What I did on my weekend… – Page 2

Journal

The Great Bookshelf Reorganising of 2011

On Saturday night, around 4 am, I started reorganising bookshelves. It seemed like the thing to do, since I’d been studiously not-sleeping for five hours after going to bed. Bookcases are one of the places where mess accumulates in my flat, largely because there’s so many of the damn things and I’ve developed a bad habit of taking things down, reading a couple of paragraphs, then putting them back somewhere else. What starts as a workable system quickly devolves over time, and every couple of years I have to start from scratch and reorganize the entire system. The whole process tends to start around 4 AM, ’cause insomnia is my response to doing to much and thinking too much and generally feeling like things are out of control. Reordering shelves is my way of figuring out what is and isn’t important in my life, and everything goes on from there. It’s a mental reset, fighting back against my natural tendency towards entropy. So far

PeterMBall 28/02/2011

Journal

I’m working late at the dayjob today, having started late under the assumption that driving back from the Sunshine Coast would be a foolhardy undertaking this morning. I’ve had to much good food and not enough sleep, and I’m suffering from the vague ick that comes from sleeping in an overly air-conditioned room. When I got to work I was told about the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Every couple of minutes someone plays a youtube clip of the events, or downloads a snippet of news from the internet, or simply sees something new on twitter. Some people have family over there, others were just planning to head over to NZ for a holiday in the near future. I’ve never been to Christchurch, but I hear it’s nice. I’m starting to suspect that nature has it in for the whole southern hemisphere of the planet at the moment. If you have the resources to do so, it may be a

PeterMBall 22/02/2011

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

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

Journal

Sunday Morning

When I was about twenty I lived in a motel, and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever rented in my life. If you’ve read Bleed, you’re already kinda familiar with it, ’cause it served as the basis for Palm Tree Row and abandoned motel where Aster finds the corpse. If you read the second installment of Flotsam when it comes out, the motel pops up again, albeit in a more inhabited form. It’s one of those touchstone places in terms of my fiction, a secret I’m still trying to unravel. The motel had these green fluorescent lights running along the first floor patios that turned on automatically at sunset and stayed on until midnight, which meant my second floor bedroom was lit up with an alien-abduction glow that was accompanied by the unearthly buzz that close comes from close proximity to bad lighting. One of my neighbours was a six-four American hip-hop fan with tourette’s who used to come home at

PeterMBall 13/02/2011

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Saturday Morning

It’s Saturday morning and I’m drinking instant coffee. Maccona Classic Dark Roast with milk and one sugar, for those who might be interested, although I have no earthly idea why you would be. In an hour or so I’m going to ignore the rest of the internet and start talking to the scattered members of my online crit group, who conveniently double as a group of good and articulate friends, so there’s still good reason to skype on the dates when we’re meant to be critting and no-one actually submitted things. This, I suspect, is as close to being one of the hidden secrets of writing as I can think of – find people you enjoy talking too who happen to be writers, then talk to them as often as you can. Ideas will form, ambitions will solidify, and the day-to-day despair of being underpaid and frustrated by the blank page will gradually fall by the wayside. I remember this far

PeterMBall 12/02/2011

Works in Progress

Day Planner

Today I am: a) writing b) making plans c) washing up d) buggering off early to play DnD Last night there was write-club, whereupon I wrote about fifteen hundred words on my next Flotsam story, then sat up into the wee hours forcing myself to write 250 words on the novel project for 2011 (which is currently called Tarnished Silver Swords, but once existed under the working title of the weird lovecrafty-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo-novel; neither of these is workable as a final title). I thank Trent Jamieson for the reminder to do the latter, courtesy of his recent blogpost aboutgetting stuff done despite being a procrastinating slacker (which is not to say that Trent is a procrastinating slacker, just that I am and his advice came at the right point to remedy that). There has been too much not-writing in my life this January. I have another five days to rectify that.

