Search Results for “apnea” – Page 3

Big Thoughts

Coping

It’s a dreary kind of morning here in Brisbane and 2015 is almost done, ready to be laid to rest with singing and dancing and libations with friends. Unless you’re me. I shall celebrate the end of the year in the same way I wish to kick of 2016: lying in my bed, notebook on my lap, scribbling words and pondering what will come my way in the future. For once, I find myself very fond of the passing year. It’s been forever since I looked back over twelve months and felt myself at peace with everything that happened – usually, at this time of year, I am waging desperate war with an internal monologue of frustration and horror about the lack of…well, everything. Playing endless games of if only I had done this better and if only hadn’t fucked that up. I spent my life incredibly angry. I am probably understating this a little. My greatest fantasy, for the last five or

PeterMBall 31/12/2015

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Characters, Couples, and Trios

I have, for the last few hours, been musing about two movies I watched over the weekend. For those doing the maths: yes, that means I get up obscenely early. Yes, I wish it were otherwise. Screw the goddamn apnea. Anyway, the movies.The first, Comet, is a small movie that charts the relationship between two characters over a six-year period, with numerous cuts back-and-forth in time. The second, 28 Hotel Rooms, is a small movie that charts the relationship between a man and a woman having an affair in a succession of hotel rooms, never seeing them outside of that context. I picked them both for the actors involved and because the synopsis sounded vaguely interesting. And they were both…odd. Is odd the right word? I’m not sure. They’re not necessarily movies I enjoyed, but movies I enjoyed watching. Movies where I appreciated the attempt and found the performances engaging, but found myself distracted by other stuff they were doing. This is

PeterMBall 15/12/2015

Stuff

Eight Topics I’m Obsessed With At the Moment

The things I am most obsessed about tend to influence the content on this blog in strange ways. I never set out to blog about them specifically, but they colour every interaction I have with other people, and it is frequently a question or idea that someone else puts out there that sparks a moment of confluence and, lo, a blog post appears. With that in mind, I figured I’d put this out there: a list of the current obsessions that are guiding my work over the next few months. The list is constantly evolving – some are long-term obsessions that lie at the very heart of my identity, while others are brief flings – but they all shape my method of engaging with the world in strange ways. 1) ART AND COMMERCE We’ve spent centuries telling people that art isn’t commerce and that’s filtered down into every aspect of the way we talk about art, writing, and creativity. For someone

PeterMBall 20/11/2015

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Sleep Thing, Blogging, And Writing Without a Net

The sleep thing. The apnea. The bad habit my body has developed of asphyxiating me a couple of dozen times an hour, while my body drifts into a REM state. I’ve called it all sorts of things over the last nine months, but it always opens up a quiet moment of panic inside me. It lies at the heart of a very specific debate I have, regarding social media and being a writer. Because I do not know where the line is, when it comes to discussing it. It came up a few times, over the weekend, and figuring out when I’d crossed over into the territory where I’d become the guy banging on about something everyone else was done with got difficult even when the non-verbal queues were present. I do, after all, have a tendency to bang on about things when I’m trying to figure them out. Usually, long after everyone else is wishing I’d shut up. And

PeterMBall 17/11/2015

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

600k Year: A Conclusion, More or Less

Warning: word-count neepery associated with the 600k challenge follows. You can skip today’s post if that’s not your thing. Right. So yesterday, at Write Club, I did this Which means I’ve now written nine of the ten chapters I had planned for the novel I’m working on and there’s just one more to go. Probably about 65,000 to 72,000 words, depending on how accurate my words-per-page assumptions are, with another eight to ten thousand words left to chase down before I hit the end. It…may not be done by GenreCon. Which hurts to admit, since I was confident I’d get able to do so until about Monday, but we’re starting to hit the point where the conference stops having things that need to be done and starts to have minor disasters that will eat hours of your time as you fix them. Since I’m the only person whose disappointed if this book doesn’t get done in time, and there’s about 180

