Tag: Dancing Monkey Posts
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A Call for Reader Questions: Dancing Monkey 2013

If you fire up the time-machine and travel back to August of 2012, you’ll notice that about this time of year my life gets increasingly hectic. Weekends that used to be free for writing and bloggery get siphoned up by Writers Festivals, Conferences, and other work-related things. I start spending more time in airports than usual. Projects that have been ignored for a little too long start lurching their way to the top of the to-do list.My brain, known to be unreliable at the best of time, starts misfiring like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve discovered, from hard experience, that it’s best not to set my own topics in this period. No-one is particularly interested in reading an endless cycle of well, guess how I fucked up today and seriously, me and airports, it’s like I’m cursed; I’m not particularly interested those posts either, but I know I will if I find myself ready to blog and unable to think of something. Which brings

PeterMBall 08/08/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I’m Far To Easily Amused By The Phrase “ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL”

So my friend Nic, who scribbles a bit but doesn’t have a website, snuck a final question in on the end of the dancing monkey series: What do you do with an idea or story that just runs out of steam far too early? (Say many thousands of words short of what it needs) Well, much as I’d like to say I’ve experienced this one, I’m generally an up-against-the-word-limits-can-I-have-a-few-thousand-more-please-gov’ner kind of writer. I spend half my structural redrafts trying to cut things out of my manuscripts, so should a story come in several thousand words under my approach I’d probably sing hallelujahs and weep with goddamn joy. Writing shorter is one of my goals, not a problem. Assuming for the sake of argument (and blog post) that I did suddenly run into such a problem – say for whatever unlikely reason an editor really needed a 10k gap in an anthology filled and my pinch-hitting story only came in at

PeterMBall 01/10/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

Crank up the organ grinder and gather around the popcorn, ’cause we’re almost at the end of the dancing monkey series. For our second-last entry, John Farrell asked: I have awful problems constructing a plot. How do you do that? Apparently you folks don’t want to go with the easy questions, huh? This is not a topic where I’m known to be *concise*, so I’m going to set myself a word-budget on this one and send you off into the wide world with some reading homework, ’cause really, plot is big. Here we go: EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS 1. PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST – FIGHT! Most plots hang off a pretty simple dynamic designed drive a story forward. It goes something like this: your protagonist wants something really badly; your antagonist denies your protagonist the thing they really want; delicious, awesome conflict ensues. Take Lord of the Rings as an example – Frodo wants to live

PeterMBall 28/09/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Gaming is not Writing

Once again, I dance like a monkey for your amusement. This time around my friend Al asked via facebook: Why should writers never write RPG campaigns as stories, why on earth did you do just that, why isn’t it finished yet? Okay, we’re going to kick this one off with a list o’ reasons, some of which people are likely to disagree with. 1) EDITORS DON’T LIKE IT Let’s kick this off with the obvious – the best reason to avoid writing up RPG campaigns as stories is the fact that places that give you money for writing aren’t a big fan of things that are based on RPG campaigns. This warning from Strange Horizon’s List of Stories They See Too Often isn’t exactly uncommon, where they pretty much tell you to avoid anything where: Story is based in whole or part on a D&D game or world. a.       A party of D&D characters (usually including a fighter, a magic-user, and a

PeterMBall 26/09/2012
Works in Progress

I Do Believe in Syntax

And lo, it is Monday, and we continue the dancing monkey series wherein people ask me questions and I blog long, rambling answers in response. Once more into the breach and all that. Today, Peter Kerby offered up the following: Just to stir the pot; English is living language and all living things evolve, so how much licence should be tolerated when it comes to grammar and spelling, or does it depend on the intended audience. Verily, I am the wrong person to ask this sort of question, ’cause my response is invariably something along the lines of “so long as you can be understood, rock the fucking Kasbah, lolz, peace out, peeps.” Except, you know, not in so many words, and potentially in ways that make me sound less like an idiot and more like I have some understanding of what da kidz are speaking like with their crazy slang these days. I mean, hipsters, man, who gets them? (Hipsters