PeterMBall 26/01/2011

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

They had me at “Horse Mounted Gatling Guns”, they lost me at “Megan Fox”

So I sat down and watched the Jonah Hex movie over Christmas. This was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I really wanted to like this movie. I mean, it has a bounty hunter who can speak to the dead and horse-mounted gatling guns in the first ten minutes, and that kind of absurdity is the kind of wrongness that I’m willing to roll with. And for the first first half-hour or so, things were looking pretty good – it wasn’t a great movie, but it was zany and weird and it had undead fucking cowboys and that kind of shit is awesome. Then Megan Fox showed up. A few years ago I had a friend who worked off the theory that Kate Beckinsale was the kiss of death for a film. As soon as she appeared on screen you were pretty much doomed to a cinematic experience that sucked. At best you’d get a film that achieved a kind

PeterMBall 05/01/2011

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Sunday Round-Up

So this week I managed to finish reading Georgette Heyer’s Cotillion, start reading Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine, watched the third season of The Big Bangtheory, and went down to the Gold Coast to spend some time with my dad while he makes his way through the three months of rehabilitation that follow open heart surgery. I worked a whole bunch and got to play with the company website. I tried to write fiction without any real success: 2,500 words total for eight days of work. I had a long fight with my local vendor of mobile phones after the phone they sold me under the promise that it would do everything my old phone did proved to be false, yet this wasn’t deemed sufficient to replace the phone for something else. I managed to lose track of what day it was twice, getting messages from people asking “dude, where are you?” while I sat there going “what? Come on, it’s only

PeterMBall 14/11/2010

Journal

Hello!

So, apparently I lied yesterday – I am back today. I didn’t mean to lie, or expect to be here, but after a day at the final Year of the Novel course at the Queensland Writer’s Cetnre there was a part of brain that clicked over and said wait, yes, I am meant to be writing, perhaps it’s time to reclaim that bit of my life again. And so I have critted work, and pondered problems with the novel-in-progress, and chatted with the awesome Angela Slatterabout when we can kick off write-club again and which day we can use so we can get some continuity going (we’ve traditionally used Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, all of which have become untennable due to semi-regular scheduling conflicts). It’s been chaotic fortnight around these parts – it kicked off with the news of my dad’s heart attack on the 24th of October that saw me spend much of the week on the Gold Coast,

PeterMBall 06/11/2010

Works in Progress

Heading off for a few days

I’m preparing to decamp to the Gold Coast and hang out with my parents for a few days, which is a process that would probably go a lot better if I hadn’t just spent an hour drinking my morning coffee and checking my RSS feeds on the internets. On the other hand, the more internets I get out of my system now, the less time I spend wasting my parent’s bandwidth. I’ve also been deploying kitchen timers and to-do lists this week, which is slowly starting to make a difference when it comes to getting things done. I’m yet to actually finish a to-do list, mind, but I’m usually averaging five or six things on a list of ten goals for the day. I’m still debating whether the timer is going with me to the Gold Coast or not; in theory I’ll be spending the bulk of my time down there doing a rewrite on the sparse first-quarter of Claw

PeterMBall 08/10/2010

Journal

Musings

Today is wet and dreary and therefore full of awesome. I’m always far fonder of the world when it’s overcast and dreary than I am during the sunny days, especially now that it’s spring and the demolition-force humidity and heat of Summer are just on the horizon. I am steadily ignoring the fact that there are multiple breeds of football dominating the airwaves at the moment and pretending the rest of the world has gone away for a while. It’s always easier to write on such days, although I’ll admit that I miss the comfort of having another cup of coffee and watching the world through my office window. Soon I will head off and make myself some soup. Until then I will sit and think about Claw, which is proving to be unruly and hard-to-tame due to my insistence on a) not repeating the opening tropes that were used in Horn and Claw; and b) my desire to make use

PeterMBall 02/10/2010

Tag: What I did on my weekend…

The Great Bookshelf Reorganising of 2011

Let There Be Cake

Credit Where Credit’s Due

Sunday Morning

Saturday Morning

Day Planner

They had me at “Horse Mounted Gatling Guns”, they lost me at “Megan Fox”

The Sunday Round-Up

Hello!

Heading off for a few days

Musings

Book Information?

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