PeterMBall.com

Today PeterMBall.com is a year old. This caught me a little off-guard when I went and looked at the archives, since it seems slightly inconceivable that I’ve only been posting to the website for a year instead of meandering around on livejournal (where, admittedly, this still blog runs a feed and much of the conversation happens). It got even worse when I realised that one of the first posts being made was “Horn has sold to Twelfth Planet Press,” which means we were one day shy of announcing Cold Cases a year exactly after Horn. Spooky. Between this moment of  nostalgia and the Americans celebrating Turkey Day and the vising 80-point-plan of awesomeness, I came up with the following:

Awesome Things about 2009 (1/15): Pathfinder RPG

Stick with me on this one, because there’s a lot of introspection involved in it making the list.

Okay, to start with, this is probably important to know: I’m a big ol’ geek and Roleplaying Games have been a part of my life for about two decades now. That said, there’s only really been three game releases over the last decade that I’ve actually been so excited about that I’ve actually tracked the development and promotional material (that’d be Dungeons and Dragons 3E, Mutants and Masterminds 2E, and Pathfinder). There was something really nice about being able to get in contact with my inner game-geek and anticipate for the first half of the year. Pathfinder had me excited about gaming in a way that 4E didn’t, right down to the point where I briefly managed to get a group together and run a few sessions. Over the years I’ve turned into a stoic grump, so experiencing any of the child-like joy that comes from anticipating things is a rare enough commodity that it’s worth celebrating. Outside of the aforementioned gaming products and the occasional fiction book, I think the last thing I really anticipated can be summed up as “the first season of New Who.”

Then, around the middle of the year, Pathfinder arrived (just in time for Gen Con Oz, yet, but that’ll get its own entry). And it was every bit as awesome as I’d been hoping. I then, promptly, didn’t run a damn thing using the rules.

This was extraordinarily weird for me. While I had my brief flurry of activity leading up to the games release, running a few sessions with the playtest rules, the actual final release will probably be one of the first gaming rule-sets I’ve learned as a player rather than a GM*. In this respect Pathfinder represents something of a shift in the relationship between me and gaming – there’s been a couple of times this year where I’ve stepped back and thought “man, I’m just not gaming as much as I used too,” but the truth is that I’m still involved in as many RPGs as I used to be (about three regular games) and I’ve added a weekly session of Bloodbowl on top. The difference is that I’m not longer running games, and for about fifteen years writing campaign notes and preparing adventures was what I did with my free time.

Not that I didn’t run anything this year – I started the year running CSI Arkham for the Call of Cthulhu peeps – but trust me when I say this was less prep time and just plain *less* GMing than I’ve done in a long while. It stole tiny little fragments of time, rather than the extended hour or so I’d used to spend fine-tuning a session and creating monster stats. Running a roleplaying campaign used to be one of those activities that defined my days, now they tend to be defined by writing instead**.

Still, Pathfinder promised me awesome, and Pathfinder delivered. And even if I don’t get a chance to run it, I’ll still be using the rules to kick evil’s arse, Cleric-Style, in my friend Adam’s campaign.

*Okay, yes, so it’s not entirely apt, given that I ran the d20 version of DnD that forms the basis of Pathfinder, not to mention releasing a bunch of d20 products using the system, but trust me when I say there’s enough differences between the two to make relearning the game as a player a delight. Hell, trust me when I say learning the game *entirely* as a player makes for a great change of pace.

**Not that any of this should be read as “Peter doesn’t want to run Pathfinder.” In an ideal world, I’d totally dig running through one of the pre-written adventure campaigns I’ve got lying around, but finding four or five people able to commit to a regular game gets rarer and rarer as you get older and most of the players I know have already got their regular sessions spoken for***.  

***Besides which, if I could find four players who wanted a regular game, odds are I’d still try and pitch a Mutants and Masterminds game first. ‘Cause there is an awful lot of Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque fantasy being played at the moment.

If you haven’t dropped by the Twelfth Planet Press livejournal today, odds are you’ve missed this:

Book Announcement: Sequel to Horn, due out April 2010 Twelfth Planet Press is proud to announce the acquisition of the sequel to Horn from Peter M Ball. Under the working title of Cold Cases, Miriam Aster works to solve an old file but her painful past refuses to stay buried. Book 2 in the Aster Series will be launched at Swancon, in April 2010.

So it’s all official-like: the follow-up to Horn is on its way and sometime in the New Year I’m going to have to get cracking on Novella 3 in the series.

Things I’m going to do this week:

1) Write a short story
2) Re-establish my writing routines after letting them fall by the wayside during the march towards the deadline
3) Write some blog posts that don’t involve the word “novella”
4) Work out a series of goals for December that are flexible enough to suddenly transition into “fixing Cold Cases” when needed

Things I am not going to do this week:

1) Write five thousand words a day in a desperate binge to complete NaNoWriMo with a 50k manuscript.

