PeterMBall.com

1) There’s is nothing quite so pleasant as heading out to one of your favorite bookstores on a rainy night and having someone read to you, but it’s doubly awesome when the topic du-jour is the Art of the Reading. The irony is that this totally wasn’t my idea – my sister e-mailed a few days back and asked if I’d be interested, and I was all “sick now, whatever, yeah? Put me down as a yes and leave me alone.” And so I was put down for a yes and Tuesday night rolled around and after I remembered I needed to be somewhere at somewhen there was much confused flailing and wondering what the hell I’d gotten into and then…then…then there was a pleasant night of awesomeness. And Nando’s chicken for afters, ’cause nothing says “pleasant night of literary discussion” like following things up with fast food.

2) I’m finally starting to find my routine again after nearly two weeks of being knocked about by allergies and the flu. The Spokesbear is pleased, although that may have more to do with the fact that my first resposne to bad news ceases to be curling up in ball and whimpering pitiously. The Spokebear has no pity.

3) Due to the pharmaceutical-induced cold-and-flu insomnia I happened to be up late enough to see episodes of Brad Garrett’s dire post-Everybody-Loves-Raymond sitcom, ‘Til Death. And it’s truly dire, not least of which because it’s falling back on the increasingly familiar trope of portraying married men as perpetual adolescents who need to be mothered by their wives. This shit makes me mad. Throwing stuff at the TV mad angry, actually. There is a rant brewing in the back of my brain about the need for male-oriented narratives that find a response to the rise of feminism beyond “act like children”, but ranting with lingering flu-brain is not the best idea.

4) Every time I use du jour in a blog post, I keep thinking about this scene from Josie in the Pussycats and giggling. If you haven’t seen the Josie and the Pussycat’s movie, you really should. It’s awesome. And Du Jour means crash positions!

So I followed my week of almost dying of cat allergies with a week of being mildly inconvenienced by a cold, which would have been fine were it not one of those strains of the common cold that makes your eyes blurry and sore every time you looked at a computer screen. Not being able to look at a computer screen is a fairly dire state of affairs in my world, especially when electronic proofs start appearing (one can type with one’s eyes closed, after all, but one cannot correct what one cannot read).

On the plus side, I was apparently shortlisted for some Ditmar awards while I was away, which is kind of cool. Plus there’s a seemingly endless parade of friends on the short-list as well, which is always a good thing.
________________________________________________
Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 14/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

My friend Jason Fischer has expressed his consternation regarding author bios that mention cats in the past, so I feel obligated to mention this in the interests of scientific research:

People love them some cats. 

I mean, seriously, the spike in visitors once I started blogging about the cat-sitting scares me a little (and that was *before* Angela linked to them). I find myself thinking of the motivational poster that went up on John Scalzi’s site a few days after he taped bacon to his cat.

People love cat-related stories, Mister Fischer. They like knowing the cats exist and that you have them. Give it up, mate. The Cats win.
________________________________________
Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 3
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 12/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

I talked to the inimitable Ben Francisco over the weekend and was immediately reminded of the fact that this doesn’t happen often enough. There is something dreadfully wretched about having people I enjoy talking too spread across the globe, accessible only via chat programs that require one of us to be awake at an ungodly hour. Not that it would change if he were local, because I am inherently lazy and am horrible at catching up with people, but there it is. Fortunately the gist of the conversation was largely worldcon is coming, yay, which means there will be a whole bunch of people I enjoy talking too in the same place at the same time. Including Ben. Which will be awesome.

About ten minutes after this conversation I read the press release informing the world that Gen Con Australia is cancelled in 2010. Needless to say, this cast a pallor over the rest of the weekend. I tried to write posts about this a few times, but there’s a complex knot of baggage tagged to GCOz in my head due to the fact that I worked for them leading into their first show in 2008 (and then broke my vow of never again to run the seminar program last year). During the months prior to a show it’s name was often a by-word for greif and frustration, but the Conventions themselves…man, they were good fun to be at.  Lots of people worth talking too, lots of guests being gracious with their time and experience, and presumably a lot of games going on (I wouldn’t know; I don’t think I ever got the chance to game at Gen Con Oz).

