That means a new Regina Spektor album’s on the way and this brings me joy.

Last week was dominated by day-job dramas; this week has been dominated by bad news (often of the medical kind) among friends and family.

On the whole, I’d rather go back to the job-dramas.

Black Candy Draft

Projected Total: 80,000
Total Words to Date: 19,345
Words Done in Previous 24 48-hour 12 Days:11,057 (although some of that was scenes I’d pre-written and stitched into this draft)
Deadline: July 23rd

As you may have deduced from the lack of updates recently, this week was full of badness – day job issues, contracts evaporating without warning, and the general financial angst of being marginally employed all combined to ensure that the most productive thing I’ve done for the last three days was pull my lazy butt of the couch and go shopping. Fortunately the ever-awesome Angela Slatter was heading around for a writing session this morning  and I wrote about two and a half new words between cooking lunch, chatting about writing, and eating chocolate.

Interestingly I’m more-or-less on-track when it comes to the plot-to-wordcount layout I had in my head that said twenty-K was the end of the first act (and it is, more or less, although I may have another scene in there). This is effectively the first time I’ve ever worked to plan this far in, but that may be a function of changing my definition of “plan” than anything else.

I’ve been thinking about my obsessive love of cover-versions this week, and near as I can tell this was the first cover I ever recognized as both a) a cover and b) far more awesome than the original.

I’m feeling a little out of sorts today, which means it’s time for another dancing monkey post. This time courtesy of deepfishy (aka JJ Irwin) over on LJ: This may veer too close to writing, but: tropes you’re drawn to in tv shows or films. (For instance, for myself I get a lot of joy out of variations on and subversions of the Defective or Exotic Detective – Life, Psych, Nero Wolfe, The Dresden Files, Foyle’s War…)

Originally I thought I was going to have trouble answering this – my inclination towards SF aside, there doesn’t always seem to be a lot of continuity to the types of shows I find myself watching. Naturally I went to TV Tropes and plugged in a few of my favourite shows to check this and quickly discovered it wasn’t the case. As such: I’m probably overly-drawn to the Bunny Ears Lawyer trope, but primarily in TV shows that stack their decks pretty heavily with examples of that type (Boston Legal, Scrubs, NCIS, Firefly). I can also be lured by specific examples of Crazy Awesome, and general eccentricity among the cast.

But, overall, I think that’s all a little misleading. I’m hard on TV, as a general rule. I demand a lot from it and I’m a cranky, unpleasant viewer. And hitting those tropes alone isn’t enough to drive me to watch a show – Six Feet Under is, by all accounts, a show full of quirk and eccentricity, but I’ve never really gotten a grip on it. CSI apparently has its share of crime-fighting bunny ears lawyer types in the same vein as NCIS, but again I’ve never managed to wrap my head around it.

A list of things that will sell me on a TV show regarldess of genre and trope:

• Fast-paced, well-written dialogue: this is still one of the biggest selling points for the Gilmore Girls, and the thing that eventually lured me to Buffy after years of mocking it.
• A consistent and engaging supporting cast, preferably built slowly and carefully (or a very strong ensemble cast, in the case of shows like How I Met Your Mother):I’ve never really jibbed with the reset-button approach to television and having the same extras/minor characters floating around gives a sense of narrative continuity.
• Fringe-dwellers, punks, goths, geeks & weirdos: basically, if you find a social group/sub-culture that doesn’t usually get positive airplay, then give it to them, I may well be yours for life (this is, incidentally, the reason I still watch NCIS despite the horrible, horrible subtext of the show)
• Do Future Imperfect SF: Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, even Dark Angel
• Do something narratively/culturaly interesting: I dig How I Met Your Mother because of the non-linear structure; similarly, I dig Boston Legal because it has a kind of subversion of traditional masculinity going on in what’s traditionally been a hyper-masculine profession.

So the nominations for the Australian Ditmar Awards have been released after a few weeks of my friends-list being packed with reminders to send in nominations and reminders about the 2008 works that are eligible. Unlike the Aurealis Awards, which I followed for years before I actually started writing SF, the Ditmars are something of a mystery to me – I lack the context to understand how they fit into the wider scheme of Australian fan culture and speculative fiction. I figured I’d get a chance to puzzle that out at while attending Conjecture, since that’s where they’re awarded this year. Then the list came out:

Best New Talent
—————
Peter M. Ball
Felicity Dowker
Jason Fischer
Gary Kemble
Amanda Pillar

And you know what? Context for understanding or no, that’s kind of cool. I’m going to stump for the Fisch to win, of course, since he’s both a fine writer and the man who is putting me up during the con, but as nomination lists go that’s a pretty nice one to be on :)