PeterMBall

Big Thoughts

I would rage, but I no longer have the energy

I hate it when things I usually enjoy go and do something daft. This week that space has largely been taken up by the Apex Blog, in which one of the regular bloggers has trotted out the argument that feminists complaining about all-male TOC are arguing in favour of political correctness over quality. Which, yeah, way to be a few years behind the debate and all, dude. Thumbs fucking up. I planned on getting irate, but lets face it, I’ve been irate about this before (and Apex has already announced that there’s someone posting a response on their site). Instead, I’m just going reblog the response I had last time this shit came up: Gender and SF (Originally posted in February of 2009) There’s been a bunch of debates about Gender and SF of late, all of which seem to end up with someone defending themselves with a variation of “I filled all the spots on project X with men because

PeterMBall 20/10/2010

Works in Progress

Process

So after a week of sturm-und-drang and putting forthblog posts and twitters that worry my parents, it’s time to get back to the talking cats. There seems to a process when I sit down to write novellas. It starts with this is easy, no problem, which is quickly replaced by aaargh! WTF? Who thought I could do this, and it eventually reaches okay, I’ll dump everything and start over, with a plan; planning for the win! This usually coincides with a healthy slice of screw this, I just want to write short stories, which is usually followed by some OMG, I totally forgot how to write a short story type flailing. Guess which stage I hit a few days ago. Fortunately, I’m already aware I’ve been here before and things worked out. It’s handy to track these things, sometimes. From memory there’s a stage or two that follows this one, although the fact that Claw is part of the series

PeterMBall 20/10/2010

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writing, Budgeting, and Shame

My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the moment of parity between the Australian dollar and the US*. In fact, I’m not really leaving the house much for anything, really. All of this takes considerable mental energy on my part, because the impulse is there to do all of them and in some cases (say, Locus) I can even partially justify why I should do them. Such are the realities of paying off credit card debt in my current circumstances – I’ve trimmed my budget to focus as much as possible on paying off the accumulated debt of the last year, and even then the realities of credit interest meant I’m only dropping the

PeterMBall 19/10/2010

News & Upcoming Events

The Mike & Carly Story in Shimmer 12

So I’m spending some time away from the internet this week, trying to get some life stuff sorted out, but I figured I’d drop by to mention the following: Issue 12 of Shimmer magazine is out This is always a source of joy, largely ’cause Shimmer is one of the magazine I consistently subscribe too regardless of financial circumstances. And to quote from their webpage: Issue 12 contains wonders and marvels, from Peter M. Ball‘s punk-not-emo teenage werewolf story, to Josh Storey‘s gorgeous take on the tale of Orpheus, to Monica Byrne‘s story of stigmata in a colony on a distant planet. We’ve got an imaginative reinterpretations of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wizard of Oz, and a sweet little zombie love story. And more! We packed 9 stories into this issue. What they don’t actually mention in that excerpt is that Issue 12 also contains the inimitable Ben Francisco’s Crepuscular, which takes the concept of a firefly and

PeterMBall 14/10/2010

Works in Progress

Heading off for a few days

I’m preparing to decamp to the Gold Coast and hang out with my parents for a few days, which is a process that would probably go a lot better if I hadn’t just spent an hour drinking my morning coffee and checking my RSS feeds on the internets. On the other hand, the more internets I get out of my system now, the less time I spend wasting my parent’s bandwidth. I’ve also been deploying kitchen timers and to-do lists this week, which is slowly starting to make a difference when it comes to getting things done. I’m yet to actually finish a to-do list, mind, but I’m usually averaging five or six things on a list of ten goals for the day. I’m still debating whether the timer is going with me to the Gold Coast or not; in theory I’ll be spending the bulk of my time down there doing a rewrite on the sparse first-quarter of Claw

PeterMBall 08/10/2010

Journal

4 Things

1) This morning I introduced a friend to the glory that is Hark, A Vagrant, which is kind of like XKCD for literature and history nerds instead of math-geeks. I mention this purely because I just assume everyone reads these things, but every now and then I’ll be all “the hippos will always be hungry; they will never be satisfied” and people will be all “WTF Peter? That makes no sense.” 2) A fairly neat review of Twelfth Planet Press’s Sprawl anthology, which was released at Worldcon and contains new short stories by me and Angela Slatter and LL Hannett and many other awesome folks. In an odd moment of synchronicity, my contributor copy arrived in the mail yesterday too. Should you want your own copy, you can go order one on the TPP website. 3) I suspect being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers would be mildly uncomfortable. And no, you do not context for that. 4) I find myself, post-worldcon, staring at

PeterMBall 06/10/2010

Works in Progress

To Do

Things I have to do today: write job applications; attend a meeting; pick up the mail at the PO Box; eat dinner with my parents. Things I wish I was doing today: fixing the current wordcount on Claw, since the bits I’ve got written thus far are so damn sparse and rough that it makes me itchy to think about them. What writing I’m going to get done today will take place in small gaps – a half-hour here, twenty minutes there. I suspect this will be enough to hit Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity (aka 500 words), but it may not be enough to hit the Comfort Zone (aka 2000 words) or a Good Day of Writing (aka 5,000+ words). All in all, I’m starting to remember how this writing thing goes again.

