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Works in Progress

Novella Deathmarch, Day Four

Today the novella did good things. Less of the Death side of the equation and more of the March. The sub-conscious writing muscles have remembered how to work and the story starts chugging along under its own steam. I can look of the current draft and see the shape of the book it’s going to be when it’s done, which is something I hadn’t managed prior to starting the deathmarch. The voice started settling down. I remembered how to take stuff out of a rewrite, especially when it belongs in another scene. All is well with the world. The real measure that the Deathmarch is working, though, comes when I can look forward to the next writing project without immediately running off to work on it instead. When I’m avoiding a project, I’m all about the distraction. Today I’m all about the focus, and hopefully I can start transitioning to normal sleeping patterns instead of maintaining the manic manic working-to-five-in-the-morning approach

PeterMBall 22/04/2010
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Cold Cases: Thinking Out Loud

Okay, to start with, Michael Moorcock talks about the genesis of the Dorian Hawkmoon books over at the Tor site. I mean, seriously, why are you still here? Also, Twelfth Planet Press has released the guidelines for their forthcoming Speakeasy anthology full of urban fantasy stories set in the 1920s.  I totally dig the idea of this anthology, but I’ll admit that all of my initial ideas will be bloody hard to pare down to short story lengths (unless, of course, I finally break down and write the 1920’s zombie story set in Tahiti I’ve been threatening to write for four years now, but Alisa at TPP is quite adamant in her hatred of zombies so it’s probably not the best starting point). ♦ Okay, fair warning, the following entry is rambling and scattered while I think through a specific problem related to the project du jour. If you have no real interest in writers thinking out loud, I suggest going

PeterMBall 26/03/2010
Journal

A frustrated Spokesbear is dangerous

I’m drinking my second cup of coffee of the morning, revelling in the fact that I’ve been awake for nearly three hours now and I don’t yet feel the need to take a nap. Huzzah for reaching the end of the medication, although the celebrations are tempered by the fact that I head into the dentist for stage two of my root canal this afternoon. I know nothing about the art of dentistry, but the implication after my last visit was essentially “if the infection’s still there, we’ll have to remove the tooth instead.” I’m okay with removing the tooth, to be honest, as long as it doesn’t come with another round on medication. Experience says I have a predilection towards sloth that shouldn’t be encouraged and I have phobias about returning to the slacker mindset that dominated my early twenties. Or, to return to my new years resolution: don’t fuck it up, dumb-ass. I’ll take a week of jaw pain

PeterMBall 24/03/2010
Journal

Seven Thoughts for a Tuesday

1) On the grand list of bad narrative decisions that cause me to dislike things I should have loved the decision to have the first half of Veronica Mars, Season 3, to use extreme feminists as one of the key antagonists is right at the top. The first time I watched the series it was a moment of pure WTF and it seriously hasn’t made any more sense on subsequent viewings. 2) Someone has created inhalable coffee as a consumer product. The jet packs and self-driving cars are surely on their way. 3) Part of my beef with the decision mentioned in number one? The writers of Veronica Mars have a seemingly magical ability to create empathy with the antagonists. *Every single arsehole* in the show – from the self-involved Sheriff Lamb to killer Aaron Eckles to frat-boy Dick Casablancas – has a redeeming moment or two in amidst their grating evil. There was depth to them. The “evil feminist”

PeterMBall 23/03/2010
Journal

And now we are thirty-three

I’ve never really known what to do with my birthday. The realities of being haphazardly employed mean going out and celebrating are off the agenda and I’m pretty sure the last time I tried was back in 2006 or so. The idea of celebrating my birthday has always seems kinda awkward anyway. Existing for a year isn’t necessarily an achievement, you know? This year I seem to have settled upon ordering a cheese pizza and re-reading the introduction to Haruki Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, which will inevitably lead to the rereading of the anthology itself in days to come. Later on I’ll regret the fact that medication means I can’t drink a glass of wine with dinner, then bugger off to play DnD with friends. Given that I’m still tired and sluggish from the medication, I may even have a nap before I go. Really, this is business as usual for a Thursday. So I took a photograph, just to mark

