Works in Progress

A short post

Last night I dreamt that I took three months off my dayjob and wrote things. I don’t remember what they were, but I remember the writing. Most of it took place in a bathtub. All in all, it was a good dream. In reality, I’ve spent the day trying to commit acts of short story and, for the most part, failing. I’ve been meaning to write this story for a long time, near on two years, largely ’cause this scene gets stuck in my head: We were seated in a McDonalds, occupying a pair of hard plastic seats with a two-person table between us and the window overlooking the playground on my left. There were kids in the playground wearing soccer uniforms, these black and gold jerseys with numbers on the back, and their shrieks rattled the glass as they darted back and forth. It was a Saturday morning, eleven-forty-three AM. I was eating a cheeseburger. We were meant to

PeterMBall 22/02/2012
Works in Progress

Horn Spotting

So back in 2010 I get an email from Alisa over at Twelfth Planet  sent me an email that said, in effect, there’s some people making a TV show that’d like to use a couple of TPP books as background props.  Apparently there are contracts that needed to be signed when this kind of thing happens, which is one of those things about making television that I never really thought about, and I was being given a heads up that the permission had been granted and there was some kind of TV show which may or may not use Horn and a bunch of other Australian small press books in the background. This was two days after my dad’s heart attack, so I mostly nodded and made sure there was nothing I needed to be doing and went back to fretting and coping with the fact that my dad was due for open heart surgery in a few days time.

PeterMBall 16/02/2012
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

write club today

You’ve got to admit its not t a bad place to spend a few hours writing.

PeterMBall 15/02/2012
Journal

Why do you get a random photo of bookshelves, you ask?

So I finally got around to uploading the WordPress app onto my android, allowing me to update the blog remotely using my dodgy smartphone keyboard and a  3g connection. Somehow I doubt this will be massively life changing, although it does seem to be a faster way of uploading photos to the site. Not good photos,  mind, nor photos of anything interesting for the moment, but its an option that may come in handy eventually.

PeterMBall 14/02/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Let me put this out there from the beginning: I’m a totally fucking cranky cinema goer. I find it very hard to discuss films, even films I like, without veering into the territory of ranting. It’s not that I dislike film – quite the contrary – but the result is this kind of terminal disappointment as I encounter film and after film that just doesn’t quite excite me. It gets me into considerable trouble when I discuss films with people at work, because it frequently looks as though I dislike everything, when really I’m just perpetually disapointed by films that take no chances or lack a visual aesthetic or even, god help me, decide to go 3D. Also, I’m not a huge fan of realism. The more a film tries to simulate reality, the less interested I am. I will watch  some utter dreck and adore it simply because it’s trying to do something interesting, even when the story fills me with towering

PeterMBall 13/02/2012
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Knock Loud, Kranksy Sausages, and an offer of Free Stories

For the last few months of 2011, I developed a Friday routine: finish work, walk across the Victoria Bridge, and stop for dinner at the street vendors set up at the top of the Queen Street Mall. There were only a handful of options available, but they were pretty damn good options: a place offering German sausages with sauerkraut; a place that did a mighty fine steamed BBQ pork bun; a couple who produced some of the weirdest and tastiest cinnamon donuts I’ve ever tasted (and, for bonus points, the damn things were the size of my head). Then Christmas happened, and New Years, and there were a few weeks where I didn’t go to work, and by the time all that had passed there weren’t any food vendors at the top of Queen Street Mall on a Friday evening and I started picking up cheap take-out before doing some Friday Night Shopping. Which isn’t a bad plan, by any means, but it’s

PeterMBall 10/02/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Stories told, Stories Consumed, and a link to Cats Sleeping

There was no story unlocked when I walked across the Kurilpa bridge this morning, which is a matter of some sorrow to me. I was counting on that moment today, since I’m looking askance at the second chapter of Claw and trying to figure out what’s going to go in there. I know some things, yes: corpses, cheerfully gloomy coroners, a modicum of angst. It’s just the details that go around that I’m struggling with at the moment, writing a paragraph or two before thinking, no, that’s not right, and going back to the well for a new idea. I’m sure there’s something coming, sooner or later, but it isn’t quite there yet. Everything that’s been written thus far is weighed down by the burden of history, calling back to Horn and Bleed, and the thing that made me happy about the draft of chapter one is how much less of that it does than the last time I tried to write

