PeterMBall.com

First, a little pimping: The Queensland Writer’s Centre has announced the November Writing Frenzy, a month-long initiative to get people writing whether they’re engaging in the month-long madness that is NaNoWriMo or just looking to get a project done. Part of the program consists of several Writing Races held on the Australian Writers Marketplace Online Forums, including one this Sunday between 3 pm and 4 pm where I’ll be floating around and answering as the guest racer between the frantic attempt to kick off the NaNoWriMo project. Drop by, say hi, and get some words down if you’re a AWMO subscriber.

Unlike the puntastic Jason Fischer, who’ll be following up as a guest/race captain for the 10th of November Writing Race, I don’t promise to wear a tricorne hat while executing my duties (which seem to consist of “talk about writing” and “write,” which are pretty cool as duties go).

I may have a bear on my head though. It’s been that kind of week.

The invite came at a good time actually, because this weekend is going to be all about the words (Unless you’re actually my friend Chris and you’re coming over for a game of Bloodbowl during my one break from the deadline madness, in which case there will simply be the wailing and gnashing of teeth as the dice fail my team of plucky halfling football players yet again). My current plan for the weekend write-fest looks something like this:

Friday - Write Club with the inimitable and awesome Angela Slatter. Must cook dinner, write a lot, and apologise for the lack of chocolate this week. Then write, bitch about writing, catch up with news of the outside world, make zombie jokes, and write some more. If things go well I’ll have the Cold Cases draft done by the time I turn in this evening. Write club is awesome. I heart the write club.

Saturday – World’s longest writing binge. Seriously. My current plan is to get up early, write a like a manic to finish any of the chapters that aren’t finished on Cold Cases, get some rewrites of chapters that are already outdated and need fleshing out, take a break to play Bloodbowl, then review my notes on the NaNoWriMo project. If I actually get Cold Cases done on Friday night, all the time scheduled for novella drafting will be devoted to a short story instead. Either way, I’m hoping to write until my fingers bleed and collapse into bed with visions of spellchecker faeries dancing through my head.

Sunday – NaNoWriMo Kick Off, the aforementioned Writing Race in the afternoon, and some revision on the Black Candy manuscript in the evening because my poor ol’ novel re-draft has been fermenting that little bit too long now.

Basically, it sees that I’ve hit one of those periods where it’s actually less stressful to spend seven or so hours at the computer, producing words, than it is to avoid the work. I like to capitalise on those periods while the opportunity is there.

As the duly appointed taskmaster and primary source of daily conversation you’re regular blogger has on any given day, I thought I’d drop past and deliver an important warning: expect nothing of substance from Peter in the near future. He’s boring me with his “novella novella novella” and “Ooh, a short story idea” and “check it out, I’m writing *words*” like it’s something special, so I figured I’d spare us all another hamfistedattempt to say something meaningful while his brain is all muddled up with plot. Jeez, you’ve never met a guy who is so astonished by the fact that he’s actually writing when he’s supposed to be. Makes my life a misery, I tell ya, trying to keep him focused on the things he’s meant to be doing.

If you’re looking for interesting reading try this post, or this one if you’re after writing advice that’s actually useful. I promise you Peter won’t mind. At this point he’s lucky to realise that he should stop and eat lunch rather than keep typing.

Peace out, Peeps.
Your duly appointed spokesbear,

Fudge P. Fudge, esq.

There’s usually a point in a project where I stumble over it’s identity. Not a theme or a plot or a character conflict, but a moment where I can suddenly look at the piece and realise why I’m writing. Sometimes it’s easy - Horn got defined as as the book about unicorns for people who hate books about unicorns right from the very beginning, before I even came up with the characters. Most of the time it isn’t, and it takes a good deal of noodling around before I have moment of realisation and everything falls into place. The noodling is actually kind of painful and aimless, because even if I’ve got a plot in mind and the story is travelling okay, it always feels a bit listless without getting to know the reason for the book.

Cold Cases spent a really long time without that sense of identity. That thing that makes it a specific book I want to write, rather than just a thing I’m writing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I’ve completed short stories without ever having that moment, and people seemed to like them regardless – but it slows things down a lot.

Then, at some point during the Friday write-club, I wrote a scene and went “oh, that’s what this book is about.” And in the days that followed I went from having 10% of a finished draft to about 60%. Because it’s so much easier to write a book once you know it’s identity, if only because it tells you how to make narrative choices that work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the weekend, because originally I thought it was going to be easy to write a follow-up to horn. Claw was going to be the talking cat book for people who hate talking cats, only identity is rarely that easy and it quickly became apparent that I wasn’t really excited about rehashing the identity of Horn with a different trope. I wanted to work in the world again, and use the characters, and I still wanted to have a talking cat in there somewhere, but it needed to have its own thing. The thing that made me want to write it, even if it didn’t get published, because it had it’s own reason*.