PeterMBall 18/03/2010
Journal

Only Thursday

‘Tis a Thursday, today. Somehow this fact managed to elude me until I rocked up for the Friday launch of my friend Chris Lynch’s Tangled Bank anthology, which wasn’t on for obvious reason. I really shouldn’t be trusted to run my own schedule. That said, the momentary mortification hasn’t really done much to dilute the fact that this is a week of awesomeness among my friends. There’s Chris’s launch tomorrow, the official announcement that Angela Slatter will be doing a short-story anthology with Ticonderoga Publications, due for release at Wordcon in September, and we’re counting down the days until Jason Fischer’s zombie novella After the World: Gravesend hits newsagents on Monday. On top of this there was discounted ginger marmalade on sale at the grocery story today (score!), my laptop repaired and came in towards the lower end of the projected costs (double-score!), and I’ve managed to start watching a  TV series on DVD without spiraling into the twenty-four episode

PeterMBall 11/02/2010
Works in Progress

Spirit: willing

I got the writing moving again over the weekend. Not full, productive workdays where I get my 1,000 words down, but enough to feel like I’m actually doing something. Today’s list of things to do consists of words: words; e-mail; tracking down groceries. I will achieve all of these. Everything else is superfluous. This will not, of course, prevent me from wasting time on the internets. Current Project: Getting Back to Basics Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8 Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0 Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0 Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 2 Days without chocolate: 5 Today the Spokesbear is: sleeping in.

PeterMBall 08/02/2010
Journal

Rumors of my absence may have been exagerated

It turns out that spending two-to-three weeks writing by hand just wasn’t on the list of things I was willing to do. Fortunately this roughly coincided with the realisation that I could pick up a very cheap desktop (to replace the machine that died last September) and write it off as a business expense. It’s not as ideal as no computer problems at all – I’ve spent the last two days uploading the various programs and back-up files onto the new machine rather than working – but it has fringe benefits (hello, photoshop. I’ve missed you). It’s a stinking hot, evil day outside my office so I’ve retreated into the air-conditioning with a pile of Primus CD and a large vat of coffee. The coffee because my sleep patterns are shot right now (going to bed at eleven, getting to sleep around 4 am). The Primus because I watched a lot of Robot Chicken in a row and it’s Les

PeterMBall 05/02/2010
Works in Progress

And lo, I could not think of a title

Mornin’ peeps. The laptop’s on battery power* at the moment so I’m racing against time to get a blog-post written before the computer yawns and says “sleepy now, going away.” Yesterday I wrote 381 words on a story, poked at another to see where it fell over**, cleared out 50-odd e-mails had been waiting for me to answer them since the beginning of January***, ate half a loaf of bread, took out the rubbish, pondered tactics for tonight’s Bloodbowl game****, and learned that one of my stories from last-year has been picked-up-for-a-reprint-that-I’m-not-sure-I-can-talk-about-yet-so-we’ll-leave-that-there. Among the various e-mails was a note from Andrew C Porter that basically went along the lines of linked you on my blog, and you might want to go check out the nice things Apex Submission’s Editor Maggie Jamison said in her interview. And so I went, and nice things were said, and Andrew’s blog proved to be fun and vaguely maddening with his insistence on posting Advanced Dungeon’s

PeterMBall 02/02/2010
Works in Progress

Lists and Planning

1000 words of redraftage on Black Candy last night. It appears that the “hours per day” writing metric I’ve been used to get the Cold Cases draft in is going to be replaced by the more familiar “wordcount needed before I can sleep” metric. I suspect my process may be seasonal – Brisbane is too damn hot in summer to do regular work-hours in my flat and I find myself drifting towards writing at night when the temperature and humidity is down. Either way, I’m back work after taking the first ten days of January off for the purposes of taking a break from writing, celebrating my mother’s birthday, and writing my somewhat over-detailed yearly plan (sixteen pages and counting) of what needs to done on the writing front. My T0-Do List for January and February: 1) Redraft Black Candy 2) Write 3 short-stories I owe people after saying “yes” when they asked if I’d be interested in submitting 3) Write

PeterMBall 13/01/2010
Works in Progress

Watch out for the Deadlines, they move when you’re not looking

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 🙂

PeterMBall 16/11/2009
Works in Progress

Words, words, words (With bonus Angela Slatter Interview)

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

PeterMBall 06/11/2009

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