PeterMBall 09/02/2012
Works in Progress

Write Club

We held the second write club of the year today, and I’ve discovered the seemingly terrifying power that comes with combining a walk across the magic, story-inducing Kurilpa bridge in the morning with a two-hour block of writing alongside Angela Slatter at the State Library. And the net result is a day where I’ve produced 3,500 new words I’m more or less happy with, most of which make up the first chapter of a new Aster novella. About two thirds of this was done at write club, which is now partially time-limited due to the fact that we’re borrowing space from the State Library, and the rest has been done after I got home later in the day and had a nap. Turns out I rather like this writing thing. I think I’ll do more of it once this blog is done. I’ve been pretty stringent about not applying deadlines to my year, either externally-imposed or self-imposed, but I think

PeterMBall 08/02/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Revisiting The Cure

Several years ago I owned The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys on vinyl and it was one of my favourite things ever. I owned Faith on vinyl too, at least temporarily, although I suspect it got traded away in one of those poorly thought out relationships that sustained itself on angst, the novelty of having sex, and the trading of meaningful gifts instead of actually liking one another. Maybe it didn’t get traded, I can’t be sure, but if it did there would be some other treasure among my collection. There is paranoia that sets in at a certain stage of those types of relationship, a lingering fear that you’ll be the one who gave less and thus become beholden to someone you no longer really like. It’s only worse when you’re young and stupid and trying very hard to be intense about things, because intensity seems like something worth chasing. But I digress: we were speaking of the Cure. Albums

PeterMBall 06/02/2012
Works in Progress

Just a tired and random kind of evening, posted a day late

You’ll have to forgive me if this is a touch vague today, but I didn’t really sleep last night. Not in a bad way, just one of those instances where you starting a show on DVD and figure you may as well finish things while the momentum is there. There may have been beer involved, and a particularly frustrated end to the day on Friday. It largely means that all I’m good for today is drinking coffee, listening to Misfits songs, and making idle kind of notes for stories I’ll work on tomorrow. It’s a good way to cap off a very good week. It’s an out-of-order way of going about it, but one of the best bits was the release of this years Locus Recommended Reading List which included Dying Young in the novelette category and Memories of Chalice among the recommended short stories. I’m particularly happy about the latter, to be honest, since I spent years circling around that particular story

PeterMBall 04/02/2012
Journal

Undergoing Maintenance

So there’s a bunch of things on the website that I’ve been meaning to fix for ages and last night I finally got around to it, which inevitably led to the decision that maybe it’s time to gussy the place up a bit given that I’ve been using the same theme and layout for three years now. It’s something of a work in progress, since there’s plenty of changes I’ll be making when I get the time, but for the moment it feels a bit cleaner and the links on the front page work and my parents can finally stop saying “You’ve only got Horn on your website. When are you going to put up a link to Bleed? You should really do that.” Well, now it’s done. I have a vague feeling that I should go and clean my room. # And my spell-checker is trying to tell me that gussy isn’t a word, but this is one of those situations

PeterMBall 29/01/2012
Journal

Saturday Gloom and Notebooks

So I seem to have lost the ability to just sit down and blog at the moment, because the long stretches of silence means everything seems far to trivial when I finally sit down to start posting things. I want to, say, pop in and blog about the fact that I’ve just spent the day with my inner goth turned up to eleven, listening to songs I haven’t listened to in years while rereading the big ol’ copy of The Annotated Sandman, Vol 1, that I picked up on Friday night, which means it’s now coming up on nine o’clock in the evening and I’m surprisingly maudlin and in a bitter-sweet kind of mood that would totally result in me dying my hair black if there was black hair dye in the house. Fortunately, there isn’t, so I’ll continue on as a vaguely normal person on the morrow, but you know how it goes. I’ve had a day catching up with a

PeterMBall 28/01/2012