Journal

The Umbrella Does Nothing

I spend a lot of time walking across this bridge these days: Twice a day, four days a week, in fact. It’s on the path between the train station and work, and avoiding it means traversing a somewhat less pleasant bridge that qualifies as the long way around, so its really a no-brainer to take the Kurilpa Bridge even before I made my startling discovery that the bridge had secret, magical, powers of plot development. In seven of the last eight mornings where I’ve walked across the bridge, I’ve reached the other end with a new scene in my head, typically one that will fix a story I’ve been working on for a while, or advance a novel I plan on writing in a way I’m not really expecting. It’s magical and kind of awesome and usually results in my tapping frantic notes into my phone at the far end so I can email them home when I actually have writing time.

PeterMBall 22/01/2012
Journal

The Writer in a Silly Hat

I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last few weeks. Not that she’s wrong about me posting a picture here, just the time frame: Best. Present. Ever. The hat came about because my sister buggered off to Nepal a few months back, planning on walking to the base camp of Everest, and asked if there was anything I wanted. Usually when my sister goes places I shrug and mumble something non-committal and end up with a motley array of t-shirts when she returns, but Tibet proved to be a special case. “You know what?” I said, “I’d really dig a sherpa hat.” The fact that she found one with its own woolly Mohawk is really

PeterMBall 04/01/2012
Journal

The Perils of Working at a Writers Centre

One of the perils of working in a Writers Centre is the moments of downtime when your colleagues will turn to you and ask, so, what are you writing at the moment? Not a bad thing during the times when you’re actually working on things and eager to talk about it, but right now I’m kinda…not doing anything. Or rather, I’m giving myself a break after a year of deadline after deadline, accompanied by the fact that I’m still in the process of moving out of my old place (there’s a bunch of stuff still waiting to go into storage, and a whole mess of cleaning to do after Christmas is done with). So when asked during the walk to collect lunch for the office today, my response was, well, nothing really.  Mostly what I’m doing at the moment is catching up on things. Specifically, catching up on email, which has been a little…untouched…during the process of packing and moving

PeterMBall 20/12/2011
Gaming

David Bowie and Bing Crosby Singing Christmas Carols

My friend Chris has been running Space: 1889 for our Sunday night gaming crew for about a year now, and it seems to be the first roleplaying game that’s managed to dislodge the mindset of Sunday Night Cthulhu that dogged our weekly sessions after…well, about three straight years of Call of Cthulhu gaming. A few weeks back we kind of bullied persuaded Chris that we should do a Christmas Special, and he somewhat hesitantly agreed despite the fact that he thought we were crazy. So we gathered and we played and there was…well, quite  a lot of Christmas references thrown around. More than you’d expect, given the vast majority of us are bah-humbug types who aren’t all that fond of the Holiday season. I won’t go into the details, since there’s nothing quite so dull as listening to an enthusiastic RPG player waxing lyrical about how awesome their game was, but we all had a blast. I bring it up because the climactic moment

PeterMBall 19/12/2011
News & Upcoming Events

Things I wrote doing stuff out in the world

I’ve been meaning to drop past and blog a few things for the last couple of days, but my times largely been taking up by packing and writing and desperately trying to reach the pre-moving deadlines, and so most of this is old news to anyone following me on twitter or facebook. In any case, my story Dying Young from Eclipse 4 has been selected to be part of Gardner Dozois’ Years Best Science Fiction athology due out next year, which means I can go scratch another thing off the big ol’ list of places I’d like to get published but rarely talk about. There’s a full ToC over on SF Signal, and it looks like a very cool book to be included in. I should also mention that my story, The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again, is online over at Daily Science Fiction so that those who don’t want to subscribe can go check it out.