I’m still not sure I can articulate it properly, since the closest summary I’ve got is the book where I torture Miriam Aster with the possibility of happiness and that’s really just a summary of every conflict, everywhere, but it’s somewhere in that ballpark.

And at this point the draft is 60% done and I’m happy enough with what’s happening that I can finally stop freaking out about the fact that it’s got a deadline

*This is not always about the story as a whole. On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War Machines of the Merfolk exists in my head as “the story where I make fun of the little mermaid statue.” For some reason I tend to hinge an books identity on one or two scenes, then everything else tends to grow around it and justify the scenes existence.

“So this is what the volume knob is for”

Within it’s original context this line floors me with its emotional impact, time after time. Divorced from it, it’s just a collection of words. Except for the fact that the Mountain Goats have claimed that sequence forever now, and it’ll always be one of those stray phrases that’s loaded with meaning.

These are the kinds of things I think about on a Friday afternoon.

1) I signed up for NaNoWriMo

There’s plenty of folks among my circle of friends who do this every year, but for me it’ll be the first attempt at the nano-madness in seven or eight eight years. I primarily signed up because I miss the rigor of the public daily wordcount and it’ll be nice to have somewhere to put one without boring the hell out of everyone reading the blog. Should you be interested in watching me change the totals on a wordcount meter I can be found under the name PeterMBall on the nano site. I also promise there will be minimal wordcount updating on this here blog. Honest.

2) I started writing short stories again

And it’s been a while, I tell you. I took a break from short fiction around the middle of the year with the goal of getting a novel drafted. After that I took a break in order to focus on getting the draft of Claw done. And after that, I stayed on a break while focusing on getting the novella that replaced Claw done. And now it’s October and I’m looking at the pile of unfinished, awkward stories and wondering if maybe it’s time I get back to them. ‘Cause, at the very least, when writing short stories I can pretend I know what I’m doing.

3) I paid off my credit card debt

And for a breif, glorious period I allowed myself to feel happy and at peace with the world. Then, five minutes later, I did the math on how I’m going to buy groceries and pay bills over the coming month and the giddy high of being free of the soul-crushing debt wore off. So it goes, folks, in the lands of unemployed writerdom. Please don’t try this at home

4) I started reading the collected works of HP Lovecraft*

After years of playing the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, revelling in the critical commentary that surrounds his work, and collecting more Lovecraft anthologies than you poke a stick at, I finally broke down and started reading the short stories of Lovecraft in what I hope is their entirety.

5) Write Club Returned after a long haitus

There was merriment . And wordcount. And chocolate.

* For those who may be curious: the Lovecraft reading will be the third male writer I’ve read since asking for recommendations for female writers a few months back and the first that’s not work-related. This puts my reading total at about 4 books by male writers to 38 books by women over a period of three months. And I’m working on another blog-post about that project once I’ve got some free time in my schedule.

After realising that the last few years have been rather good to him on the writing front, Jason Fischer has decided to take a quick tour through the lands of the writer he used to be and declared this Juvenalia Week. And since he’s under the assumption that the embarrassing mistakes of yesteryear are something all writers share, he’s encouraging others to join him in his public display of work from our misbegotten pasts.

I’m nothing if not a joiner, but seeing as I can’t find my old book of short stories from when I was actually a jouvenile I set the way-back machine to the file on my computer marked “Poetry, 1998″ and grabbed one of the hundreds at random. I wrote a lot of poetry over ’98 and ’99 – I’d decided that I’d write a poem a day while I worked on my honors thesis in place and white-space poetics – but this one seems to hit all the standard hallmarks of my work in terms of topics (girls and…well, really that was it), imagery (cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, and hair), and awkward line syntax.

Which, if nothing else, just goes to point out the inherent problems in telling twenty-year-old middle class geek boys to “write what you know.” Especially if he thinks poetry *is* actually a way of impressing girls. I did write some good stuff that year, which eventually got published in journals, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that it’s the stuff that strayed away from this them. As for the rest, well, you could basically remix the following and have a pretty good idea of what I wrote…

Balcony Scenes

Act One

Smoke trail from a cigarette
Her blue eyes
       (that drown the sky)
watch the grey
       drift into the clouds.

