Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Twenty-Six Hours of Melancholy

A Sweet and Pensive Sadness When I was in my second year of university we studied Hotel Sorrento, a play by the Australian playwright Hannie Rayson that was later turned into a film. One of the themes running through the play – one of many – was an exploration of melancholy, and two lines in particular remained with me some fifteen years after I first read it. The first was a female character asserting that men do not feel melancholy, that it’s a particularly female emotion. The second was the definition: a sweet and pensive sadness. A sweet and pensive sadness. I mean, fuck, how do you go past that, eh? It’s a beautifully expressed idea when you hear it at nineteen, and I was immediately smitten. I don’t remember how it happened, or where it happened, but I fell and I fell hard, in a very, melancholy, fuck yeah, that’s the stuff for me kind of way. I still

PeterMBall 24/10/2011
Journal

Busy week is busy

Things I’ve been doing instead of posting on this here blog: Writing things. Mostly this thing, but occasionally other things. Yes, that’s very vague, but that’s pretty much the way my brain works at this point: Writing! Things! Woo! Reading things. Specifically: reading Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest (pretty good), the Bloodshot/Hellbent tandem from Cherie Preist (also pretty good), the new Christa Faust novel, Choke Hold (awesome), and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (very good, but I’m a sucker for essays). Going to things. Specifically: AusCon 2 and the EWF Digital Writers conference Working a day job which, magically, does not suck and continues to be awesome. Doing my washing. Preparing to move out of my current abode in December. How about you guys? Anyone up to anything interesting?

PeterMBall 16/10/2011
Journal

28th September 2011, 7:15 AM

There’s something rather pleasant about writing in hotel rooms. For starters, there’s nothing to distract you, especially if the room you’re renting is marked by a list of things that don’t work: lights, television, the hotel’s broadband network. Hotel rooms endeavour to be pleasingly utilitarian at the best of times, and once you remove those little creature comforts there’s really nothing to do but go out, sleep, or write. And I’m in Rockhampton for work at the moment. Fritz the Laptop is getting a pretty good workout as a result. It’s kinda odd, ’cause I feel like I should be complaining about the various things that aren’t functioning in the room, but mostly I’ve just found them to be a pleasant surprise. It meant I did things I wouldn’t ordinarily do, like take a bath in the hotel bathroom and dance to the light of the laptop screen, and go to bed at a reasonable hour. My only complaint is the hotel

PeterMBall 28/09/2011
Works in Progress

Hear Me Roar

A few days ago I sat down and with the Spokesbear and had a talk. It wasn’t a pleasant talk. It never is when the Spokesbear isn’t happy, even when he’s trying to be nice about it, and in this instance he was both very unhappy and very pleasant about his unhappiness. The gist, more or less, went something like this: “Your process over the last twelve months has been arsetastic and full of whine. Perhaps you’d like to do something about this, dumb-ass.” It’s very hard to argue with spokesbear when he’s right. Also, it’s hard to argue with him when he makes the face. You know, this one: It’s the face he makes when he’s disappointed by things. The Spokesbear is wise, but the Spokesbear is not particularly patient, and refusing the face usually ends up with me getting mauled in the night. Which, lets face it, is slightly embarrassing when the thing doing the mauling is a stuffed bear that

PeterMBall 17/09/2011
Journal

Just a Peaceful, Lazy Friday

It’s been a particularly lazy morning around these parts. I woke up, I read things, I dozed. I repeated the process until I’d read the latest installment of Trent Jamieson’s Death Works series, whereupon I emerged and ate breakfast and generally started pottering on the internet. In a couple of minutes I’ll head off to get some lunch and do my washing, whereupon I’ll write some things. Later, I’ll pack some books ahead of the move, then go across town to catch up with the Cthulhu peeps and play Space: 1889 a few days ahead of our usual schedule. So it goes on Fridays, where I have the option of being lazy and engaging in crazy rescheduling shenanigans. Thursdays are writing days, the one where I blow out my wordcount in a manic enthusiasm. Fridays are about respectable, reasoned levels of wordage. They’re about reigning in my impulses and saying “yes, I know there are two more days of this to

PeterMBall 16/09/2011
Journal

Three Things

WRITING RACE I’m going to be the guest racer at tonight’s Australian Writer’s Marketplace Writing Race, an online gathering where a bunch of writers…well, write. *Waves hello to any AWM Writing Races that drop past* I last guested at one of these back in 2009, just after Horn was released, and it proved to be a lot of fun. Kind of like Write Club, only online and with people who aren’t the inimitable Angela Slatter. If you’re a writer at a loose end this evening, why don’t you strap on your writing pants, fire up your keyboard, and come join us on the AWMforums around 8 o’clock. THE DALEK GAME I know I’ve said this before, but if you’re not following Kathleen Jenning’s Dalek Game illustration, you really are missing out on one of the most charming series of illustrations on the internet. I recommend Daleks Can Jump Puddles, the flappereque Roxie Dalek, The Dalek in the Rye, and…and…and…look, just go

