PeterMBall

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket...
Read More »

I’m spending some quality time with the keyboard tonight, chasing the elusive end of the Flotsam story-sequence. I keep scribbling notes in the margins about things I’d like to mention when I eventually do the Flotsam recap, given the somewhat usual space the entire thing occupied in my process, but that’s most just keep...
Read More »

I nipped off to the local shopping centre to have a haircut today. Not that you’d notice to look at me, all things considered, since in my vernacular having a haircut largely translates as choosing to look like an ill-kept hobo rather than arriving there accidentally. Fortunately, today’s hairdresser was one of the few who...
Read More »

Yesterday evening I was walking from work to the train-station, taking the long-cut through Southbank so I could enjoy the afternoon breeze and the Brisbane river, and I came across a pair of buskers playing a version of the Beatle’s Norwegian Wood as a duet on violin and banjo. They were kind of phenomenal, I think,...
Read More »

I’ve come to the opinion that migrating a website from one host to another is rather like being in charge of the Death Star firing controls. You sit there quietly, doing your job, counting off the minutes until you unleash the awesome power of some technological masteripeice capable of destroying planets, and in your...
Read More »

I’m drinking coffee with my breakfast this morning. This is worth mentioning because, quite honestly, for the last three weeks I’ve been sufficiently under the weather that the very thought of drinking coffee with breakfast was enough to induce nausea. Huzzah for good health; you always miss it when it fails you for a...
Read More »

A Sweet and Pensive Sadness When I was in my second year of university we studied Hotel Sorrento, a play by the Australian playwright Hannie Rayson that was later turned into a film. One of the themes running through the play – one of many – was an exploration of melancholy, and two lines...
Read More »

Things I’ve been doing instead of posting on this here blog: Writing things. Mostly this thing, but occasionally other things. Yes, that’s very vague, but that’s pretty much the way my brain works at this point: Writing! Things! Woo! Reading things. Specifically: reading Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest (pretty good), the Bloodshot/Hellbent tandem from Cherie...
Read More »

There’s something rather pleasant about writing in hotel rooms. For starters, there’s nothing to distract you, especially if the room you’re renting is marked by a list of things that don’t work: lights, television, the hotel’s broadband network. Hotel rooms endeavour to be pleasingly utilitarian at the best of times, and once you remove those little...
Read More »

A few days ago I sat down and with the Spokesbear and had a talk. It wasn’t a pleasant talk. It never is when the Spokesbear isn’t happy, even when he’s trying to be nice about it, and in this instance he was both very unhappy and very pleasant about his unhappiness. The gist,...
Read More »