PeterMBall.com

Man, I’ve been all over the place for the last week. Good stuff happened and bad stuff happened and my emotional state bounced around like one of those 20-cent rubber crazy balls you used buy from the machines out the front of the grocery store, but there was rarely a moment where stuff happened all on its own and demanded no real engagement on my part. Fortunately the last three or four days have trended towards the good rather than the bad, but I suspect any seven day period that starts with your parents ringing from the other side of the world and saying “we were almost killed in a car crash” is going to struggle to come out ahead on points.

Still, among the cool stuff:

- Doing edits and contracts for my short story, L’esprit de L’escalier, which will be coming up at Apex Magazine in the future. Astute readers may put two-and-two together and realise this was the source of much post-acceptance dancing two weeks back.

- Kicked off a whole new round of snoopy dancing, for it appears that I’ve sold a third story for the year. Once again I err on the side of vagueness until details firm up, but suffice to say that this one is rated pretty damn high on the awesomesauce scale.

- Had the yearly rejection count climb to a tantalising 19 rejections, which has spurred me to get back into the wordmines and get some new stories done.

- Picked up the inimitable Ben Francisco from the airport, whereupon there was nattering about writing and the eating of cassoulet and the planning of literary hi-jinx in the lead-up to the con.

In other news I’m still prodding my brain and saying “yo, you ready to acknowledge that there’s a book with our name on it coming out next week” and the brain continues to respond with a surly growl and a denial. I suspect I’m saving my “ZOMG…BOOK!” type squee until there’s a copy in my hands, whereupon nearby dogs will probably register my joy. I also have to figure out what I’m going to read in my reading slot at the con (logically it should be Bleed, but there’s always something a tad iffy about me reading Aster’s interior monologue); I was tempted to go with the aforementioned L’esprit de L’escalier, but then I realised I had no idea how to pronounce the title without mangling the French and thus it was shelved for another time.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 1
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 19/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August )

 Peter wakes up to find the Spokesbear sitting on his chest, staring him in the face.

Spokesbear: Time to work.
Peter: Fuck off.
Spokesbear: You’re not sick anymore.
Peter: I feel like someone’s taken a razor blade to the inside of my oesophagus.
Spokesbear: Yes, but you can *stare at a screen without bleeding from the eyes*. That means it’s time to work.
Peter: You’re mean.
Spokesbear: It’s what you pay me for.
Peter: I pay you?
Spokesbear: Yes.
Peter: You’re an anthropomorphised fraction of my own subconscious guilt, why do you get paid?
The Spokesbear punches Peter in the throat with a padded paw.
Spokesbear: That’s why. Next time you ask a stupid question, I’m going after a kneecap.
Peter: I kill you.
The Spokesbear makes a cute face.
Peter: Okay, I don’t kill you.
Spokesbear: I don’t do this for free, dude. Time to work.
Peter: Sadist.
Spokesbear: Wuss.
Peter: Crazy bear.
Spokesbear: Slacker.
Peter: Tyrant.
Spokesbear: Slug.
Peter: How long are we going to do this?
Spokesbear: We’re done the moment you start writing.
Peter: I hate you.
Spokesbear: Fair enough. Consider it payback for all the times you made me listen to your rants about Avatar.

Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 0
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 15/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

It’s entirely possible that I’ll spontaneously combust at some point today. Somehow it’s become an intersection of deadlines, doctor’s appointments, social engagements and other madness that all needs to be done *now*. Naturally, I have a plan for getting everything done. Just as naturally, it’s all going to hell the moment I hit the doctor’s surgery. While I totally dig my local surgery, they’re often overbooked and the waiting times are haphazard.

On the plus side, I seem to have moved past the nightmares where the stitches in my head split open and I bleed over my bed. Now the only thing waking me up is the stitches hurting when it gets really cold around 4 in the morning.

In other news: the yearly rejection count hit 7 today, but this is counterbalanced by having the first new story sent out in a long, long while.

I keep trying to be online this week, but the world moves against me. It has ever since Monday, when my internet provider decided I’d had enough of a good thing five minutes from the end of the latest Doctor Who on I-Tunes. Since then my internet access seems to have been choked to the point where I long for the glory days of dial-up where webpages could load in ten minutes on a good day. It’s gotten to the point that I have no idea whether this post will actually post – I’m writing it, hitting the publish button, and walking away for three or four hours. There’s even odds the connection will have itmed out before this paragraph was loaded onto the webpage.

Needless to say, this presents problems with e-mail (it takes an hour for gmail to load, longer to actually get into a specific e-mail message). If you’re waiting on something, I’ll get back to you whenever the powers that govern such things fix whatever’s wrong or I visit my parents over the weekend and use their computer.

