Smart Advice from Smart People
International Women’s Day, Redux
Right, so, by this point everyone’s more-or-less seen this, but for the small percentage of you who haven’t:
PeterMBall
08/03/2011
Right, so, by this point everyone’s more-or-less seen this, but for the small percentage of you who haven’t:
Today is International Women’s Day, which is one of those days that ought to be celebrated. I’m tempted to post more, but everything I come up with always sounds a little “yay for women” and/or overly patronizing, which isn’t really what I’m aiming for on a day that’s all about women’s causes and their achievements. So, instead, I’m going to go find a worthy and appropriate cause to donate money to in celebration of the day. And later, possibly, I will attempt to write something doesn’t make me feel like a misogynist arse every time I touch the keyboard. # I sent off the third story in the Flotsam series yesterday, after which I collapsed into bed and tried to sleep and eventually gave up and read all of The Hunger Games in one fell swoop because it was there and I was too lazy to climb out of bed and get something else to read and it was obvious that sleep
Last night, because I am classy, I ate a dinner of hot-dog franks and baked beans and melted lite cheese slices with BBQ sauce. Then I wrote and wrote and wrote and accidentally fell asleep at the keyboard, which is one of those things that hasn’t happened to me in about fifteen years, and is even less productive than it sounds ’cause you wake up and discover all the odd things you’ve edited into the story by rolling onto the laptop in your sleep. In a less sane and reasonable world, I would have woken up this morning and gone back to writing, fixing the editing mistakes. Unfortunately I live in a world where the landlord is insistent about things like rent, so I got up and went to work at the dayjob instead. I may have done all of this, up until the going to work part, in my underwear. It’s also entirely possible I did not. I’ll leave
It’s a pleasant kind of Sunday afternoon, except for the parts that aren’t. In this case the parts that aren’t are largely covered by a party happening elsehwere, where my friend Chris is welcoming his son into the world alongside a bunch of other friends we have in common, while I’m here trying to figure out how to end the story that absoloutely needs to be ended and sent off later tonight. I’m at the point where I work on a scene then pace for a bit, then work on another scene and pace for a bit, then go back and change everything in the first scene to match the changes I’ve just made. Basically, my favourite kind of day, were it not for the awkward glances I keep shooting the clock and the under-my-breath muttering about my inability to get these issues sorted earlier. The only upside is that at least I’ve already met the younger Slee, who is
Yesterday I taught my first tutorial at the University of Queensland. Quite fortunately, no-one threw things, and I started to remember all the things I actually quite like about teaching and talking to aspiring writers. I’d never really been to UQ before this. I visited once or twice about fifteen years ago, back when I was trying to work out where I was going to go to university and UQ was my more-or-less second choice due to the lack of an actual undergraduate writing program and my parents informing me that I’d spend my first year living in an all-boys Christian college. I went back once again for a friend’s art show, but that only required me to find a building very close to the car park, right on the outskirts on the campus. Apart from that, it was unfamiliar territory. Turns out it’s quite big, and they’re very fond of stonework. Also, when printed, the campus maps have very
One of the fun things about owning a website is the ability to peer behind the scenes and see what people are typing into Google before they find you. Most of the time it’s utterly expected – various combinations of “Peter” and “Ball” and occasionally “Horn” feature prominently – and sometimes it’s stuff that makes slightly less sense, and sometimes it’s phrases that make you wonder exactly what there is on your blog that’s connected to it. I’m not sure, for example, why Google has suddenly taken to linking my blog to searches on Grey’s Anatomy, and I can’t imagine the people who follow the links are going to be anything other than disappointed. # Off to take my first tutorial at UQ this afternoon, which is a little nerve-wracking in the way that going to do something you haven’t done in a very long time can be when someone is paying you good money to do it well. Common sense