PeterMBall 23/10/2015

Journal

A Curious Thing

Ducked around to my PO Box earlier today and discovered that my contributor copies of Gods, Memes, and Monsters had arrived. And lo, it is a handsome book, once you see it in the flesh: That’s not the curious bit. This is: I have a bit of a ritual with contributor copies these days, which has developed over the last few years. Basically, they come in, and I make myself a nice cup of tea to calm the nerves before cracking the book open and taking a close look at my story, figuring out how much of it I actually remember writing. The answer, thanks to the exhaustion associated with undiagnosed apnea and the desperate attempts to hit deadlines, is invariably less than I’d like. For Gods, Memes, and Monsters, it was virtually nothing. I could basically remember the idea I pitched and the things that inspired me to tackle that particular topic, and that was about it. Reading the story was kinda

PeterMBall 22/10/2015

Big Thoughts

The Sleep Thing

I run into people, from time to time, and they ask: how is the sleep thing? Usually, I tell them the sleep thing is fine. Way better than it was back April, when I was falling asleep in front of the computer. Way better than it was back in May, when the diagnosis of chronic sleep apnea became all kinds of official and they sent me off with a machine that’d stop me from asphyxiating while I slept. This is not a lie. Compared to the state I was in at the start of the year, life is a magical wonderland full of candy unicorns. I sleep better. I concentrate better. I do not feel like I am messing up every aspect of my existence as a default state. I keep discovering all sorts of secondary problems – shoulder pain, neck pain, teeth grinding – that were basically linked to the apnea and have now cleared up. The sleep thing

PeterMBall 22/09/2015

Stuff

Morning Shift

So this is pretty much how my morning went: Peter gets up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off at 6:00 am Peter sits down to write a half-hour ahead off schedule Peter finishes the 1,300 goal he set for his morning writing shift forty-five minutes early. Peter wombles around the internet for ten minutes, then realise everyone else is asleep or on their way to work. Peter gets bored. Peter goes back to writing. And that, folks, is why I’ve missed getting up early to get writing done. It wasn’t possible for much of the last year, courtesy of the apnea and my tendency to sleep through alarms, so I gradually cut back my morning writing to a bare minimum of getting up a half-hour early and getting a couple of hundred words done (and, even then, there were mornings it didn’t happen). It’s nice to be back. # Speaking of things coming back, tomorrow night will see the

PeterMBall 25/05/2015

News & Upcoming Events

Book Update: Flotsam

I woke up this morning to find the publisher’s notes for Crusade in my email. I’ve got a week to go through things and get it back to the fine folks at Apocalypse Ink, then they go and do their arcane voodoo that transform it from a word file to a books. The e-book for Crusade comes out in June. (Out of curiosity, I went over to cover artist Mark Ferarri‘s site this morning. There’s previews of the Crusade cover and the cover for the print edition of Flotsam in his online gallery, for those who are curious, and allow me to say, well, holy shit I’m looking forward to seeing that print compilation. It’s so fucking pretty.) Coincidently, starting tomorrow, I also have five-straight days off from work. My goal – gods and sleep apnea willing – is to get about twenty-thousand words down on the next novella on my list, which is all about ghosts and werewolves and boxing and some particularly unpleasant underworld types.

PeterMBall 21/04/2015

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Total Microsleeps While Writing This Post: 5

I don’t sleep well, not anymore. I first wrote that in the opening paragraph of Horn back in 2007, when a kind of restless sleeplessness was one of the first things I knew about Miriam Aster. It was a trait we shared, to some degree, if only ‘cause I’m the kind of person who resists sleep like the plague. I enjoy being up late. I prefer being a night owl. I’m used to living with a kind of self-inflicted exhaustion when I found myself having to engage with other people’s daylight-focused schedules. These were the stories I told myself, and for the most part they were true, but they ignored stuff: the weeks where I’d wake up repeatedly throughout the night, desperately needing to urinate; the nights when I’d wake myself up ‘cause I snored so loudly; the times when I’d go to bed and get a full eight hours sleep, but still wake up feeling exhausted as hell. They

PeterMBall 08/04/2015

Search Results for: apnea – Page 3

Coping

Characters, Couples, and Trios

Eight Topics I’m Obsessed With At the Moment

The Sleep Thing, Blogging, And Writing Without a Net

600k Year: A Conclusion, More or Less

A Curious Thing

The Sleep Thing

Morning Shift

Book Update: Flotsam

Total Microsleeps While Writing This Post: 5

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