PeterMBall.com

Another week where the list is far less complete than I’d like, but such is life these days…

• Okay, did you know Angela Slatter has a blog now? No? Well, now you do. Do yourself a favour and go read it, for Angela is a phenomenal writer and a sayer of useful things – I recommend starting with her posts on dialogue or the Clarion South experience.
• So Friday of last week I put forth some ideas about SF and Gender in response to debates that’ve raged accross the Australian SF community of late. Most of the discussion seemed to occur over in the comments of my livejournal, but it also spawned a response from Ben Payne (which generates some interesting discussion on its own).
• Scienceagogo on Biodeversity Regions as Hotspots for War (Courtesy of Chris Green)
• Chris Green takes my standard screed on the awesomeness of being rejected and turns it into a yearly writing goal.
• The Conjecture website has been updates after a long period of silence, suggesting that my time in Adelaide come June may consists of more than sitting around Jason’s house and figuring out how I’ll get myself a pie floater.
• Nancy Cress on common writing mistakes.
• Sean Williams is giving away free e-book copies of his fantasy novel, The Crooked Letter.
• How to Write a Novel Synopsis in an Hour (Courtesy of Jason Fischer).

Over-tired, very busy, and generally lazy this week. This is not so much a weeks worth of interesting links (which I’ve started doing as I go along) as stuff I remembered with half-hearted accuracy sometime this morning.

• Via the ever-entertaining villainous_mog - photographs of Japanese Factories at night (as VM puts it: they look straight out of Final Fantasy 7.)
• Tansy Raynor Roberts on writing time, with much on the notion of draft-speed.
• Clarion peep Ben Francisco has posted his latest article at Fantasy, grading last years big comic-book company crossovers. (In the interest of self-confession, I must admit that my primary response was “thank god I don’t read comics” anymore, even though that’s something of a misnomer – it was big crossovers that drove me towards the discreet stories of the graphic-novel format).
• Speaking of Clarion Peeps, both Lyn Battersby and Daniel Braum have posted their thoughts on the 2007 experience at tutor Lee Battersby’s blog.
• Kate Eltham has two posts full of notes about Building Online Communities from the Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York. If you’re a writer and you’re not reading Kate’s blog, you really should – it’s chock-full of stuff about the relationship between writers, the internet, and emerging technologies.
• This week’s mind-meld over at SF Signal talks about the Hardest Part of Being a Writer
• A few weeks back I loaned my friend Kathleen a copy of Space Train (aka the actual worst SF novel, rather than the so-bad-it’s-amusing worst SF novel ever). Like many people who have heard me hold forth on the horrors of Terence Haile’s story of sabotage, misogyny and class warfare (with bonus space crabs) she remained unconvinced that it was as bad as I claimed – behold her capitulation, in which she shares the pain (with bonus snark)… For those of you intrigued by all this, bear in mind that I’ve already made this book sound better than it is.
• Clarion peep (and owner of the most awesome boots in existence) Chris Green shares his own list of links and bookmarks. I’ll just send you to his blog rather than posting them all here.

• To kick it off, some members of WA fandom are putting to together a fanzine, Hope, to raise funds for the Bushfire victims in Victoria. A bunch of talented folks have already volunteered work, so much so that there will now be more than one issue. Worth keeping an eye on, all up.
• With all the doom and gloom surrounding small press publishing, there is at least a glimmer of hope that the recently deceased Realms of Fantasy may come back courtesy of a buy-out of the magazine/brand. Until then, a farewell by the RoF Sushmaster that includes a list of the accepted stories we won’t get a chance to see (With commiserations to my friend Ben Francisco, who unfortunately has a very fine story caught on that list).
• Something Positive on the tendency among American reviewers to associate the stop-motion film Coraline with Tim Burton.
• Speaking of webcomics, XKCD addresses an issue that does actually bother me.
• My old friend Villainous_mog, now lost to the wilds of London forever, posts about the subject lines of Lost Property e-mails at his workplace. (Yes, random, but I find it interesting and I keep misreading the 5th one as “a frothing, whizzing gadget found on the kitchen floor” and thinking it sounds like the start to a story)
• Speaking of Laura Goodin (We weren’t, you say? Ah well, we should be), here’s some fun stuff snurched from her blog this week: Shakespeare doing the facebook 25 things meme & steampunk cake!
• The Australian Horror Writers Mentorship program is open for applications. As mentorship programs go, this is one of those insane-good-value deals if you’re an aspiring writer looking to make the next step.
• Chris Lynch’s Clarion South 2007 Bibliography, now updated, charting the various achievements of my Clarion peeps over the last two years.
• Chris Lynch is also over on the Battersblog, talking about the week 4 experience at Clarion South 2007.
• Jay Lake on a subject near and dear to my heart after the trauma of losing everything a few years back – backing up your fiction like a pro.
• 10 Privacy settings every facebook user should know - because facebook is actually evil.