Act Two

She is fire and blood and sunset
henna hair and first crush simplicity

The coffee I make goes cold
ignored as she chain smokes
        and dreams

Act Three

A cigarette drowns in spilt coffee

She saves it for later
(A student’s pragmatism, since lost)

Act Four

Night washes the sky with stars
I shelter in the glow of the balcony

She hides behind a veil of hair
her smile afraid to come out of hiding

And if I can track down my old notebook from high school, from the days before I wrote directly onto a computer, I may even find some work that’s even more mortifying in its approach before the week is out…

It’s been a rough week thus far (yes, all two days of it) and I’m in a covety kind of mood. I can’t help it, honest. Coveting things is one of those survival tactics that kick in when I’m otherwise unsure of what’s going on in the foreseeable future. And I figured I’d share some of the coveting. A tiny big of it, anyway. It will distract me until my jelly is ready to come out of the fridge and do it’s comfort-foody magic.

And so, in approximate order, the six things about America* that I tend to covet:

1) Home-delivered Chinese food that comes in neat folded cardboard boxes.

Oh little paper boxes full of wontons, cashew and noodle, how I dearly covet thee. In the fifteen years I’ve actually been eating Chinese food (I started late in life, after some bad experiences in my childhood) I have always been disappointed by the plastic containers in which Chinese take-away is served.

To say nothing of my disappointment upon discovering so few Chinese restaurants will deliver in my homeland; Pizza, I can order in, and a good Indian curry if I pick the right suburb. Thai food, maybe, should I be very lucky; heck, in recent months I’ve even had the option of home-delivered schnitzel, though the cost of delivery is prohibitive (and unlikely to be taken up on, were it not for the novelty of the experience). Home delivered Chinese food? Never seen it. And even if I had, there would plastic containers and the disappointed wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I have heard, of late, that the folded boxes are on their way out, a conceit retained in movies and TV shows because they’re far more aesthetically pleasing than plastic tubs. If this is true, I shall be a sad panda. Should I ever actually make it over to America to visit the various friends I don’t get to see often enough, you can bet that my default response to the question of “what do you want for dinner” will inevitably be “Chinese” in the hopes of eating from said cartons. And this is in spite of the fact that Chinese food and my digestive tract rarely get along.

2) Constitutionally protected right to free speech.

Because say what you will about the bits of your constitution and its many amendments that seem outright crazy (yes, constitutional right to bear arms folks, I’m looking at you), this one is just plain cool. That you have folks who recognise how awesome it is to have this and fight to keep it from getting stomped into the mud is likewise very cool.

Those of us stuck in Australia don’t actually have this right, though it’s a fact that catches most people by surprise. It would depress me less if we used it to silence the vocal-but-utterly-moronic segments of our populace, but unfortunately we tend to celebrate them and offering them a spot on Dancing with the Stars.

3) Doctor Pepper

They tried to launch it in Australia, they really did, but many of my countrymen just didn’t seem the glory in a fizzy drink that tasted, primarily, like cough syrup. I suspect it’s because they never got around to putting bourbon in it, but that’s just me.

I would also be covetous of the fact that you have Jolt, but there are enough hardcore geeks in Australia to ensure you can usually find it lingering in the back of some non-franchised twenty-four hour convenience store somewhere. Six weeks ago I would have coveted your Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, but it appears there’s now a supplier importing them to my local store, and that fucking rocks.

I don’t, however, covet your tendency to use high-fructose corn syrup in such drinks. That shit is just wrong. And it makes your cola taste funny.

4) Stamps

Not for any aesthetic or monetary value, just for practical reasons. I need to send self-addressed stamped envelopes to America pretty regularly, so coveting stamps is just a business decision and will remain so until the SF magazine industry is run entirely via internet submissions.

This would be higher on the list, but I’m fortunate enough to be well-stocked in American postage for the moment. I’m just, you know, coveting on the principle that I’ll need them eventually.

5) Southern Gothic…

…because kudzu, ghosts, vampires, and melodrama warm my heart. And because Australian Gothic involves too much red dust, dry heat, and empty landscapes to be much fun. And because kudzu is a fun word to say out loud.

6) Population Density

Yes, I know this isn’t universal, but you guys have a lot of people. Even your small cities are big enough to dwarf most of the urban areas in Australia. I’m sure it comes with its own problems, but with population density comes interesting pockets of subculture and more people who are likely to be interested in whatever weird-ass thing you’re interested.

As a guy who tends to like weird-ass things and frequently finds himself with limited options for talking about them locally, population density is one of those traits that looks particularly promising.

*disregarding the various awesome American peeps who’d I’d gladly steal from you, the fact that America tends to be the  biggest market for English language fiction in the world, and the fact that it’s the hub for SF industry. ‘Cause those go without saying.

