Journal

Curtains

The curtains in my bedroom do a poor job of keeping the morning out of my face. I’m not going to speak about the week that was, because no-one really needs to see me complain and swear and generally carry on, but suffice it to say that the inability to keep out the morning sun was a source of great distress to me this morning. My first real night of sleep in weeks turned out to be not so full of slumber, and not for any of the good reasons, and I really wanted a sleep in to make up for it. Alas. Alak. The daystar strikes again and I my internal monologue now inserts three swear words between every thought instead of the two curses that were my default throughout the week. I mean, you should see the words I’ve had to edit out of this entry. It would have read like an Erving Walsh novel in its original

PeterMBall 09/04/2011
Journal

The reason I’m not blogging this week.

There’s people on leave at the dayjob this week, which means I working a lot of overtime this week and my dayjob has gone from “seriously, wtf did you hire me for, there’s nothing to do” to “not enough hours in the day to do the work of the two people I’m covering for.” I have the next installment of Flotsam to write. My house is a mess, I’m sleeping four hours a night, and I’m living on baked beans ’cause I don’t have the time to go shopping at the moment. I’m incapable of communicating with the world in a language other than panic and bile this week. In the words of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge. See you next week when things are calmer.

PeterMBall 04/04/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

What I Did on My Weekend

So, by my standards, it was an awesome but crazy-busy weekend. Often, when my weekends are quiet and sedate, I feel like I’m letting the side down and I find myself thinking, “man, I wish I had a crazy-busy weekend, you know?” Then the crazy-busy-weekend comes along and I go along with the flow and then Monday comes and I wake blinking like a stoned raccoon wondering why I’m so tired. I need coffee. I need to catch up on the writing that didn’t get done. And I really do need to schedule some more crazy-busy weekends in the near future. The weekend itself is kind of squished together, a little, in my head. Things bleed into each other. # Okay,  I guess the first thing is that I’ve been shortlisted for some Ditmar Awards this year, in both the Short Story category for One Saturday Night, With Angle, and the novella category for Bleed.  I found this out while

PeterMBall 28/03/2011
Journal

418

This is my four hundred and eighteenth post to this blog, which I guess means we’re on the downhill slope towards five hundred blog entries (whereupon I probably turn into a pumpkin). The last few days have settled into a comfortable kind of routine – I get home from the dayjob, I don’t turn on the internet, I read a book until five o’clock or so, then I eat dinner and force myself to write 1000 words before I go to sleep. My brain’s resisting the latter – last night I wrote the first five hundred words with ease, then scrambled for the last four hundred or so for hours before admitting defeat and collapsing into bed. Tonight there is teaching, which means I’ll have to forgo the reading, and the 1000 words will be an even bigger challenge. It needs to be done, because at this point 1000 words a day is pretty much the line between me and

PeterMBall 24/03/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mmm, BBQ

S0 yesterday was pretty good day. There was a delayed birthday dinner with the family, whereupon we set out for The Smoke in New Farm and ate our own bodyweight in American-style BBQ, then we set out to see Wil Anderson at the Brisbane Comedy Festival, and then because I was full of food and happy I stayed up to listen to the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast instead of going to sleep. Somewhere in there the home internet was fixed, so I rejoined the online world, and I wrote some things. About 1 o’clock I went to bed and actually slept for five hours, which is something I rarely do since starting the dayjob and discovered that being employed is actually far more stressful and soul-destroying than being unemployed (who knew?). So yesterday was a pretty good day, against all expectations, and tonight I make chili in the hopes that it’ll redeem today in much the same way. # The

PeterMBall 23/03/2011
Journal

Grr. Arg.

Tomorrow night I am making chili. If I’d thought to defrost some of the necessary components, I’d probably make chili for lunch when I got home from the dayjob, but since this morning was one of those mornings where I was lucky to leave the house with pants on the defrosting will have to wait. Ergo, tomorrow there will be chili, which is a better dinner meal than a lunch meal anyway. I’m behind on things again. It’s like a magic trick, the way it happens. One moment I’m chugging along, happily getting things done, then the world gestures with the left hand to distract me from the right hand, and then I’m looking at the to-do list and going “really? All of this? When did all of this arrive?” So it will be a light week of blogging this week, because I’m behind, and one of the things on my to-do list is ringing the internet company and informing

