Big Thoughts – Page 3 – Peter M. Ball

Big Thoughts

13 Notes for a Story That Won’t Get Written

I shouldn’t be trusted with the internet at the moment. It’s summer and I am maudlin, and these two things do not go well together. I find myself picking at old scabs and realising that the wounds beneath them never fully healed. I find myself creating drama, simply because drama is easier to handle. Inhabiting drama makes it easier to exist. It’s good for writing, I’ll give it that. Less good for everything else. # Two instincts wage war within me. The first demands silence because silence is my natural state, because what does not get said cannot be examined. # I’ve never hidden my heart. I’ve never placed my heart inside an egg, to be placed inside a duck, to be hidden in a well inside a secret courtyard, located in a keep on a distant isle far from charted waters. I’ve never done this, but I’ve been tempted. # Through it all there are words, ’cause writing is

PeterMBall 19/12/2012

Big Thoughts

Pledging My Allegiance to the Fake Geek Army

There are days when I feel insufficiently geek. Don’t get me wrong – I do plenty of things that are geeky as hell – I play, on average, 1.5 face-to-face RPG sessions a week, have a semi-regular influx of graphic novels appearing in my mailbox, and the staff at my local Fantasy, SF, and Crime bookstore know me on sight. I can just about make it through an entire week of wearing shirts with pictures of C’Thulhu on them without having to do laundry. When I run out of Lovecraft inspired T’s, I’ll move on to my collection of web-comic shirts without missing a beat. That should keep me going for a month or so before it’s time to hit the washing machine. Two of my favourite TV shows are Justice League: Unlimited and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. I just dropped a whole buttload of cash on the reprints of Larry Hama’s classic GI JOE series from Marvel in the

PeterMBall 19/11/2012

Big Thoughts

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

I recently answered a bunch of questions for the 2012 Australian Spec Fic Snapshot project, a semi-regular interview series that surveys the Australian SF scene and presents the interviews in a week-long flurry. I don’t know if my particular snapshot will be online by the time this post goes up, but it’s coming and in one of my answers I mention the rise in feminist discourse taking place within SF over the last few years and how happy I am to see that happening despite the fact that my engagement with feminism is haphazard at best. And I’ve been thinking about that phrase, a lot, since I sent off my snapshot response. My initial intention with that phrase was to acknowledge that I’m basically white, male, university educated, and middle class. I am white male privileged incarnate and get to play life on the lowest possible difficulty setting, and even as someone who tries to be aware of that, even as someone

PeterMBall 06/06/2012

Big Thoughts

Everything is Artifice

Years ago, when I first started my never-to-be-finished PhD, I had one simple belief: everything is artifice. I suppose it’s a natural enough conclusion to come to when you’re twenty-two years old and reading Lyotard’s theories on the post-modern condition during the bulk of your waking hours, and it certainly seemed to explain an awful lot about the things I didn’t quite understand about the world. That any attempt at authenticity was but a carefully constructed stratagem to create the illusion of authenticity made sense to me. After all, I lived on the Gold Coast. Trying to deal with the concept of authenticity on the Gold Coast is fucking confusing, since the whole damn city embraces artifice as its default state. You make sense of it as best you can, or you get the get the hell out. These days I’m older and dumber and I have about thirteen years of additional experience to process, and I’m still not entirely sure that my

PeterMBall 21/05/2012

Big Thoughts

Situation Comedy, Redux

To give you fair warning, this is a cranky post. It’s possible I’ll swear. Often. Loudly. You have been warned. # One of the more interesting threads running through the comments on yesterday’s post, both here and over on Facebook, was this attitude that sitcoms are inherently limited and/or required to suck by virtue of the genre conventions they operate under. To which I respond, no, fuck that, genres are as limited as we want them to be, pleas take your they-cater-to-the-masses-and-therefore-must-suck class-oriented modernist bullshit to someone else’s discussion. ‘Cause, you know, that kind of attitude is the reason we get bad science fiction, bad romance, bad action-adventure films, and pretty much everything else. You reap what you sow, in that respect, and unless you’re willing to ask for more it’s unlikely you’ll ever get it. I no more accept the inevitable suckiness of sit-coms than I do the argument that Avatar needed to be a three-hour exercise in narrative tedium; it