PeterMBall 24/09/2012
Journal

5 Things I Know About Squid

1. Squid are cephalopods of the order Teuthida, which comprises around 300 species. Like all other cephalopods, squid have a distinct head, bilateral symmetry, a mantle, and arms. Squid, like cuttlefish, have eight arms arranged in pairs and two, usually longer, tentacles. Squid are strong swimmers and certain species can ‘fly’ for short distances out of the water. Admittedly, I didn’t know this, but in the age of the internet, it’s remarkably easy to find this stuff out. 2. If you haven’t read Kraken, in which a giant squid is stolen and the end of the world begins, you really should. It currently wages war with The City and the City as my favourite China Meiville novel. 3. I tried cooking with squid once. It didn’t go well. 4. “In her old firm they called her The Squid.” “The Squid?” “The only thing that can kill a shark.” Parker Posey’s run on Boston Legal was far too short. Although that can

PeterMBall 20/08/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

A Few More Ideas About Ideas

You know what’s handy when you pre-write a bunch of blog posts and set them to post while you’re away? Actually remembering to set them to post. Seems I forgot to hit the all-important Publish button in my rush to get ready for the Adelaide trip last week, which means we’re starting the dancing monkey series a little later than expected. If there’s a topic you’d like to throw into the mix, you can still do so by pitching it here.  A Few More Ideas About Ideas A few years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the often-maligned question of where do your ideas come from. I wrote it ’cause I didn’t like the way most writers behaved when they were asked that question, and ’cause I kind of like understanding my process. Plus, as a guy whose occasionally asked to teach people how to write, it’s a useful thing to be able to talk about process

PeterMBall 15/08/2012
Journal

Fear my Sartorial Splendor!

The dreaded paperbaghat is one of my many bad habits; I seriously end up wearing the damn things for a half-hour every time I leave one laying around the house, largely because it’s the only way I remember to throw them out. It’s one of those things that you can do when you live alone. Or that you end up doing when you live alone. I’m not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg in this situation. In any case, most days I remember to take the dreaded paperbaghat off and depositing it in the bin *before* I answer the door. Unlike, say, today when I forget I was wearing the dreaded paperbaghat and answered the door to chat with the nice missionary types who were trying to convince me that I should fear the forthcoming apocalypse or something. -facepalm- Stupid paperbaghat.

PeterMBall 15/08/2010
Works in Progress

Juvenalia Week

After realising that the last few years have been rather good to him on the writing front, Jason Fischer has decided to take a quick tour through the lands of the writer he used to be and declared this Juvenalia Week. And since he’s under the assumption that the embarrassing mistakes of yesteryear are something all writers share, he’s encouraging others to join him in his public display of work from our misbegotten pasts. I’m nothing if not a joiner, but seeing as I can’t find my old book of short stories from when I was actually a jouvenile I set the way-back machine to the file on my computer marked “Poetry, 1998” and grabbed one of the hundreds at random. I wrote a lot of poetry over ’98 and ’99 – I’d decided that I’d write a poem a day while I worked on my honors thesis in place and white-space poetics – but this one seems to hit all

PeterMBall 14/10/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

TV Tropes (Not the Website)

I’m feeling a little out of sorts today, which means it’s time for another dancing monkey post. This time courtesy of deepfishy (aka JJ Irwin) over on LJ: This may veer too close to writing, but: tropes you’re drawn to in tv shows or films. (For instance, for myself I get a lot of joy out of variations on and subversions of the Defective or Exotic Detective – Life, Psych, Nero Wolfe, The Dresden Files, Foyle’s War…) Originally I thought I was going to have trouble answering this – my inclination towards SF aside, there doesn’t always seem to be a lot of continuity to the types of shows I find myself watching. Naturally I went to TV Tropes and plugged in a few of my favourite shows to check this and quickly discovered it wasn’t the case. As such: I’m probably overly-drawn to the Bunny Ears Lawyer trope, but primarily in TV shows that stack their decks pretty heavily

PeterMBall 12/05/2009
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

I predict that Jason is the sole person who’ll take me up on this, but-

I sat down this morning and thought “Right, post something that has nothing to do with writing, you’re about due.” But you know what? I’m being a little writing obsessive this week. Can’t be helped; I’m in the midst of the first prolonged stretch of writing I’ve had in a long while and I’m still far to excited about that to think of something else to talk about on my own. So consider me a dancing monkey waiting for someone to crank the hurdy-gurdy (aka give me a topic and I’ll attempt to say something meaningful for your amusement. Otherwise I predict the remainder of the week will consist of me showing up with some variation of “look, I’m writing stuff, and it’s an awesome feeling” as my theme…)

PeterMBall 22/04/2009

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