peeps doing cool stuff – Peter M. Ball

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Peeps Doing Cool Stuff: February 2014 Edition

Somewhere along the line, I got out of the habit of posting about peeps releasing cool stuff into the world. I’m not sure why, ’cause I got some pretty awesome peeps and they’re doing some very cool stuff, but my blogging habits are arbitrary these days despite my best intentions. With that in mind, lets rectify this oversight, and allow me to recommend the following: Review of Australian Fiction, Volume Nine, Issue Three The concept behind the RAF is actually pretty cool – they grab an established writer, get them to pick an up-and-comer to work with, then produce an issue that features (generally) novella or novelette length work that would be hard to sell elsewhere. This issue features the always impeccable prose of Angela Slatter as the established author, paired with emerging Brisbane fantasist Linda Brucesmith. The upside of Angela publishing here is that I now know that RAF has finally abandoned the god-awful Book.ish ebook platform it used

PeterMBall 12/02/2014

Journal

So it appears this is one of those weeks where I have very little worth saying, which naturally results in spending less time online saying things. Instead I have been marking student assignments for the UQ dayjob, which is sadly reaching its end after tonight’s class and tomorrow’s class are done with, leaving me with nothing but the marking on the student’s final assignments. I suspect I will continue to be quiet for the next week or two for marking eats time like no-ones business (both the actual activity of marking and the procrastination as you try to avoid it). # On the topic of things that are not marking-related, I recommend checking out the Conquilt currently being auctioned as a fundraiser for the Continuum SF Convention in Melbourne. I’m not sure I can really explain the Conquilt in sufficient detail to capture it’s awesomeness, since descriptions largely come down to “it’s a quilt made up of fabric signed by writers

PeterMBall 02/06/2011

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

Journal

Posts of a Random Sleep-Zombie

Very random attack of insomnia last night, especially since there wasn’t any of the usual triggers that set off my sleeplessness. In the old days I used to welcome such things, since I could just wander off and do other things and sleep in the day afterwards, but I am now a working man with a dayjob that starts in the wee hours, and insomnia has become a thing that I no longer care fore. Things I should post about today, and would do so in more detail were I not yawning: – Jason Fischer’s short story collection, Everything is a Graveyard, scheduled for release by Ticonderoga Publications in October 2013. The collection’s slated to revolve around Jason’s post-apocalyptic and zombie-themed work, which is the kind of news that makes me extremely happy, if only because it’d be damn handy to have all those stories in the one place. – The May issue of the Edge of Propinquity is up,

PeterMBall 17/05/2011

Journal

‘Tis a busy type of day today, so I’m going to just ramble on about things for the breif period I’ll be home between the first dayjob and the second. Plus there are several workmen helpfully digging up the road out the front of my house, ostensibly to lay down something or other involving pipes large enough to crawl through, which inevitably means my power or my internet or my phone line will go out at some point in the very near future. # On the list of conversations I never expected to have with my father, the one that starts with do you have any Warhammer 40k novels I could borrow? is pretty damn high on the list. I also never expected the answer to be yes, but you can’t borrow them right now, but you can have the short story anthologies if you like. Yet, somehow, we had that conversation yesterday, and my copies of Tales of the Heresy and

PeterMBall 10/03/2011

Works in Progress

Shadows

So there’s a shortlist for the 2010 Australian Shadows horror awards available online, which includes Bleed in the Long Fiction category alongside such brilliant works as Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories and Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine and a handful of books I haven’t yet come across but I’m sure are excellent ’cause, really, once you start with Madigan Mine and The Girl with No Hands I’m inclined to just trust the judges tastes – those books are freakin’ great. So it’s a happy sort of day, even if it feels a bit odd to be on the short list because Bleed isn’t really a horror story. The complete short-list looks something like this, and it’s full of names that I’m very happy to see on short-lists. Congratulations to all who made it. LONG FICTION Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott (Picador Australia) The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga Publications) Guardian of the Dead by

PeterMBall 25/02/2011

Journal

Storms & Minotaurs & OMG, Sleep

On the evening of my dad’s sixtieth birthday we were all sitting on the thirteenth floor balcony while a storm rolled in. If we were in a movie the rapidly moving sheet of clouds would have been the special effect that signified the end of the world is nigh, so we all unearthed our mobile phones and digital cameras to take photographs. About fifteen minutes before I took the shaky, blurred mobile photo featured in this post the view from the thirteenth floor was all clear skies and blue ocean, and it was pretty enough that even my jaded-towards-beaches approach to life acknowledged that it was a pretty good place to celebrate someone turning sixty. I gave my dad a book – the Collected Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marques, ’cause everyone should read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings – and a CD/DVD of Leonard Cohen’s 2009 tour ’cause we were meant to go to Cohen’s show last year,

PeterMBall 23/02/2011

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

Journal

Ditmar, Etc

So about six months ago I won the Best New Talent Ditmar, and I have to admit that I’m rather fond of the trophy. It’s a clean design and it’s got a nice weight to it, and it makes for a nigh-perfect book-end on the brag shelf in my living room. Plus its not made of glass like the Aurealis Award, so it’s somewhat easier to photograph with the camera in my mobile phone. I didn’t really expect to win it, so it was rather nice when it happened, even if I was so convinced I wouldn’t win that I wandered off to have dinner with friends instead of going to the ceremony. At the time my name was announced, I was tucking into a particularly good hamburger at a nearby restaurant. Oops. On the plus side, at least I was surprised. I mention this for two reasons. The first is that my dad’s health problems hit not long after Worldcon

PeterMBall 16/02/2011

Journal

Credit Where Credit’s Due

On Friday night, after a panel at the QWC’s One Book, Many Brisbanes program, I got the opportunity to go hang out with Cat Sparks, Trent Jamieson, and the elusive Ben Payne. There was beer and chatter and hot chips with tomato sauce. The true value of this experience probably doesn’t sink in unless you know Cat and Trent and Ben, but fortunately for me I do, so I got to be there (although, given I had to drive home, I elected to drink coke. This seems to keep happening when I find myself in pubs; somehow I seem to have lost the ability to get my drink on). Should you not know Cat and Trent, the short version goes something like this: one is the author of Death Most Definite and Managing Death and more quality short stories than you can poke a stick at, while the other possesses a resume similarly stacked with quality short stories and recently

PeterMBall 14/02/2011

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Magic of Trent’s Book Corner

1) This amuses me. 2) It’s also posted because my parents read my blog and sometime in the next month they’re going to start the yearly dance of “what do you want for Christmas and I’m forced to give them a list of books and DVDs that are not easily available in their hometown of the Gold Coast with nothing but mall-spawn bookshops catering to tourist’s looking for a beach read. Now apparently I’m being unfair with that accusation, for they have a Border’s now, but after fifteen years as a reader in one of the least reader-friendly cities I’ve ever been in, I remain unaccountably bitter. In any case, when they ask this year, I’m going to tell them “All I want for Christmas is a copy of Managing Death,” for it should be widely available on release and Trent is an awesome dude. And ’cause the first book, Death Most Definite, was a cracking read. And ’cause the

PeterMBall 22/11/2010

Tag: peeps doing cool stuff

Peeps Doing Cool Stuff: February 2014 Edition

Walking and Book Buying and Peanut Butter & Sweet Potato Soup

Posts of a Random Sleep-Zombie

Shadows

Storms & Minotaurs & OMG, Sleep

Let There Be Cake

The Lady of Situations and Moby Dick

Ditmar, Etc

Credit Where Credit’s Due

The Magic of Trent’s Book Corner

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