Laura Goodin – Peter M. Ball

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

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

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something). I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met

PeterMBall 07/12/2011

Journal

Dancing Monkey Post 2: Memories of Brisbane’s Ferry System

The Dancing Monkey challenge from lauragoodin: “write a blog post about being on a Brisbane ferry. At night. And it’s raining. And you’ve spent your last money on the fare.” I suspect it’s not what Laura intended, but every time I read that request all it translates into is “please tell me what it was like being twenty-three.” It’s all the qualifiers to the original request that do it – when I was twenty-three I’d just finished my honours year in which I wrote a lot of poetry, just moved to Brisbane for the first time, and just started my PhD. Being at the tail-end of my love-affair with goth as a movement, I was prone to attaching all sorts of significance to thing that happened in moments of poverty, rain and night. Lets not make this *all* about nostalgia though. Instead lets talk about exactly how lucky you are if you live in a city with a decent public

PeterMBall 30/04/2009

Journal

For the record: peanut butter soup is awesome.

2013 Update: I Need Your Help If you’re reading this in your RSS feed, please let me know in the comments. It’d also be really helpful if you could let me know which RSS reader you’re using and/or which RSS for the site you’re following – it seems my attempts to spring-clean some old posts have resulted in said posts going out as if they’re new, and I’m trying to rectify the problem. Also, for the record, Laura Goodin’s Peanut Butter Soup Recipe is still awesome five years on, and she posted it on her blog a few years back. I figured that, if anything, was sufficient reason to use an edit this post as a means of doing this test. Thanks in advance, folks, and I now return you to the thoughts of Peter M. Ball from 2008… Yesterday I thought I was meant to be at a QWC workshop, only to discover that I had the dates mixed

PeterMBall 10/12/2008

Tag: Laura Goodin

I Do Believe in Syntax

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

Dancing Monkey Post 2: Memories of Brisbane’s Ferry System

For the record: peanut butter soup is awesome.

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