PeterMBall 05/10/2010

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Six Thoughts Upon Reading The Maltese Falcon

I started reading The Maltese Falcon yesterday, which is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read forever without getting around to it. I lay the blame entirely on the film, which is awesome and fulfilling in a way that the other big hardboiled-to-noir adaptation* never really manages, and thus makes it easier to excuse the act of reading in favour of another round of Bogart playing Sam Spade. In any case, after starting to read I had some thoughts. Six of them, to be exact: 1) The more I read hardboiled fiction the more I’m aware of the way it infiltrates our culture, seeping in through other media when we’re not looking. It’s a genre that lends itself to the intertextual, to endless moments of “so that’s where that came from” as you go back and find primary sources. I knew the tropes of noir film long before I came across it’s classic stories, largely because I’d inherited

PeterMBall 04/10/2010

Works in Progress

Metrics!

For the first time in a long while, I’ve managed to write two thousand words in the space of a day. While this is certainly good news around these parts, it comes with the somewhat sickening realisation that Giving Up Coffee is Working. Interestingly, kicking the draft version of Claw into gear has involved sketching the bare bones of a scene – basically, getting the conflict and the final line down – then trusting that I’ll be able to come back and flesh things out once I’ve got the structure in place. This is a new and different territory so far as my process goes, and may well come back to bite me in a few thousand words time. ________________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30 Rejections in 2010: 21/100 Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)

PeterMBall 03/10/2010

Journal

Coffee, Meaning, and Getting What You Get

I woke up this morning with a desire to blog, only to discover that the back end of my website is down for some kind of regular maintenance, and this presents problems because I’ve grown so used to using it that the thought of posting straight to livejournal seems redundant. So instead I write this elsewhere and assume it’ll go online sooner or later. It’s 8:36 in the morning. It’s raining. I’m barefoot and wearing my oversized winter writing coat and listening to old Cure songs. There’s a list of five things I want to accomplish today sitting beside the keyboard. The first thing on the list is the production of words for Claw. The second thing on the list is the revision of words for Black Candy. If you read yesterday’s post, you may be seeing a theme. Right now I’m missing coffee. Not the caffeine or the taste of it, just the comforting way it used to fit

PeterMBall 03/10/2010

Journal

Musings

Today is wet and dreary and therefore full of awesome. I’m always far fonder of the world when it’s overcast and dreary than I am during the sunny days, especially now that it’s spring and the demolition-force humidity and heat of Summer are just on the horizon. I am steadily ignoring the fact that there are multiple breeds of football dominating the airwaves at the moment and pretending the rest of the world has gone away for a while. It’s always easier to write on such days, although I’ll admit that I miss the comfort of having another cup of coffee and watching the world through my office window. Soon I will head off and make myself some soup. Until then I will sit and think about Claw, which is proving to be unruly and hard-to-tame due to my insistence on a) not repeating the opening tropes that were used in Horn and Claw; and b) my desire to make use

PeterMBall 02/10/2010

Journal

Cutting back on coffee, redux

So it’s been a week since I started cutting back on caffeine, replacing my 9+ cups of coffee a day with a single cup in the morning and the occasional cup of tea in the afternoon. It’s made for a trying week, especially since it came with a side-order of mandatory workshopping and a slew of ongoing problems with my internet access*, so I haven’t yet gotten around to answering all the various people who keep asking “why, for the love of god, why?” whenever I mentioned this on various social media. The short-answer goes something like this: I recently availed myself to the counselling service the Australian social-security system offers to the long-term unemployed, during which we spoke of many things. The Fear was among them, as was my frustration at my inability to put a consistent writing routine together due to increasing anxiety about bills, rent, insomnia, the inability to find consistent employment, and assorted other issues I generally don’t

PeterMBall 27/09/2010

Author: PeterMBall

I would rage, but I no longer have the energy

Process

Writing, Budgeting, and Shame

The Mike & Carly Story in Shimmer 12

Heading off for a few days

4 Things

To Do

Six Thoughts Upon Reading The Maltese Falcon

Metrics!

Coffee, Meaning, and Getting What You Get

Musings

Cutting back on coffee, redux

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