Through a variety of circumstances* I wasn’t involved in organising anything related to Gen Con Oz this year, although I’d planned on volunteering to work the show once I knew for sure I’d be around during the Convention weekend. I was looking forward to catching up with people, particular the core group of volunteers and the regular guests. I was looking forward to maybe playing a game or two, especially if the Indie Games on Demand guys were around this year**, and I’m disappointed I want get the chance to do so.

I suspect I’ll be even more disappointed if there’s no Gen Con Oz in 2011.

*Largely known as “I have a novella getting released in September and house-guests coming prior to Worldcon”.
** Should the show never run again, I can safely say never partaking of the Indie Games on Demand experience will be my biggest dissapointment. These guys were a joy to organise in amid the trials of setting up the 2008 schedule, and I was really happy to see them back in 2009. Plus I dig Indie Games – half the joy of hitting gaming Cons is to experience new systems.

Bugger who I write like*, when presented with a tool of complex literary analysis such as this I can think of only one sensible thing to do with it. And now I give the you the results of my most important and detailed analysis:

When you plug in the lyrics to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back, you get:

I write like
J. D. Salinger

I Write Likeby Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

And this amuses me no end. Poor Holden Caulfield – if only he’d learned to dial 1-900-mix-a-lot, his life could have been very different**.

So can we all go back to the infinately more interesting 30 Days of Television meme now?

* I tried Horn, got “You write like Jane Austen”, then figured we were done.
** Of course, on further reflection, it makes perfect sense. No-one understands poor Holden and who understands those rap guys anyway?

How was yours?

This post is dedicated to my parents, who immediately asked whether they were going to see such a less than flattering portrait go up on the blog.

Facebook recently announced another round of changes to its privacy policy that’s got some folks concerned. The short version, for those who prefer not to follow links, goes something like this: a group of pre-approved third party applications will be given permission to automatically siphon your data should you or one of your facebook friends visit it. This basically means you may click on a link and discover a website that already knows who you are (plus your date of birth, location, sexual preference and political allegiances, should you have put such things in your profile and left them accessible to others). To be fair to facebook, you don’t have to be involved with this, but the default settings will make it possible unless you specifically go and set your profile to opt out of the option.

I first joined facebook for work reason when I was working for Gen Con Australia in 2007. I avoided it for as long as possible, because even back then I was wary of the seductive qualities the social-networking gloss over what essentially seemed to be a massive data-sink collecting personal information about the whole damn world. I stuck around after I stopped working for Gen Con Oz because the social-networking gloss does have its good points, but I was always pretty wary about what I agreed to and what it I didn’t. Despite all this, the proposed changes don’t really bother me that much. The facebook privacy policy has always been a worrying document full of potential abuses, but one of the realities of living in a computer-mediated world is giving up the idea of a private self and hoping for the best. I may take steps to mitigate exactly how much I give away, albeit fairly lazy and probably ineffective ones given my relatively lax understanding of privacy law on an internation scale, but I’m also somewhat at ease with the basic principle of exposure that’s at work in the internet in general and social networking sites in particular.

Not happy about, but at ease. Presumably I’ll hit a point where I’m not, eventually. I suspect there will probably be even a bunch of stories written while I sort out my feelings on it, but I’ll deal with that when I come to it. Right now, the thing that really interests me about the change in policy is actually the way it tracks towards a shift towards opting out as the default setting for our interaction with the world. It’s the same language that’s at work in things like the Google Books Settlement where authors were forced to make choices about not letting someone use their copyrighted work rather than giving someone permission to do so (which is, basically, an inversion of the system we’ve been using since the Berne Convention, near as I can tell). I suspect it’s something that’s going to happen more and more often in the next couple of years, this aimless agreeing to things because we aren’t aware that we need to say otherwise, especially since there’s whole generations of people who are used to skimming the privacy policies and conditions of use that pop up (although, presumably, we’ll hit a point where you’re assumed to have agreed to those too).

The future appears to be in choosing not to do something, rather than choosing to do it.

Edit: Until then, may I suggest Dave Graney’s Rock and Roll is Where I Hide as a tonic to the inevitable exestential crisis that occurs when one starts thinking too hard about the perils of having no privacy.