I thought about this one for a long time over the weekend, because in the back of my head there’s the awareness that five thousand words a day isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Up until Sunday evening I really thought it was going to happen – what was another week of being a work-obsesses shut-in after three weeks of working on Cold Cases – but in the end common sense won out.

The salve to the wailing, angry writer-child within that stomps his foot over failing a wordcount goal is this: My regular routine will still get the 50k draft written by mid-December, but it’ll also allow me to stock up a few short stories along the way and leave me a complete burn-out at the end of the process.

For those who may be wondering, allow me to clarify what exactly it is you’re looking at in the accompanying photograph. That, my dear peeps, is a photograph of victory in action. Or a pile of 205 books that are ready to leave my house forever and never return, thus clearing shelf-space and giving me tacit permission to buy new books should I ever find myself in possession of discretionary cash ever gain.

The problem, at this point, is that I have no idea how I’m going to get many of these books out of the house. Some I suspect will be claimed by friends (particularly the gaming material and fantasy books) and I expect the rest will go to charity of some kind, although the logistics of carting a box of this size to a salvo bit could be a bit of a problem.

Still, the cull is done, and when I originally wrote “get rid of 200 books” on my to-do list I seriously thought it was the thing least likely to get done. Getting rid of books is hard work for me, but I kinda found a rhythm for it at the end.

Between this and the submission of the Cold Cases draft, I’ve now completed 11.25% of the 80-point-plan for an Awesome year I wrote back in July, meaning my year has finally stepped into double-digits. I bring this up because I suspect the plan is going to be due for a quick revision over the next couple of weeks, since there are some points on it that are now more-or-less impossible* (relying, as they did, on having the computer that died in September rather than my laptop) or irrelevant (focused on options that have been cut off for various reasons).

*technically, this doesn’t make them impossible so much as really difficult and more time consuming, but given their primary role in the plan that’s effectively renders them null.

And lo, I have finished the long march from empty page to submitted manuscript and a copy of Cold Casesis now winging its way to the publishers via the miracle of the internets. And well-timed it is, all things considered, since it gives me a few free moments to take part in the QWC Blog Tour of Queensland and answer some quick questions from the fine folks at the Queensland Writer’s Centre

Where do your words come from?

I borrow most of them from the dictionary. For some reason this whole writing lark works better when other people recognise the words you’re using and understand what they mean. Of course, my dictionary’s kind of old, so it’s missing words like D’oh andjiggy. Those I borrow from television shows and trust readers keep up.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

My parents were teachers, so I spent my childhood moving. We basically went between northern Queensland and the Darling Downs before finally settling on the Gold Coast when I was thirteen and stayed put for a long stretch. These days I live in Brisbane, which suits me far better than the Gold Coast ever did. I suspect it’s got something to do with access bookstores.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

“The first time the Black Dog showed up I was five.”
 - From Black Dog: A Biography in the Interfictions 2 anthology.

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

Oh, man, that’s a long list and it’d get a different answer depending on the day. Lets go with William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. The former blew my mind when I came across it at fourteen and I suspect there’s a little part of me that will always want to be William Gibson, while the latter expresses a sentiment that’s becoming more and more important to me as the years go by.

What are you currently working towards?

I just mailed off the manuscript for Cold Cases, the manuscript that should follow up my unicorn-noir novella Horn, so I’m looking forward to getting some short-stories written before I hear back from Twelfth Planet Press and get stuck into the edits and rewrites. After we’re done with Cold Cases I’ll be starting work on the third novella in the Miriam Aster series and revisiting a long-neglected novel draft.

Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…

Not something that really bothers me, to be honest. I try to remain aware of the conversation and experiments in the publishing industry and I’m excited about the prospect of finally being able to carry e-books around in things like an i-phone, but when you get right down to it I’m primarily interested in being able to make stuff up and share it with other people. If the books the best way to do that, I’ll go with the book. If the future says the best choice is an e-book, or even a different vehicle for story altogether like the computer game, then I figure I’ll do what I can to work with that. Stories existed before books, and so did professional storytellers. I’m not sure either will go out of style, even if the book as a paper artifact does.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

Still off putting the finishing touches on the Cold Cases draft before I hand it over to Twelfth Planet Press. I should be back on Friday, being my usual blathering self, but until then have a picture of the Spokesbear doing his part:

And now I’m back to the manuscript, for the spokesbear is a harsh taskmaster.

Had an e-mail conversation with the publisher which basically amounted to “I’m going to be busy this week, so you might as well take a few extra days if you want them.” To which I replied “well, yeah, okay,” and promptly fell asleep for much of Sunday instead of rushing to get the edits finalised.