Because I’m tired and unable to articulate much today, so I give you the general mood of my week via  youtube clips from the family Wainwright. ‘Cause even if my week isn’t awesome, I can share the awesome of others.

1) Anger

2) Absurdity

3) An Ill-defined longing for longing

There is something about getting up early and writing that always makes me feel virtuous. I like the way it gets the guilt of not-writing out of the way early, the way it sets the tone for the rest of the day (in which I think about writing in moderation, rather than obsessing about the fact that I’m not writing to the exclusion of all else), and the excuse to drink inhuman amounts of coffee. If only I didn’t have to pay for these early starts later (say, around 3:30 when I crash out and need a nap) or actually wrote productively (this week, getting up at six and working for two and a half hours has netted me a paragraph of thesis work a day) it’d be an awesome habit to get into; sadly, I am not built for mornings and it’ll fall by the wayside once I have absolved myself of my latest bout of writer-guilt. Which I’m slowly starting to do in relation to the thesis – today I got past the big mental block that stopped me finishing chapter two – but there’s plenty more hiding up the back of the novel/novella/short-story slacker variety.

And now I dance off, clad in my green shoes and least-salacious unicorn shirt, to collect first-year assignments and start marking them. Will probably spend tonight kicking around the Gold Coast and being a slacker, so I’ll catch you all tomorrow.

Allow me to introduce you to the great redundancy in my flat:

The redundancy, for the curious, comes in couch form (and possibly the desk in the lower foreground since I’ve already got two others, but the desk is awesome and thus excused from such considerations). My lounge room can seat six or seven people, yet it’s rare that I’ll ever have that many people in my place. I’m a little weird about letting people into my space at the best of times, and I’ve filled all three couches only twice in a two-year period (and that was for gaming purposes, the one exception to my I don’t invite people around weirdness). Therefore the primary purpose of having three couches is so I can do horrible things to my back while falling asleep in front of the TV – swapping between the two-seater and the three-seater on a daily basis keeps the kinks from settling in one part.

I’ve spent a large portion of today wandering around my flat and wondering why I really have things. Realistically I could move my TV into the bedroom and replace the couches with a nice dining room table without any real loss of functionability (in fact, the dining room table would see more use, being more convenient for eating and table-top gaming than the couch/coffee table combo). And yet I remain oddly attached to the couches. It’d feel odd not to have them around.

Just dropping in with the following reports:

• The official wordcount (aka words actually in draft documents, rather than random notes) just topped 10k.
• I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually finished a chapter.
• I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually got a plan for proceeding that seems workable.

This, of course, just means I have to get 20,000 words written between now and Wednesday evening. That’s a far worse thing than it sounds, incidently; I could probably get 5000 words a day done in a pinch, but I’ll be utterly useless for anything else afterwards and that’s not a luxury I’m going to get anytime soon.

I suspect there will be some measure of begging for mercy in my near future.

I hate it when things creep up on me, but I like having a full to-do list that I can work through. On today’s list:

• Get a big chunk of wordage done on the thesis draft – last week saw things start lagging behind again, and I really shouldn’t let that become a habit.
• Clean the flat for tomorrow’s rental inspection
• Go through the copyedit of my Interfictions 2 story and get that sent out.
• Finish writing up a crit of Angela’s story.
• Pick up a book they’re holding for me at Pulp Fiction (includes a bonus lunch with the Sleech)
• Cook at home for the first time in, what, two and a half weeks?
• Do a revision of a recently-rejected story that I think needs a little more polish before it goes out again.

In short, I’ll be keeping busy. I’ve moved the laptop into the lounge so I can set up a second work-area and flit between computers as I work – I’m not much for writerly superstitions and such, but I am noticing that the thesis is always a little easier to write while camping out with couch with the laptop. I suspect it’s because the living room has more space to spread books out and build a visual representation of my research…

I think my office may be under some kind of curse. I say this because I’ve just lost my second office chair in the space of a few months to breakage and this one was brand new (unlike the previous chair, which was a mega-comfy seventies steel-and-vinyl job that I’m pretty sure my parents liberated from a staffroom two decades ago).  I’m less than impressed with this, especially since I can’t find my receipt to go return the chair to officeworks and get a repalcement. Not that I was a fan of the new chair – I dislike office chairs at the best of times and really mourn the loss of the old-school desk-chair I had – but I kinda need something to sit on here. On the plus side, it’ll force me to work on the laptop (away from the internets) for the majority of the day since I’m officially out of chairs to sit on while at the desk.