• Jay Lake says sensible things about writers and psychotic dedication.
• ASIF has posted their recommended reading list for 2008, with much love thrown in the direction of the ever-awesome Angela Slatter.
• The 2007 Clarion Blog Nostalgia Extravaganza continues over at Lee Battersby’s site, with entries by clarion peeps Michael Greenhut and Helen Venn.
• A photo-series on dead Asian themeparks. (snurched from Elizabeth Bear’s livejournal).
• Gen Con Australia and  my former/sometimes current boss Hooly talks candidly about the 2009 convention (I am, for the record, involved in the con this year, but at a greatly reduced capacity – hence he’s only an intermittent boss these days)
• If you’re in Brisbane and an aspiring writer-type trying to figure out what happens next, I’d recommend signing up for Marianne de Pierres workshop at Sunnybank library. It’s free and I can say from experience that Marianne’s workshops tend to be both informative and eye-opening.
• And for the more artistic types – Small Beer Press is holding an open-call to find the cover-image for the next Interfictions anthology.
• Sean Williams pokes people with a stickregarding the Australian nat-con in Adelaide and the ‘sploding comments thread of doom reminds me of why I’m booking flights to Adelaide regardless (That I’ve been part of a con that had similar public-communications issues and still managed a to hit a level of awesome on the day helps as well;).
• Jeff Vandermeer talks about the genesis of Shriek: An Afterword complete with scans of annotated manuscript pages; my inner fascination with how other people work kicked in immediately.

Yesterday was busy and thus thesis-less, plus I got very little sleep thanks to some very unfomfortable shoulder pain, so odds are I’ll be saying little of interest today. Instead, I’ll entertain you with links to stuff that I’ve found interesting over the last week (or so):

• My good friend Chris Slee reflects on the Edisonade (aka the pre-history of Science Fiction) and what was the best thing *before* sliced bread.
• The ever-stylish Ben Francisco cherry-picks the SFnal highlights of the authors@google youtube series and gathers them together in a single handy post (although he’s missing Neil Gaiman in the line-up). If you’ve not seen these, particularly the John Scalzi, I recommend going and taking a look.
• The Aurealis Awards are announced and the results posted on their website. Cat Sparks has posted photographs of the night, in which a bunch of writer-types have scrubbed up pretty well (and I show up looking marginally less shabby than usual in the vast flicker list of the night.).
• Mick Foley (aka Cactus Jack, Mankind, Dude Love) reviews Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.
• Steve Kenson on the lack of randomness in contemporary RPG character creation. (My first reaction to this post? To go roll up a Marvel Superheroe’s Character and convert it over to the point-by driven system of Kenson’s near-perfect supers RPG Mutants & Masterminds)
• And, as if there’s not enough of me on the internets already, I sneak on over to Lee Battersby’s blog and guest-post my memories of the first week of Clarion South 2007.
• John Klima bids farewell to the recently shut down Realms of Fantasy over at Tor.com, but also wonders where all those stories that used to go RoF’s way will end up (For my money, you can’t go past Fantasy magazine if you’re looking for fiction with an RoF-like feel)
• Scientists discover that fiction can drive social evolution - which seems a little like overcomplicated the obvious, to me, but there you go.