Search Results for “sleep” – Page 18

Works in Progress

A grumpy, crabby kind of blog post

Yesterday… Well, yesterday I did not run away and join the circus, but it was probably one of those days where I would have if I had viable circus-type skills and access to a travelling circus to run away with. I did not turn into the Incredible Hulk and smash things in a frenzy of anger. I did not resign from my dayjob to take up a position that would be more useful to the world at large, such as hunting werewolves or wrangling wild unicorns or, you know, going into politics. But, oh, I was sorely tempted. Especially by the werewolf thing, which, really, goes to show how much I disliked certain aspects of yesterday, because I’m actually quite fond of werewolves. # We actually had a full cohort at write-club last night, which is the first time all four write-clubbers have been in the same place since other people started joining the inimitable Angela Slatter and I on a regular

PeterMBall 09/03/2011

Works in Progress

International Women’s Day and A Writer’s Woe

Today is International Women’s Day, which is one of those days that ought to be celebrated. I’m tempted to post more, but everything I come up with always sounds a little “yay for women” and/or overly patronizing, which isn’t really what I’m aiming for on a day that’s all about women’s causes and their achievements. So, instead, I’m going to go find a worthy and appropriate cause to donate money to in celebration of the day. And later, possibly, I will attempt to write something doesn’t make me feel like a misogynist arse every time I touch the keyboard. # I sent off the third story in the Flotsam series yesterday, after which I collapsed into bed and tried to sleep and eventually gave up and read all of The Hunger Games in one fell swoop because it was there and I was too lazy to climb out of bed and get something else to read and it was obvious that sleep

PeterMBall 08/03/2011

Journal

Grr. Arg. Zzzz.

Last night, because I am classy, I ate a dinner of hot-dog franks and baked beans and melted lite cheese slices with BBQ sauce. Then I wrote and wrote and wrote and accidentally fell asleep at the keyboard, which is one of those things that hasn’t happened to me in about fifteen years, and is even less productive than it sounds ’cause you wake up and discover all the odd things you’ve edited into the story by rolling onto the laptop in your sleep. In a less sane and reasonable world, I would have woken up this morning and gone back to writing, fixing the editing mistakes. Unfortunately I live in a world where the landlord is insistent about things like rent, so I got up and went to work at the dayjob instead. I may have done all of this, up until the going to work part, in my underwear. It’s also entirely possible I did not. I’ll leave

PeterMBall 07/03/2011

Journal

The Great Bookshelf Reorganising of 2011

On Saturday night, around 4 am, I started reorganising bookshelves. It seemed like the thing to do, since I’d been studiously not-sleeping for five hours after going to bed. Bookcases are one of the places where mess accumulates in my flat, largely because there’s so many of the damn things and I’ve developed a bad habit of taking things down, reading a couple of paragraphs, then putting them back somewhere else. What starts as a workable system quickly devolves over time, and every couple of years I have to start from scratch and reorganize the entire system. The whole process tends to start around 4 AM, ’cause insomnia is my response to doing to much and thinking too much and generally feeling like things are out of control. Reordering shelves is my way of figuring out what is and isn’t important in my life, and everything goes on from there. It’s a mental reset, fighting back against my natural tendency towards entropy. So far

PeterMBall 28/02/2011

Works in Progress

Shadows

So there’s a shortlist for the 2010 Australian Shadows horror awards available online, which includes Bleed in the Long Fiction category alongside such brilliant works as Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories and Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine and a handful of books I haven’t yet come across but I’m sure are excellent ’cause, really, once you start with Madigan Mine and The Girl with No Hands I’m inclined to just trust the judges tastes – those books are freakin’ great. So it’s a happy sort of day, even if it feels a bit odd to be on the short list because Bleed isn’t really a horror story. The complete short-list looks something like this, and it’s full of names that I’m very happy to see on short-lists. Congratulations to all who made it. LONG FICTION Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott (Picador Australia) The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga Publications) Guardian of the Dead by