PeterMBall 17/03/2011

Big Thoughts

Actually, fuck it, I’m ranting

Every now and then publishers I respect a lot go and do something stupid, and this makes me a little sad. This weeks’ case-in-point comes courtesy of the writer’s guidelines for Ticonderoga’s latest anthology, which I read through and had a complete WTF kind of moment when I stumbled across this. A masculine tone will be favoured but not sought exclusively (i.e. avoid becoming bogged down with intricate descriptions and fancy window dressing in your world building; save your word count for a solid scene – or 2 or 3 – of conflict, action, aggression, etc). (see the addendum below) I mean, yeah, seriously, what the fuck? Setting aside the fact that anyone’s daft enough to phrase their preferences like this in an online world where x-fail has become part of the dialogue and there’s a new generation of readers (and writers) sensitive to gender issues, I actually found this kind of disappointing because it runs up against one of

PeterMBall 24/01/2011

Big Thoughts

This post contains swearing

So this is something of an addendumto yesterday’s post, and it’s written because every now and then I see people I really like get in trouble because they don’t yet grasp the realities of white male privilege until it’s too late. I had this conversation with a friend the last time this issue raised its head, but I don’t think I ever put it together as a complete post, so I figured I may as well have it handy. Be warned that I’m going to swear a lot. Be warned that you’re probably not going to like hearing it, especially because it flies in the face of the way we wish the internet could be. Call it the two-word rule you need to wrap your head around before you launch into a discussion of feminsim online as a white male. It goes a little something like this: Fuck civility. I say this as someone who’s a fan of civility, who

PeterMBall 21/10/2010

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

Big Thoughts

Apropo of Nothing

My friend Jason Fischer has expressed his consternation regarding author bios that mention cats in the past, so I feel obligated to mention this in the interests of scientific research: People love them some cats. I mean, seriously, the spike in visitors once I started blogging about the cat-sitting scares me a little (and that was *before* Angela linked to them). I find myself thinking of the motivational poster that went up on John Scalzi’s site a few days after he taped bacon to his cat. People love cat-related stories, Mister Fischer. They like knowing the cats exist and that you have them. Give it up, mate. The Cats win. ________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 3 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30 Rejections in 2010: 12/100 Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

PeterMBall 24/07/2010

Big Thoughts

Opting Out

Facebook recently announced another round of changes to its privacy policy that’s got some folks concerned. The short version, for those who prefer not to follow links, goes something like this: a group of pre-approved third party applications will be given permission to automatically siphon your data should you or one of your facebook friends visit it. This basically means you may click on a link and discover a website that already knows who you are (plus your date of birth, location, sexual preference and political allegiances, should you have put such things in your profile and left them accessible to others). To be fair to facebook, you don’t have to be involved with this, but the default settings will make it possible unless you specifically go and set your profile to opt out of the option. I first joined facebook for work reason when I was working for Gen Con Australia in 2007. I avoided it for as long as

PeterMBall 31/03/2010

Big Thoughts

Random Thoughts While Reading Theory: Technique of Art

Think about writing for a moment. Not the let me tell you a story kind of writing I usually talk about here, but handwriting; the physical act of picking up a pencil and writing a sentence. Think about how automatic it’s become, how long it’s been since you’ve had to pay attention to the way your hand moves or the little tics in the muscle that allow you to scribe an L instead of a T. How many little things are happening without your knowledge, or the way the physical sensation of holding a pen stops registering because the act of writing is all just an automatic reflex now. Hold onto that thought, ‘cause we’re going to come back to it. Over the weekend I started one of my long-term projects in the name of the 80-point-plan – reading an anthology of literary theory essays with an aim towards filling in my patchy awareness of the field. My goal is

PeterMBall 03/08/2009

Big Thoughts

SF and Gender

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 I was choosing on the basis of quality, not gender.” This answer flummoxes me every time it’s trotted out; not because the people who use it are not bad people or knowing oppressors, but just because it often reveals itself as a blind-spot in the approach of someone whose work I’d otherwise respect. And, to be honest, I just don’t get how people can’t question that statement, since SF itself has often been denigrated and ignored using the same excuse. Think about that moment that all SF fans seem to share – that moment where you’re talking to someone who doesn’t read the genre, and you reveal that you do, and their response is a muted “oh” followed by a look that

PeterMBall 27/02/2009

Category: Big Thoughts

13 Notes for a Story That Won’t Get Written

Pledging My Allegiance to the Fake Geek Army

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

Everything is Artifice

Situation Comedy, Redux

Actually, fuck it, I’m ranting

This post contains swearing

I would rage, but I no longer have the energy

Apropo of Nothing

Opting Out

Random Thoughts While Reading Theory: Technique of Art

SF and Gender

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