PeterMBall 13/09/2011
Journal

The Day After the Unity Walk

A few weeks ago my sister signed up for the Unity Walk to raise money for Parkinson’s Queensland. Her initial goal, quite modestly, was raising $500 in sponsorship. By last Sunday, when she started the walk, she’d raised $2185, most of that in the seven-day period between her first putting the link up on Facebook and now. According to the Unity Walk website, she was the second highest individual fund-raiser in the state. I know a bunch of people donated after reading about the walk on this blog. Some did it openly, some anonymously, and everyone did so generously. We wanted to say thank-you. You people, you all rock in the hardest and most rocking-est kind of way.    

PeterMBall 30/08/2011
Journal

Unity Walk Redux

My sister’s posted a short blog about the reason she’s doing the Unity Walk for Parkinson’s Australia. It goes a little something like this: My Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003, although in hindsight, he had probably been suffering some of the symptoms for about fifteen years before that. Since the diagnosis came through, Dad has accepted this condition that life has chosen for him. He’s never once asked ‘Why me?’, I’ve never heard him complain, he accepts the physical limitations imposed on him, and while he doesn’t often ask for help, he does accept it gratefully when offered. Parkinson’s Queensland have been an enormous help to Dad, and Mum, who is inevitably his primary carer. They were there to offer advice on what medical staff in hospital needed to know when Dad had his heart operation last year. They provide visits to centres to show what little devices around the home are going to make life just

PeterMBall 25/08/2011
Journal

My Sister is Walking For Parkinsons Queensland

My father has Parkinson’s disease. It’s one of those things I don’t talk about here, but the short version is this: as a disease, it sucks in a pretty major way. It sucks for the person who has it, and it sucks for the people who care about them. It’s a degenerative disorder of the nervous system that causes a reduction in the dopamine levels, and it causes tremors, slowness of movement, muscle rigidity, instability and has associated affects that are even less fun. This Sunday my sister is planning on doing the Parkinsons Unity Walk to raise money for Parkinson’s Queensland and she’s currently collecting donations from supporters. If you’re in a position to sling a couple of bucks her way between now and Sunday, please consider doing so. Not just because it’s a good cause – there’s lot of good causes – but because this is a pretty damn personal cause for me, my sister, and my family.

PeterMBall 24/08/2011
Journal

Rain

More rain, today, and I do love the rain. Last night I turned off all the lights around nine o’clock, trundled off to bed with Fritz the Laptop, and wrote things while it was deliciously cold and wet and almost rainy. There were houses in the neighborhood who’d lit their wood fires, filling the air with a piney-smokey scent. It was…kinda awesome really. A deeply satisfying end to the evening, and one where I felt utterly justified in finishing my writing stint after hitting the thousand word goal I’d set myself. Completely satisfying days at the keyboard come along so rarely that I celebrate them when they happen. My default state is…anger, I guess. Desperation. An incessant need to do more. Doing *enough* is a foreign concept. There is never enough, really, just nights where I feel like I’ve reached the outer borders. This morning I’ve been plugging dates into calendars, marking off deadlines. I’m plugging in things I’d like

PeterMBall 23/08/2011
Journal

Two Short Thoughts

It’s a cold and blustery morning here in Brisbane, and after I get home from work this evening I’m going to need to disappear down the rabbit hole and get some writing done. The entire week is something of an experiment in that front, figuring out a new routine that works around the dayjob. I’m experimenting with getting up earlier, packing an extra hour into my pre-work routine so I can tend to my email and the website and get some reading done. It seems to be going well, although by “going well” I really mean “I have time to write this here blog post and might do it again tomorrow, if only so people don’t keep assuming that I’ve been kidnapped by ninjas and sacrificed to great C’thulhu.” My curse is to spend my life wandering the earth, bemoaning the fact that I do not write enough. And it occurs to me that. as curses go, that’s probably not

PeterMBall 22/08/2011
Journal

Confessions of an Absentee Writer

It’s been a quiet handful of weeks. I wrote, I got the latest instalment of Flotsam away on time, despite the fact that it’s a giant bastard chunk of story, then I collapsed onto a couch for two weeks watching the glory that is the Bruce Timm DC Animated Oeuvre. I have know come to the conclusion that Bruce Timm’s animated works are kinda like cocaine, but awesome and not really bad for you. Batman Beyond has Henry Rollins as a supervillain named Mad Stan that is every bit as glorious as Henry Rollins playing a supervillain should be. The Superman animated series has Lorry Petty playing a supervillain, and as a child of the nineties who has watched Tank Girl far more often than is healthy, it’s safe to say that there is never enough Lorry Petty being awesome in the world. If the Justice League Unlimited series managed to wedge Ice Cube into its voice actor list alongside

PeterMBall 15/08/2011