Tag: Food
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Knock Loud, Kranksy Sausages, and an offer of Free Stories

For the last few months of 2011, I developed a Friday routine: finish work, walk across the Victoria Bridge, and stop for dinner at the street vendors set up at the top of the Queen Street Mall. There were only a handful of options available, but they were pretty damn good options: a place offering German sausages with sauerkraut; a place that did a mighty fine steamed BBQ pork bun; a couple who produced some of the weirdest and tastiest cinnamon donuts I’ve ever tasted (and, for bonus points, the damn things were the size of my head). Then Christmas happened, and New Years, and there were a few weeks where I didn’t go to work, and by the time all that had passed there weren’t any food vendors at the top of Queen Street Mall on a Friday evening and I started picking up cheap take-out before doing some Friday Night Shopping. Which isn’t a bad plan, by any means, but it’s

PeterMBall 10/02/2012
Works in Progress

Once we give toasters a modicum of AI, the whole damn world is doomed

If you haven’t read Kelly Link’s Swans before, you can do so over at Fantasy Magazine today. I really recommend it, and I’m totally okay with you going over and reading it now. I mean, I’m not going anywhere, and I’m happy to wait. # Tried cooking chili tonight. Ordinarily not a thing that’s noteworthy, but so far I’ve managed to burn the bottom of the saucepan and forget to put on the rice and leave off half the optional ingredients that I usually put into a bowl of chili in order to transform it into the kind of chili I enjoy eating. Tried to work at the day-job today. Again, not ordinarily noteworthy, but after spending three hours watching tech support try to figure out why my computer wasn’t actually interested in doing things necessary to my job – on my computer, or any others in the office, for the work server obstinately believed I shouldn’t be there – it

PeterMBall 26/07/2011
Journal

Walking and Book Buying and Peanut Butter & Sweet Potato Soup

Yesterday I caught a train out to West End, walked to my friendly local independent bookstore, unexpected caught up with Trent Jamieson while he was working there, bought a copy of the new Michael Cunningham novel alongside a few other books (Hell’s Angels, A Fairwell to Arms), walked from West End to Anzac Square Arcade in Brisbane city, bought more books from Pulp Fiction – my favourite bookstore in the world, bar none – and then caught a train home whereupon I collapsed on the couch and watched old episodes of NCIS until I fell asleep. And really, that was yesterday, and we call it a win. Exercise and books are an unbeatable combination. ‘Course today I’ll be dead on my feet at the dayjobs, forcing myself to stay awake, but these are small problems and entirely worth it. # My friend Laura Goodin is an American ex-pat living out in the Australian wilderness (well, Woolongong), writing stories and plays and, if I

PeterMBall 26/05/2011
News & Upcoming Events

Un-Moroccan Chicken and Un Lun Dun

It’s Monday morning here, but due to the vagaries of international timezones I suspect there will not be much of Monday left by the time Say Zucchini, and Mean It arrives in my in-box. Such are the drawbacks of living on the other side of the world, I suspect. Tonight I shall make the most un-Moroccan Moroccan chicken imaginable, given that it will consist primarily of pumpkin soup with chickpeas and bits of chicken in it, spread over a layer of couscous. The couscous, by and large, is probably going to be the best bit. Possibly also the only bit that qualifies as Moroccan. It will, at least, be healthy un-Moroccan chicken, if the Australian Heart Foundation website is to be believed, and that’s probably a good thing after the week of pizza that occurred when I was last chasing a deadline. # There’s a rather nice review of both Horn and Bleed over on the Living in SIN blog,

PeterMBall 16/05/2011
Works in Progress

Billboards, Peaches, & WIP Excerpts

This morning I once again started the day with music and dancing, although I substituted PJ Harvey for Peaches The Teaches of Peaches album, which is a slightly different mood to start the day with and one that’s much more likely to irritate your neighbors. Yesterday I had a phone call from my father which started along the lines of “yes, well, I can see how PJ Harvey would wake you up in the morning.” Apparently he googles bands when I mention them on my blog, just to get some idea of what I’m listening too. So, for my dad and anyone else following my music taste online, I’m going to recommend *not* googling Peaches while at work. I mean, you can if you want, but I’m taking no responsibility when you find yourself singing Fuck the Pain Away beneath your breath while other people are in earshot. Should you not wish to take my warning, I recommend Youtube. The clip

PeterMBall 12/05/2011
Works in Progress

Rain & Writing & Too Much Pizza, Man

It’s been raining in Brisbane for the last few days, but it appears that the rain has finally given up and sunlight is starting to peek through again. This makes me rather melancholy; I was rather enjoying the rain and the cold snap and watching the bands of grey cloud overhead while taking my afternoon stroll around the block. The best part about the rain has been walking the path alongside our local drainage ditch, where the grass is the kind of green I’d forgotten grass could be and the drainage ditch actually does an impressive job of seeming like a stream. # So I wrote a few things last night. Mostly the fifth installment of the Flotsam series, which was overdue and then overdue again on the date I said I’d have it sent through after emailing the editor and letting her know it’d be overdue. Afterwards I did a couple of hundred words on some new things. Flotsam

