PeterMBall.com

Tonight, this song is the only thing between me and apathetic nihilism.

Which kinda begs the question of what I used to do in the days before youtube. I suspect I just went straight to the Smiths CDs and drank.

It turns out that spending two-to-three weeks writing by hand just wasn’t on the list of things I was willing to do. Fortunately this roughly coincided with the realisation that I could pick up a very cheap desktop (to replace the machine that died last September) and write it off as a business expense. It’s not as ideal as no computer problems at all – I’ve spent the last two days uploading the various programs and back-up files onto the new machine rather than working – but it has fringe benefits (hello, photoshop. I’ve missed you).

It’s a stinking hot, evil day outside my office so I’ve retreated into the air-conditioning with a pile of Primus CD and a large vat of coffee. The coffee because my sleep patterns are shot right now (going to bed at eleven, getting to sleep around 4 am). The Primus because I watched a lot of Robot Chicken in a row and it’s Les Claypool themesong reminded me that, yes, godsfuckit, they really were one of my favourite bands.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 0 <- Yes: FAIL
Days without chocolate: 3
Today the Spokesbear is: wishing I’d stop tooling around with the new computer and *get to goddamn work*

It seemed a good day to revisit these videos:

Way more fun than any academic discussion of the Catcher in the Rye I’ve ever had.

I spent the first ten days of 2010 listening to exactly two albums: Regina Spektor’s Far and The best of Bauhaus. And when I say “album” I may mean “the following two songs replayed endlessly, with the rest of the album getting a guernsey when I eventually step away from the stereo to do other things.”

Yeah. All in all, it’s been that kind of year thus far.

Once or twice a year I get out to see a live gig that reminds me why I like going and seeing live music. It happens far less often these days than it did in the past, but as a Dresden Doll’s fan it was kind of inevitable that I’d sell internal organs in order to go see the Amanda-Fucking-Palmer solo tour when it passed through Brisbane.

Short version: Awesome
Long version: totally worth living without a spleen until I can buy mine back from the pawn broker.

Yes, I’ve been very vid-centric lately. I acknowledge this. But, dammit, some things are sufficiently awesome that you just have to share immediately:

Between allergies, dust-clouds, lingering con-crud and deadlines I’m officially giving up on the possibility of saying anything coherant this week. Instead, I’m just going to share the earworm that’s been driving me crazy all week.

Over the years I’ve gradually noticed that the people whose creative output fascinates me the least are often the most interesting to listen to when they discuss their creative process. Today I found myself losing twenty-minutes listening to JJ Abrams talk about the role of mystery in narrative and the process.

Of course, by my earlier logic, one of these days we’re going to discover that Ewe Boll is a genius.

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

1) Chris Green Distills the Clarion Wisdom

I went to Clarion South with Chris two and a half years ago. He’s a smart man, very interested in things, and on something of a roll of late as far as publications and sales go. Over the last week Chris started distilling some of the major lessons we learned during the workshop into a series of very short, controlled blog posts. Given his terse nature, these are short and easy to digest, and they’re basically the high points of the workshop in collected form (and since he doesn’t believing in tagging posts, I’ll send you straight to the first entry and let you follow along from there).

2) Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book

This amuses me in its accuracy.

3) Reviewage andPimpage

- My comrade-in-writing Ben Francisco - and the first man to tell me “this should be a novella” – engages in some Horn Pimpage on my behalf
- The Fix diggs my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens which appeared in Apex Magazine back in May
- The Internet Review of Science Fiction describes On the Destruction of Copenhage… as “mundane surrealism.”

4) Rewriting as an Animated Giff

A very short-but-interesting post from Elizabeth Bear on the re-writing process, showing the evolution of a paragraph through multiple layers of revision.

5) My Projects

Man, the last week has been all about the new projects. I started the new novel draft, started revision of another project, started preparing for the next draft of Claw, agreed to do some work for Gen Con Australia, and tentatively agreed to take on another project I cannot yet talk about. I also ticked another entry off the 80-point-plan of awesome, making my year 3.75% awesome. If you see me looking wild-eyed this week, it’s not because I’m stressed – I’m just learning to cope with an opportunity-rich environment again

6) Oh, hell, let’s cap it off with a youtube clip

Because I’m far to fascinated by this film-clip at the moment.