1) Whip It

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog post-reviewy thing about Whip It for about two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen. Not because I think it’s a bad film – it’s utterly charming in its ability to recognise that something can be simultaneously camp as hell and the most important thing in the whole damn world – but because it fits into the same space as contemporary art where I find my critical vocabulary isn’t really up to the task of expressing what I’m thinking about after seeing the film.

 My short, haphazard take on the film goes something like this: it’s endearing. Specifically, the kind of awkward-coming-of-age endearing you find in Taylor Swift film-clip, only Whip Itcome without the puritanical undercurrent that usually causes me to froth at the mouth when encountering Swift’s oeuvre (and thus, Whip It comes closer to having actual substance). The film actually reminds me, very strongly, of Bring It On (another film that didn’t seem like something I’d like that somehow turned out to be highly entertaining) and I kinda wish it existed in a world where Bring It On didn’t because there’s far to many parallels there. The sound-track is phenomenal in its eclecticism, but gets bonus points for including both the Ramones and Yens Leckman.  The most irritating thing about the film is Drew Barrymore’s characters, but only because it’s exactly the same character she played in the Charlie’s Angel’s films with a tendency to act stoned on top. Plus it has Ari Graynor in a minor role (Graynor seems to have become the new incarnation of the cinematic past-time once dubbed “Breckin-Meyer-Spotting”)

It’s also a goddamn spectacular film to watch from a writing point of view because there’s not a damn subplot in the whole thing that doesn’t get a resolution in the end. Admittedly this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but there’s something powerful about knowing that if a film introduces conflict it will provide resolution to it, even if said conflict is just a five-second scene between the protagonist and a minor character in the opening minutes of the story. While Whip It telegraphs a lot of punches on the macro-level (I doubt anyone can’t pick the father’s final scene in the film a full hour before it happens), it gets a pass on this because the resolution of the really minor conflicts are also dragged back into the main plot and made meaningful.  It’s a neat trick, and one I’m gleefully lifting given that I’m in the midst of writing the second draft of Black Candy and dealing with a dozen or so minor characters who walk onstage and do very little after their first appearance.

Seriously, though, you can probably ignore all that and go with this instead: my friend Chris and I are the kind of snarky, mid-to-late-thirties blokes who are continiously dissapointed by films and prone to venting our dissapointment in Waldorf-and-Statler type critiques. As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to go and see film you think you’ll like when either of us are around.

Both of us hit the end of Whip It and said “Yeah, I need to own a copy of this.”

 2) Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity

 So I set myself the goal or writing 14,000 words words last week. I didn’t succeed. In fact, I struck a point significantly below success:

On the plus side, it means I’ve hit the minimum accepted levels of productivity for seven straight days now (aka if Peter doesn’t write a thousand words a day he ceases to feel like a human being and makes life miserable for everyone) and actually started to live like a real human being again. There are even parts of my house that are clean, and food that isn’t ordered from the Domino’s website.

That largely means the weekly goal achieved what it needed to achieve, right in time for the rewrites of Cold Cases to land in my inbox.

Possibly a dangerous question to ask, given that I am the energizer bunny of Avatar-hate, but the movie came up at one of the regular games last week and everyone else at the table seemed to like the film (except the one person yet to see it, who isn’t likely too) and I realised that where I see stunted story that doesn’t do anything after the set-up* a bunch of other folks are seeing unmitigated awesome. 

And I continue to not get it, just as I never got the appeal of the Transformers film and the Matrix and a bunch of other things, and while I’m normally okay with that given that everyone reads a film differently it’s starting to bug me a little this time around. I find myself wondering whether the expectations of films have shifted so far into the boundary of spectacle that story ceases to be important, or if there’s been some kind of fundamental shift in the genre of film-making that I just haven’t figured out yet.

So I turn the question over to people who did like the film: what’s the appeal?

*Incidentally, there’s an interesting article on the Avatar-that-might-have-been if it’d followed the original treatment of the film. It seems to answer every major problem I have with Avatar and reads like a film I would have been gushing over if it’d actually made it to the screen (hell, if even a fragment of it made it to the screen *besides* the pretty FX)

It’s been a rough week thus far (yes, all two days of it) and I’m in a covety kind of mood. I can’t help it, honest. Coveting things is one of those survival tactics that kick in when I’m otherwise unsure of what’s going on in the foreseeable future. And I figured I’d share some of the coveting. A tiny big of it, anyway. It will distract me until my jelly is ready to come out of the fridge and do it’s comfort-foody magic.