PeterMBall 10/05/2011
Journal

418

This is my four hundred and eighteenth post to this blog, which I guess means we’re on the downhill slope towards five hundred blog entries (whereupon I probably turn into a pumpkin). The last few days have settled into a comfortable kind of routine – I get home from the dayjob, I don’t turn on the internet, I read a book until five o’clock or so, then I eat dinner and force myself to write 1000 words before I go to sleep. My brain’s resisting the latter – last night I wrote the first five hundred words with ease, then scrambled for the last four hundred or so for hours before admitting defeat and collapsing into bed. Tonight there is teaching, which means I’ll have to forgo the reading, and the 1000 words will be an even bigger challenge. It needs to be done, because at this point 1000 words a day is pretty much the line between me and

PeterMBall 24/03/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mmm, BBQ

S0 yesterday was pretty good day. There was a delayed birthday dinner with the family, whereupon we set out for The Smoke in New Farm and ate our own bodyweight in American-style BBQ, then we set out to see Wil Anderson at the Brisbane Comedy Festival, and then because I was full of food and happy I stayed up to listen to the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast instead of going to sleep. Somewhere in there the home internet was fixed, so I rejoined the online world, and I wrote some things. About 1 o’clock I went to bed and actually slept for five hours, which is something I rarely do since starting the dayjob and discovered that being employed is actually far more stressful and soul-destroying than being unemployed (who knew?). So yesterday was a pretty good day, against all expectations, and tonight I make chili in the hopes that it’ll redeem today in much the same way. # The

PeterMBall 23/03/2011
Journal

This probably wont be my new author photo

Somehow people neglected to mention that I was having a truly dire bad hair day yesterday. I managed to ignore it myself, right up until I got home from tutorials, caught sight of my reflection, and thought “hmmm, that’s not a look I want to continue with, is it?” For a while now I’ve been aware that I’m hitting the decision point where I either shave my head again, or settle in for the process of growing my hair out. These are, by and large, the only real options with my hair – genetics have essentially eliminated all other possibilities due to a weird series of cowlicks and a tendency towards ringlets. I used to think it came from my mother’s side of the family, largely because my dad has maintained the same hairstyle since I was, like, four, but after his brief experimentation with forgoing the regular haircut earlier this year I learned that it may well have been the

PeterMBall 11/03/2011
Journal

Let There Be Cake

Last night I felt like cake, so I climbed into the car and did up my seat-belt and drove out to the store to acquire cake. Then I proceeded to curl up on the couch with a coffee and a fan and the first season of Gilmore Girls on the DVD player. I got to remember all sorts of things about the series I’d forgotten: the stilted way they initially delivered the dialogue, back before they got used to its rhythms; a really young Jared Padalecki in his pre-Supernatural incarnation, who is tall and not quite so filled out and in possession of the kind of haircut I look at and think “yes, children, the nineties really do deserve to be mocked like the eighties and the sixties for its fashion choices”; the little things that get retconned out, like Mrs Kim having a Mr Kim whose ostensibly around, even if he’s never seen, and Kirk showing up as someone who isn’t Kirk, and

PeterMBall 18/02/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Lady of Situations and Moby Dick

I’m always a bit ish-ish about recommending books to people. Giving books to people is fine – there are few things I enjoy more than randomly giving friends books they might enjoy – but asking people to trust my taste and spend their hard-earned money on something is…ish-ish. This doesn’t mean I don’t do it. And after slinging stones in their direction last month about some writer’s guidelines I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few of  Ticonderoga Publications publications, especially since they’re running a sale that takes  10% off pre-orders and 20% off direct orders of their existing fiction until the February. The former, for instance, would include Bluegrass Symphony by L.L. Hannett in both Hardcover and Softcover, while the latter would include Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories, and ordering work from either of these fine writers would be a worthwhile use of your hard-earned discretionary cash. I’d also point out that aspiring writers

PeterMBall 17/02/2011
Works in Progress

Chaos, Chili-Carrot Cake, & The Twelve Day Deathmarch

On Friday I sat in the middle of messy apartment, contemplating the messy state of affairs, thinking a series of messy thoughts. And after a while I thought, well, enough of that then, it’s kind of a drag, and instituted a plan to cut through the chaos and get stuff done. I spent Saturday and today cleaning rooms, ordering bookshelves, and taking care of long-neglected tasks. Not enough that I’ve instituted order across the flat, but enough to give me a foothold. That was phase one. Phase two requires me to finish the rewrites on Cold Cases*. I have twelve days. That’s a chapter’s worth of rewrites per day, about two-and-half to three thousand words. If I succeed, I will allow myself to have a guilt-free weekend of not-writing in May**. I’ve prepared for this task by making a weeks worth of meals in advance, stocking up on coffee, and dancing around the house to Goldfrapp***. To aid me in

PeterMBall 18/04/2010

Book Information?

Please send us an email at support@laautor.tld

Need Help?

Please call us at +6221.1000.1212

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

About Laautor
Support
Newsletter

Signup our newsletter to get update information, promotions and insight.

Copyright © 2021 Laautor, All rights reserved. Powered by MoxCreative.
Facebook Twitter Youtube