PeterMBall 25/02/2011

Journal

I’m working late at the dayjob today, having started late under the assumption that driving back from the Sunshine Coast would be a foolhardy undertaking this morning. I’ve had to much good food and not enough sleep, and I’m suffering from the vague ick that comes from sleeping in an overly air-conditioned room. When I got to work I was told about the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Every couple of minutes someone plays a youtube clip of the events, or downloads a snippet of news from the internet, or simply sees something new on twitter. Some people have family over there, others were just planning to head over to NZ for a holiday in the near future. I’ve never been to Christchurch, but I hear it’s nice. I’m starting to suspect that nature has it in for the whole southern hemisphere of the planet at the moment. If you have the resources to do so, it may be a

PeterMBall 22/02/2011

Journal

Sunday Morning

When I was about twenty I lived in a motel, and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever rented in my life. If you’ve read Bleed, you’re already kinda familiar with it, ’cause it served as the basis for Palm Tree Row and abandoned motel where Aster finds the corpse. If you read the second installment of Flotsam when it comes out, the motel pops up again, albeit in a more inhabited form. It’s one of those touchstone places in terms of my fiction, a secret I’m still trying to unravel. The motel had these green fluorescent lights running along the first floor patios that turned on automatically at sunset and stayed on until midnight, which meant my second floor bedroom was lit up with an alien-abduction glow that was accompanied by the unearthly buzz that close comes from close proximity to bad lighting. One of my neighbours was a six-four American hip-hop fan with tourette’s who used to come home at

PeterMBall 13/02/2011

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Saturday Morning

It’s Saturday morning and I’m drinking instant coffee. Maccona Classic Dark Roast with milk and one sugar, for those who might be interested, although I have no earthly idea why you would be. In an hour or so I’m going to ignore the rest of the internet and start talking to the scattered members of my online crit group, who conveniently double as a group of good and articulate friends, so there’s still good reason to skype on the dates when we’re meant to be critting and no-one actually submitted things. This, I suspect, is as close to being one of the hidden secrets of writing as I can think of – find people you enjoy talking too who happen to be writers, then talk to them as often as you can. Ideas will form, ambitions will solidify, and the day-to-day despair of being underpaid and frustrated by the blank page will gradually fall by the wayside. I remember this far

PeterMBall 12/02/2011

Gaming

Gauntlet Free Posting

Tonight there was nerdery instead of writing. The crew came over for our bi-weekly Pathfinder/D&D session (it depends on how willing you are to acknowledge the shift) and we accidentally triggered what I hope was one of the nastier fights on our dungeon level. Relocating the session to my place is a relatively recent development, which is both awesome (since I no longer have to travel) and slightly problematic (since I don’t have table and that slows us down a little). ‘Course, now I’m wired on coffee, sugar, and elevated levels of geekery-related adrenaline (crits! holy smite! level-up!). I expect Fritz the laptop will be joining me for some pre-sleep wordcount, even if it’s not a huge number. Tonight also saw me sign up for my regular fruit and vegetable delivery, which means sometime over the weekend someone will deliver a small box of tasty, tasty food to my doorstep. All in all, I’m going to call this a good

PeterMBall 09/02/2011

Works in Progress

Fists of Steel: The snooze button edition.

– Gauntlet, an update: distractions, distractions, distractions. One Flotsam story is down, which means there’s three to go ‘fore the Gauntlet is done. I lost much of the afternoon catching up on things that needed doing (deadlines, proofs, contracts) – The weekend was long and only about 30% pleasant. I’m running short on sleep and planning on turning in early tonight. Hopefully today’s writing-induced adrenaline spike won’t keep me awake. I may take the laptop to bed and try to nail down 300 words of the lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft. – Tomorrow there is write-club and going through more proofs. February is odly busy on the writing-and-getting-stuff-out front.

PeterMBall 07/02/2011

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

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

Search Results for: sleep – Page 18

A grumpy, crabby kind of blog post

International Women’s Day and A Writer’s Woe

Grr. Arg. Zzzz.

The Great Bookshelf Reorganising of 2011

Shadows

Sunday Morning

Saturday Morning

Gauntlet Free Posting

Fists of Steel: The snooze button edition.

Six Thoughts Upon Reading The Maltese Falcon

Cutting back on coffee, redux

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