…so I may as well go with the hat-trick when it comes to blatant acts of self-promotion this week and mention the following:

1) The Coming Dark at the Internet Review of Science Fiction

A long-ish article about the apocalypse in its varied form, put together by my write-club peep Angela Slatter and featuring a bunch of talented Aussie writers (plus me, who is pretty lucky to be sounding coherent given that I was drafting responses to these questions during Gen Con Oz a few weeks back. Not to self – don’t agree to deadlines that coincide with conventions you’re working at).

Spec-fic writers tend towards the strange, the weird, the unpleasant—that’s their writing, not their personalities. We’ve had the apocalypse penciled in for a while now, so how are some of us going about documenting the coming dark? How is our changing, frayed environment affecting the writing of authors on our side of the literary divide?

A small chunk (really a thin, dietary slice) of these folk grudgingly agreed to answer some questions whilst waiting for the sun to burn and the moon to crash. So I locked them in a small room, put the kettle on and gave them some homemade biscuits to distract them. The subjects ranged across scary strangling vines, Mad Max, whether the environment really is out to get us, and the Age of the Puffin. The writers gromphing down the custard kisses and jam drops (and muttering about mandatory detention) are Deborah Biancotti, Kaaron Warren, Peter Ball and Jason Fischer.

And for the record, I’d totally support Jason’s theory about the ascent of the puffin.

2) Interfictions Two Available for Pre-order (Due for November Release)

If you’re left wondering exactly what an interfiction is, you can probably get a good taste of the style by looking over the anthology’s online annex, featuring a bunch of free stories that supplement the anthology. Or you can go check out the Interstitial Arts Foundation  which tends to be full of interesting people talking about the ways genres intersect and mutate (check out the essays, but be prepared to lose to day of your life as you move from one to the next).

Or you can just take the my word, biased as it is, and pre-order based on the fact that the first anthology kicked nine kids of butt. I mean, even if you aren’t a particular fan of the story I’ve got in there, the book contains new work by folks like Jeffery Ford and Brian Francis Slattery, and I’d happily shell out the cash for a copy based on those two facts alone

The October edition of Apex Magazine went online this week, with my story To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament among the table of contents and available for free online or via print or PDF for a reasonable cover price.

I should probably mention that of all the stories I’ve written, Horn included, this one is probably the weirdest and the squickiest. And since the working title was “John Flamsteed has sex with aliens to save the world” you should probably get fair warning that it’s a little on the smutty side,  so it’s probably not safe for work unless your co-workers are particularly forgiving of alien-sex. Not that it’s all squicky sex, or even that it’s the focus, but…well, you know…it’s there.

I’m currently preparing to head off to the Gold Coast, primarily to spend a few days catching up with my parents who I haven’t seen for longer than a dinner since they came back from their trip OS a month ago (and, it must be said, to languish in the peaceful surrounds of their home and get some writing done while I’m away from the internets). With that in mind I’m going to forgo today’s entry and make mention of an anthology due to hit shelves in December. Of course, you don’t want to wait for December to organise your copy, because *all the really cool kids are preordering now*. You want to be one of the cool kids, don’t you?*

Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Volume 1
Scheduled Released December 1st, 20009

Man, I’m excited about this one. Descended from Darkness collects a lot of the work that appeared on the Apex Magazinewebsite during the first half of 2009 (and maybe a little 2008) into an attractive anthology that has the dual benefit of letting you read these great stories offline *and* contributing a few dollars to keeping a pretty damn awesome online magazine running (with the added benefit that if you order using that link on the top, you may also be contributing beer money to your not so humble author).

So why get Descended from Darkness? Well, for starters, it’s one of those ultra-rare anthologies that’s going to feature me and my most excellent peep Jason Fischer(recent Writers of the Future Winner, Clarion Mate, and all-around dude) on the same table of contents. Plus the genre that Apex promotes (Horror-SF) is one of my favourites and I suspect it doesn’t get enough love. Plus there’s a bunch of other writers on the TOC that make for an assemblage of awesomeness - Mary Robinette Kowall, Lavie Tidhar, Ruth Nestvold, Ekaterina Sedia, and Theodora Goss among them. And the best thing is that it’s a total try-before-you-buy thing if you want it to be – just go check out the magazine archives to see what Apex has been doing.

*All suggestions of peer pressure should be attributed to my own tendency towards awkward cheesyness  when engaging in self promotion, not a reflection of said anthology. Which will be very cool. And has an awesome cover, which I haven’t been able to convince my website to upload and display. And this makes me sad.