PeterMBall 22/03/2011
Journal

And Now We Are 34

Right, first things first, I give you the traditional dodgy cell-phone camera self-portrait, because no birthday is truly complete until my parents ring me and say “really, Peter, did you have to put that up on the internet?”: Of course, this probably qualifies as an improvement on last years birthday photograph, but I’ve made up for that by wearing the-hated-hawaiian-shirt-I-tricked-my-mother-into-buying and eating-unhealthy-things-that-are-not-breakfast-foods-for-breakfast and being-mildly-hangover-dammit, which should make up for that in my parent’s eyes. On the other hand, this is the first time in three years I’m suffering no physical pain on my birthday (2009 – buggered up my shoudler; 2010 – root canal) which helps things considerably, and I’m not at the primary dayjob today, which removes the major source of emotional angst from my mental landscape. To celebrate my birthday I will clean the flat, re- read Haruki Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, because it’s a damn good collection of fiction, then I will toddle off to teach a class on

PeterMBall 18/03/2011
Big Thoughts

Situation Comedy, Redux

To give you fair warning, this is a cranky post. It’s possible I’ll swear. Often. Loudly. You have been warned. # One of the more interesting threads running through the comments on yesterday’s post, both here and over on Facebook, was this attitude that sitcoms are inherently limited and/or required to suck by virtue of the genre conventions they operate under. To which I respond, no, fuck that, genres are as limited as we want them to be, pleas take your they-cater-to-the-masses-and-therefore-must-suck class-oriented modernist bullshit to someone else’s discussion. ‘Cause, you know, that kind of attitude is the reason we get bad science fiction, bad romance, bad action-adventure films, and pretty much everything else. You reap what you sow, in that respect, and unless you’re willing to ask for more it’s unlikely you’ll ever get it. I no more accept the inevitable suckiness of sit-coms than I do the argument that Avatar needed to be a three-hour exercise in narrative tedium; it

PeterMBall 17/03/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Why I Have Problems With the Big Bang Theory

I frequently find myself watching The Big Bang theory, finding it funny, then  hating myself for it. I mentioned this on the twitters and facebook yesterday, which immediately had a group of people saying, in essence, why, dude, it’s actually funny? And, yes, it is. There are times when it’s absolutely smart and entertaining, and I watch it for these moments because they’re a kind of humor that makes me happy and speaks to me as a man who self-identifies as a geek and enjoys being part of an active geek subculture. It’s a show that’s very, very good at doing that, creating little in-jokes among the broader strokes. It’s also a who willing to play to deeply entrenched cultural myths about geeks and women, which makes me less happy, and in some points outright angry. The default narrative of the show is generally one that posits all geeks are children looking for a mother figure and the bulk of

PeterMBall 16/03/2011
Journal

This probably wont be my new author photo

Somehow people neglected to mention that I was having a truly dire bad hair day yesterday. I managed to ignore it myself, right up until I got home from tutorials, caught sight of my reflection, and thought “hmmm, that’s not a look I want to continue with, is it?” For a while now I’ve been aware that I’m hitting the decision point where I either shave my head again, or settle in for the process of growing my hair out. These are, by and large, the only real options with my hair – genetics have essentially eliminated all other possibilities due to a weird series of cowlicks and a tendency towards ringlets. I used to think it came from my mother’s side of the family, largely because my dad has maintained the same hairstyle since I was, like, four, but after his brief experimentation with forgoing the regular haircut earlier this year I learned that it may well have been the

PeterMBall 11/03/2011
Journal

‘Tis a busy type of day today, so I’m going to just ramble on about things for the breif period I’ll be home between the first dayjob and the second. Plus there are several workmen helpfully digging up the road out the front of my house, ostensibly to lay down something or other involving pipes large enough to crawl through, which inevitably means my power or my internet or my phone line will go out at some point in the very near future. # On the list of conversations I never expected to have with my father, the one that starts with do you have any Warhammer 40k novels I could borrow? is pretty damn high on the list. I also never expected the answer to be yes, but you can’t borrow them right now, but you can have the short story anthologies if you like. Yet, somehow, we had that conversation yesterday, and my copies of Tales of the Heresy and

PeterMBall 10/03/2011
Works in Progress

A grumpy, crabby kind of blog post

Yesterday… Well, yesterday I did not run away and join the circus, but it was probably one of those days where I would have if I had viable circus-type skills and access to a travelling circus to run away with. I did not turn into the Incredible Hulk and smash things in a frenzy of anger. I did not resign from my dayjob to take up a position that would be more useful to the world at large, such as hunting werewolves or wrangling wild unicorns or, you know, going into politics. But, oh,  I was sorely tempted. Especially by the werewolf thing, which, really, goes to show how much I disliked certain aspects of yesterday, because I’m actually quite fond of werewolves. # We actually had a full cohort at write-club last night, which is the first time all four write-clubbers have been in the same place since other people started joining the inimitable Angela Slatter and I on a regular

PeterMBall 09/03/2011