On the plus side, I woke up after all that and said “Oh, yeah, that’s why that scene isn’t working.” Space from a manuscript is a wonderful thing.

Apart from that, it looks like there’s another couple of days between me and sanity, and I’m about to abscond to the Gold Coast for a few days where I can cajole my parents into proofreading the manuscript for me :)

See you on the other side

I sold a story to Weird Tales.

If you need me for the rest of the day, I’ll be over in the corner geeking out*.

*For bonus points, I discovered that I like the first half of the novella enough that I’m not actually embaressed to let people read it. It’s still flawed, yes, but not *OMGWTF am I doing, this ferking sucks” flawed. As usual, the problem seems to have been cramming in way to much backstory in one go.**

**Hell, this day keeps getting better. The Australian Government decided to ignore the shitty recomendation from the productivity commission that we remove Australian territorial copyright. I so thought Australian writers and publishers weren’t going to win that fight, for all that there were dozens of sensible reasons on our side and a handful of really daft ones on the pro-parrallel importation end.

Alongside the release of Interfictions II comes the Interstatial Arts Foundation Auction featuring art peices, jewelry and other works based upon the stories in the two Interfiction’s anthologies. A full list of the peices is being rolled out on the IAF Auctions blog over the coming month, but allow me to call attention to Item 4 on the list, Mia Nutick’s Black Dog Forever, which is based on my story in IF2:

I don’t know about you, but I file this under “cool.” Go forth and peruse the other awesomeness on offer, for all sales go towards the IAF. Hell, let me just quote for this bit: “The Interfictions auctions have become a major aspect of the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s fundraising efforts, allowing the organization to fund other interstitial arts projects, including future Interfictions anthologies. Please join us in celebrating the anthology and support the Interstitial Arts Foundation by bidding and spreading the word.”

Interfictions II has also racked up its first review courtesy of Charles Tan’s Bibliophile Stalker blog if you’re still wondering about the book itself.

And with that, dear internet peeps, I dissappear back into the morass of the Cold Cases manuscript draft in an attempt to kill the damn thing off before it *eats my goddamn brain*. For if I don’t, the spokesbear get’s angry, and the bears got paws, man. Don’t be fooled by the apparent fuzziness and the styrofoam bean filling, the bear’s got paws.

Before I begin, let me direct you to this: Marshal Payne’s Super-Sekrit Clubhouse has a new interview with my Write Club peep Angela Slatter, which should give you a pretty good insight into why I usually use words like “awesome” and “inimitable” when discussing both her and her writing.

Angela remains one of those folks who fuses talent, hardworking dilligance and bucket-loads of smarts in her approach to writing (although she’ll refute the latter with Simpson’s referenes, giving half a chance). She speaks wisdom and her writing is good – so go read about her now, while she’s still an ‘emerging writer’, and then  you can join me in the nodding and looking smug when people start talking about how this awesome new ‘emerged’ writer in the years to come.

And if you don’t, well, I’ll mock you -with a very mocking mock - because that’s the kind of guy I am.

Okay, back to the entry. Or, to put it another way, a Cold Cases update

It appears that if you past your writing progress in the forms of Lord of the Rings references they become a lot more palatable in this newfangled world of social interactivity, so allow me to adapt from one of yesterday’s twitters/facebook updates and say this: I walk, I walk some more, there is a swampy bit, and I keep reminding myself that if I keep walking I should be hitting Mordor in the near future and tossing the deadly weight of the unending draft of doom into the volcano (and I’ll stop the metaphor there, of course, because the next step would be talking about tonight’s Write Club and I suspect any attempt to position Angela Slatter as the metaphorical Samwise Gamgee in the process would result in some form of bodily injury. Although it also reminds I should do a post about the psychology of write-club once I’m done with the novella).

In less fancy terms, the update goes something like this: rewriting continues, two more chapters got added, and I’m within striking distance of hitting the end. I don’t like the book at this point, but that’s kind of natural in the writing process. After all, I’ve just spent five days looking at it and focusing on the things that are wrong wrong wrong and nothing seems to be working. And the weight of it keeps dragging at my attention, reducing the world down to words and more words and more words, with the occasional break for food and sleep.

Every now and then I take a break and re-read a fragment of an old nanowrimo peptalk:

“The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”

I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.”

I suspect it’s all about tension at this point – a fight between fixing the longer structural problems “this story makes no sense” rather than the short-terms problems like “this scene has too little tension” or “why do I keep setting things inside cars” or “wait, wasn’t it daylight when I started this scene?” In short, there is much to do, and the evil writer brain wants to tackle them all in an omnivorous burst. The spokesbear tells me to go scene by scene and trust in the process.

As usual, the spokesbear is smarter than I am.