PeterMBall 13/12/2011
Journal

SNUFFLES FOR EVERYBODY

Still packing. Still writing. Still having a rather stressful week at the dayjob, courtesy of unruly technology that insists on not-working even after months of people trying to address the not-working issues. Suspect that I’m going to go into work tomorrow and be told there’s nothing we can do to fix the issue, which promises to be the kind of adventure people have in mind when they curse you to live in interesting times. This despite working late tonight in order to try and rectify things, or at least get the news now so I won’t fret about it for the next thirteen hours. On the plus side, today’s email brought the news of a potential reprint sale that means I may be able to cross yet another goal off my not-so-secret-list-of-writing-goals-I-have-no-control-over-and-therefore-don’t-talk-about – news, as always, once contracts are signed and things are official – and I’ve been quietly filling out the forms that will officially mean I no longer

PeterMBall 08/12/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something). I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met

PeterMBall 07/12/2011
Journal

Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies, The Author Wears a Paper Bag

I’m spending some quality time with the keyboard tonight, chasing the elusive end of the Flotsam story-sequence. I keep scribbling notes in the margins about things I’d like to mention when I eventually do the Flotsam recap, given the somewhat usual space the entire thing occupied in my process, but that’s most just keep the hamster wheel inside my head spinning while it comes up with the bit that comes next. It’s remarkably tempting to just type Rock’s Fall, Everyone Dies, but somehow that doesn’t seem an adequate conclusion for Keith and co (Public Service Announcement: the link in the sentence prior to this leads you to TV Tropes. God knows I just lost 45 minutes tooling around following links. You Have Been Warned). Because I’m packing and they’re around, I find myself working while wearing the dreaded paperbaghat. Basically, I’ve spent much of the evening looking like this: And, as is traditional, I forgot to take the damn thing off when

PeterMBall 06/12/2011
Journal

Haircuts and deadlines

I nipped off to the local shopping centre to have a haircut today. Not that you’d notice to look at me, all things considered, since in my vernacular having a haircut largely translates as choosing to look like an ill-kept hobo rather than arriving there accidentally. Fortunately, today’s hairdresser was one of the few who understood that was the goal of having a haircut, rather than attempting to try and make me look neat and tidy. I long ago came to grips with the fact that my hair doesn’t do neat and tidy unless I’m willing to shave most of it off, but for some reason hairdressers seem to take that as a challenge. # I’m a bit behind on things at the moment. I’m behind at the dayjob, I’m behind on the writing front, and I’m behind on the packing and cleaning plan that will allow me to vacate my flat on the 17th of December with minimal hassles and

PeterMBall 04/12/2011
Journal

Buskers, Daily SF, and a 2012 Challenge

Yesterday evening I was walking from work to the train-station, taking the long-cut through Southbank so I could enjoy the afternoon breeze and the Brisbane river, and I came across a pair of buskers playing a version of the Beatle’s Norwegian Wood as a duet on violin and banjo. They were kind of phenomenal, I think, considering they were utilizing a banjo, but the best part of it was the surprise of finding them there, just doing their thing, while the rest of us ambled to and fro, getting away from our dayjobs and heading into the evening. Had it been a different kind of evening I would have stopped and listened for a bit longer. I probably should have, but my mind kept drifting to other things, and I was hurrying home to pack and clean and get some writing done. And somewhere amid all that, it occurred to me that I should blog, and here we are, trying to figure

PeterMBall 23/11/2011
Journal

Lessons from the Day Job

I’ve come to the opinion that migrating a website from one host to another is rather like being in charge of the Death Star firing controls. You sit there quietly, doing your job, counting off the minutes until you unleash the awesome power of some technological masteripeice capable of destroying planets, and in your moment of triumph – right as you count down to one, in fact – it all goes to hell and your space station is obliterated in a fireball. I have all sorts of sympathy for Moff Tarkin this week. Poor dude was just trying to get shit done, you know?

PeterMBall 08/11/2011
Journal

Things

I’m drinking coffee with my breakfast this morning. This is worth mentioning because, quite honestly, for the last three weeks I’ve been sufficiently under the weather that the very thought of drinking coffee with breakfast was enough to induce nausea. Huzzah for good health; you always miss it when it fails you for a time. Today I’m going to write things. Like the coffee, it’s been a good three weeks since I last did that as well. Wish me luck.

PeterMBall 07/11/2011