I wasn’t going to spam you with dodgy phone-camera records of the Great Bookshelf Reorganisation of 2011, but I got a phone-call from my dad and at some point he asked for an update, and I like my dad enough that I’m going to oblige him. The photograph above contains the first seven shelves of the reorganisation – top left is the brag shelf, the first two on the right are the selected nonfiction shelves, and the rest are just books by writers that remind me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. The vast majority of books on those shelves were written by about a dozen authors, and in a year I’ll have to reorganise the whole thing because many of them are still releasing books. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with the bottom shelves, though. I tend to fill bookcases based on a theme, but bottom shelves ruin that by being
A few years ago I wrote a story titled On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves, which eventually found its way into Fantasy Magazine in 2008. About a year after that I wrote On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War Machines of the Merfolk, which showed up in Strange Horizons in 2009 and then went on to be reprinted in a years best collection and pod-casted and other such things. I didn’t write an On The… story in 2010, despite my best intentions to do so. This makes me a little sad, ’cause it’s one of those things that I meant to do and simply didn’t find the time for. In my head they’re part of an ongoing series, albeit a rather slow-moving one, and there’s a file on my computer where I put notes regarding possible titles. Every now and then I’d open the file, pick a title, and start writing, and somehow the story would always mutate
On Saturday night, around 4 am, I started reorganising bookshelves. It seemed like the thing to do, since I’d been studiously not-sleeping for five hours after going to bed. Bookcases are one of the places where mess accumulates in my flat, largely because there’s so many of the damn things and I’ve developed a bad habit of taking things down, reading a couple of paragraphs, then putting them back somewhere else. What starts as a workable system quickly devolves over time, and every couple of years I have to start from scratch and reorganize the entire system. The whole process tends to start around 4 AM, ’cause insomnia is my response to doing to much and thinking too much and generally feeling like things are out of control. Reordering shelves is my way of figuring out what is and isn’t important in my life, and everything goes on from there. It’s a mental reset, fighting back against my natural tendency towards entropy. So far
So there’s a shortlist for the 2010 Australian Shadows horror awards available online, which includes Bleed in the Long Fiction category alongside such brilliant works as Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories and Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine and a handful of books I haven’t yet come across but I’m sure are excellent ’cause, really, once you start with Madigan Mine and The Girl with No Hands I’m inclined to just trust the judges tastes – those books are freakin’ great. So it’s a happy sort of day, even if it feels a bit odd to be on the short list because Bleed isn’t really a horror story. The complete short-list looks something like this, and it’s full of names that I’m very happy to see on short-lists. Congratulations to all who made it. LONG FICTION Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott (Picador Australia) The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga Publications) Guardian of the Dead by
On the evening of my dad’s sixtieth birthday we were all sitting on the thirteenth floor balcony while a storm rolled in. If we were in a movie the rapidly moving sheet of clouds would have been the special effect that signified the end of the world is nigh, so we all unearthed our mobile phones and digital cameras to take photographs. About fifteen minutes before I took the shaky, blurred mobile photo featured in this post the view from the thirteenth floor was all clear skies and blue ocean, and it was pretty enough that even my jaded-towards-beaches approach to life acknowledged that it was a pretty good place to celebrate someone turning sixty. I gave my dad a book – the Collected Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marques, ’cause everyone should read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings – and a CD/DVD of Leonard Cohen’s 2009 tour ’cause we were meant to go to Cohen’s show last year,
I’m working late at the dayjob today, having started late under the assumption that driving back from the Sunshine Coast would be a foolhardy undertaking this morning. I’ve had to much good food and not enough sleep, and I’m suffering from the vague ick that comes from sleeping in an overly air-conditioned room. When I got to work I was told about the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Every couple of minutes someone plays a youtube clip of the events, or downloads a snippet of news from the internet, or simply sees something new on twitter. Some people have family over there, others were just planning to head over to NZ for a holiday in the near future. I’ve never been to Christchurch, but I hear it’s nice. I’m starting to suspect that nature has it in for the whole southern hemisphere of the planet at the moment. If you have the resources to do so, it may be a