Author: PeterMBall
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

More recent reading

So yesterday I had a cyst the size of a walnut removed from my scalp, which served as the catalyst for the rather enthusiastic bandage job posted last night.  The combination of restless nerves, a long wait in the surgery, and the complete inability to sleep due to the bandages constricting my jaw meant I spent a lot of the day reading. Changeless, the follow-up to the Gail Carriger novel I blogged about on Tuesday, was a fun read that didn’t really have the zomgawesomesauce feel of Soulless. Which is not to say that it isn’t full of Steampunky goodness and a readable book, just that I missed the added frisson of enjoyment that came from the intertextual Austen-esque moments that made the first book so much fun. Austen-esque doesn’t work when you’ve got happy, sexually active couples in the opening pages. I found myself missing that. Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, however, was the exact kind of comfort reading

PeterMBall 11/06/2010
Journal

So my day’s been fun…

How was yours? This post is dedicated to my parents, who immediately asked whether they were going to see such a less than flattering portrait go up on the blog.

PeterMBall 10/06/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Don’t think, just follow the link and order

Angela Slatter’s short story collection, The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales, is available for pre-order in hardcover or paperback. And you’ve gotta admit that it’s a pretty awesome-looking book:   The official launch is at Worldcon in September. It goes without saying that the book itself is going to rock and you should totally secure yourself a copy.

PeterMBall 09/06/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

In Which I Wax Enthusiastic About Some Recent Reading

So Gail Carriger’s Soulless is pretty fricken’ awesome, assuming a given value of awesome that roughly equals me rabidly devouring the book like the unholy mixture of crack and mind-candy it is. I’d fallen for this book so hard after the first chapter that it could have spent the remaining pages kicking puppies and forcing kittens to recite Mein Kampf in their native lolcat and I still would have loved it. Yes, I lapse into hyperbole here, but the book deserves some hyperbole, for it is one of those novels that operates on the fundamental assumption that pure undistllled awesome will carry the day. It bypasses the critical impulses and pleads directly to the little part of the soul that’s been waiting for this book all along without ever knowing of its existence. It inspires the kind of unconditional joy that last emerged when I was sixteen and reading David Eddings.

PeterMBall 08/06/2010
Journal

Doing my best not to swear in this post

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

PeterMBall 03/06/2010
Journal

My to-do list

At some point today I’m planning on making cupcakes, which means I have to clean the mixing bowl, which means I have to eat the salad currently sitting in the mixing bowl as it occupies a shelf of my fridge. And I frickin’ hate salad. There is no reasonable excuse for lettuce. At some point today I’m going to continue going through the Cold Cases draft, engaging in all the chapter-by-chapter tinkering that needs to be done before I hand the manuscript over. I am still unsure of this book, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I am unsure of everything I write that’s longer than 1000 words. At some point today I’m going to vacuum the seemingly endless carpet of shed hair that covers the floor of my house. On the plus side, that’s not going to be a problem for the next few months. There is some pretty simple math that gets done when your lazy, your

PeterMBall 31/05/2010
Journal

In Which Deadlines Make My Life Very Tiny

It’s one PM on a Monday. The rejection count has risen by one (6 for the year). I’m spawning new projects at a rate of knots instead of toying at the tangled web of problems that is the novella I’m meant to be finishing. I took this morning off to listen to Jeff Buckley’s Grace and watch the latest episode of Doctor Who. All in all, rather standard for the last-week-of-a-deadline rush. I’ve noticed that deadlines make my life very small and non-bloggable. I’m leaving the house today – just heading out to pick up groceries and check my PO Box – and I’m unfeasibly excited about the prospect of seeing other people for the first time in about ten days (I try to avoid this kind of non-contact, but last week was a mess of social engagements that got cancelled for various reasons and I didn’t have the energy to scrounge up replacements at the last minute). There will

PeterMBall 24/05/2010
Works in Progress

2010 Rejection Count: 5

It’s been 36 dayssince I clocked up my first rejection of the year, but as the submissions start going out more regularly things are picking up. 5 rejections done, 95 rejections to go in order to hit my 100 for the year. Of course, I’m being completely pantsed by my friend Chris Green whose already doubled my total, but that’s because Chris is made of awesome while my primary composition is slackness. Mind you, I’m going to catch up. I just have to remember how to write a short story, since I seem to have fogotten (yes, again)

PeterMBall 16/05/2010
Works in Progress

State of Play

Last night I braved the outside world and joined Trent Jamieson and Chris Lynch to talk about SF as part of the QUT Informational Professionals Alumni Chapter’s Bookclub, which was an enormous amount of fun given the books we were discussing (the fact that I’m a nerdy bibliophile who rather enjoys chatting about books didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that Trent and Chris are lovely blokes to share a panel with). Today I started tackling May’s to-do list from hell. It’s a long list, and its terrible, and there were at least two things on there with a deadline of “May 31st”. The first of these is done (short story submission, although given the length my stories are when I’m finishing them these days they may not deserve the title short); the second of these is daunting (going through the fourth rewrite of Cold Cases in preparation for May 31st, when I hand it back to TPP). The rest of the list has a little more

PeterMBall 11/05/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Ben Francisco @ I09

This week io9’s Weekend Short Story Club is throwing some love in the direction of my friend Ben Francisco and his story Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts which originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy last year. This pleases me because, lets face it, Ben is awesome and Tio Gilbertois one of those stories I patiently waited for him to get published since I read the first draft at Clarion back in 2007 (the other peice I’ve been waiting for, This is Not Concrete, appeared in the most recent issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet that arrived on my doorstep on Friday).

PeterMBall 09/05/2010
News & Upcoming Events

My Stuff Online This Week

Part One: Tubers in the Moonlight Ben Payne has launched his online zine, Moonlight Tuber, and the first issue (subtitled A Handsome Laundrette, A Box of Lovers, and Two Dozen Happy Sea Cows) is completely free and available for download. Somewhere within its virtual covers, said issue contains my story, The Peanut Guy, which is the tail end of the Warhol Sleeping/Avenue D vignette that started with one of my first publications, The Normal Guy, in Antipodean SF 102 back in 2006. The rest of the series, should you wish to track them down, appeared in Antipodean SF 107, Antipodean SF 117, Dog Versus Sandwich, Dark Recesses 8 (not available online anymore, but I’ve posted a copy here), and Dog Versus Sandwich again. Some of this is old work, and the very fact that it’s split up into various vignettes largely shows my discomfort when it comes to figuring out how prose worked prior to Clarion (these days, I’d probably

PeterMBall 04/05/2010
Journal

Mmm, new book smell

I don’t normally buy remaindered books, what with the fact that they’re financially dead for the authors who wrote them and I’m in favour of authors getting paid, but today I made an exception based on the grounds of being very broke and finding a trio of Hard Case Crime books at a very low price while shopping for groceries. The part of me that feels bad about buying remaindered books wages a quiet war with the part of me that thinks picking up pulpy, hard-boiled paperbacks in a supermarket is one of those experiences I thought lost forever. It confused the hell out of the woman on check-outs too; she had to be convinced they were store product, rather than library books I was carrying around while picking up bread and milk.

PeterMBall 29/04/2010

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