And so, in approximate order, the six things about America* that I tend to covet:

1) Home-delivered Chinese food that comes in neat folded cardboard boxes.

Oh little paper boxes full of wontons, cashew and noodle, how I dearly covet thee. In the fifteen years I’ve actually been eating Chinese food (I started late in life, after some bad experiences in my childhood) I have always been disappointed by the plastic containers in which Chinese take-away is served.

To say nothing of my disappointment upon discovering so few Chinese restaurants will deliver in my homeland; Pizza, I can order in, and a good Indian curry if I pick the right suburb. Thai food, maybe, should I be very lucky; heck, in recent months I’ve even had the option of home-delivered schnitzel, though the cost of delivery is prohibitive (and unlikely to be taken up on, were it not for the novelty of the experience). Home delivered Chinese food? Never seen it. And even if I had, there would plastic containers and the disappointed wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I have heard, of late, that the folded boxes are on their way out, a conceit retained in movies and TV shows because they’re far more aesthetically pleasing than plastic tubs. If this is true, I shall be a sad panda. Should I ever actually make it over to America to visit the various friends I don’t get to see often enough, you can bet that my default response to the question of “what do you want for dinner” will inevitably be “Chinese” in the hopes of eating from said cartons. And this is in spite of the fact that Chinese food and my digestive tract rarely get along.

2) Constitutionally protected right to free speech.

Because say what you will about the bits of your constitution and its many amendments that seem outright crazy (yes, constitutional right to bear arms folks, I’m looking at you), this one is just plain cool. That you have folks who recognise how awesome it is to have this and fight to keep it from getting stomped into the mud is likewise very cool.

Those of us stuck in Australia don’t actually have this right, though it’s a fact that catches most people by surprise. It would depress me less if we used it to silence the vocal-but-utterly-moronic segments of our populace, but unfortunately we tend to celebrate them and offering them a spot on Dancing with the Stars.

3) Doctor Pepper

They tried to launch it in Australia, they really did, but many of my countrymen just didn’t seem the glory in a fizzy drink that tasted, primarily, like cough syrup. I suspect it’s because they never got around to putting bourbon in it, but that’s just me.

I would also be covetous of the fact that you have Jolt, but there are enough hardcore geeks in Australia to ensure you can usually find it lingering in the back of some non-franchised twenty-four hour convenience store somewhere. Six weeks ago I would have coveted your Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, but it appears there’s now a supplier importing them to my local store, and that fucking rocks.

I don’t, however, covet your tendency to use high-fructose corn syrup in such drinks. That shit is just wrong. And it makes your cola taste funny.

4) Stamps

Not for any aesthetic or monetary value, just for practical reasons. I need to send self-addressed stamped envelopes to America pretty regularly, so coveting stamps is just a business decision and will remain so until the SF magazine industry is run entirely via internet submissions.

This would be higher on the list, but I’m fortunate enough to be well-stocked in American postage for the moment. I’m just, you know, coveting on the principle that I’ll need them eventually.

5) Southern Gothic…

…because kudzu, ghosts, vampires, and melodrama warm my heart. And because Australian Gothic involves too much red dust, dry heat, and empty landscapes to be much fun. And because kudzu is a fun word to say out loud.

6) Population Density

Yes, I know this isn’t universal, but you guys have a lot of people. Even your small cities are big enough to dwarf most of the urban areas in Australia. I’m sure it comes with its own problems, but with population density comes interesting pockets of subculture and more people who are likely to be interested in whatever weird-ass thing you’re interested.

As a guy who tends to like weird-ass things and frequently finds himself with limited options for talking about them locally, population density is one of those traits that looks particularly promising.

*disregarding the various awesome American peeps who’d I’d gladly steal from you, the fact that America tends to be the  biggest market for English language fiction in the world, and the fact that it’s the hub for SF industry. ‘Cause those go without saying.