Works in Progress

Metrics!

For the first time in a long while, I’ve managed to write two thousand words in the space of a day. While this is certainly good news around these parts, it comes with the somewhat sickening realisation that Giving Up Coffee is Working. Interestingly, kicking the draft version of Claw into gear has involved sketching the bare bones of a scene – basically, getting the conflict and the final line down – then trusting that I’ll be able to come back and flesh things out once I’ve got the structure in place. This is a new and different territory so far as my process goes, and may well come back to bite me in a few thousand words time. ________________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30 Rejections in 2010: 21/100 Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)

PeterMBall 03/10/2010
Journal

Coffee, Meaning, and Getting What You Get

I woke up this morning with a desire to blog, only to discover that the back end of my website is down for some kind of regular maintenance, and this presents problems because I’ve grown so used to using it that the thought of posting straight to livejournal seems redundant. So instead I write this elsewhere and assume it’ll go online sooner or later. It’s 8:36 in the morning. It’s raining. I’m barefoot and wearing my oversized winter writing coat and listening to old Cure songs. There’s a list of five things I want to accomplish today sitting beside the keyboard. The first thing on the list is the production of words for Claw. The second thing on the list is the revision of words for Black Candy. If you read yesterday’s post, you may be seeing a theme. Right now I’m missing coffee. Not the caffeine or the taste of it, just the comforting way it used to fit

PeterMBall 03/10/2010
Journal

Musings

Today is wet and dreary and therefore full of awesome. I’m always far fonder of the world when it’s overcast and dreary than I am during the sunny days, especially now that it’s spring and the demolition-force humidity and heat of Summer are just on the horizon. I am steadily ignoring the fact that there are multiple breeds of football dominating the airwaves at the moment and pretending the rest of the world has gone away for a while. It’s always easier to write on such days, although I’ll admit that I miss the comfort of having another cup of coffee and watching the world through my office window. Soon I will head off and make myself some soup. Until then I will sit and think about Claw, which is proving to be unruly and hard-to-tame due to my insistence on a) not repeating the opening tropes that were used in Horn and Claw; and b) my desire to make use

PeterMBall 02/10/2010
Journal

Cutting back on coffee, redux

So it’s been a week since I started cutting back on caffeine, replacing my 9+ cups of coffee a day with a single cup in the morning and the occasional cup of tea in the afternoon. It’s made for a trying week, especially since it came with a side-order of mandatory workshopping and a slew of ongoing problems with my internet access*, so I haven’t yet gotten around to answering all the various people who keep asking “why, for the love of god, why?” whenever I mentioned this on various social media. The short-answer goes something like this: I recently availed myself to the counselling service the Australian social-security system offers to the long-term unemployed, during which we spoke of many things. The Fear was among them, as was my frustration at my inability to put a consistent writing routine together due to increasing anxiety about bills, rent, insomnia, the inability to find consistent employment, and assorted other issues I generally don’t

PeterMBall 27/09/2010
Journal

Withdrawal

Please let it be known that I’ve been good this week. I mean, there was no writing worth speaking of, but I made it through the various things required of me without blowing people up with my INVISIBLE MIND LASERS, even though parts of the week were frustrating enough that I only endured the passage of time by pretending I truly did have said mind lasers and slipped into a mental debate about the ethics of using them to eliminate pesky annoyances. The next time I’m locked in the room with disciples of positive thinking for three days, there will be no internal debate. I’m just going to channel my inner Ming the Merciless and destroy the goddamn world. This may be an overreaction, but I’m like that, really. Hyperbole and overreaction are my default state, and the next time I won’t be polite when I point out that it takes 21 days to form a habit shit is fucking

PeterMBall 24/09/2010
News & Upcoming Events

Reviews and Other Stuff

Today has been long and slightly odd and overburdened with irritating moments and it involves me cutting back on coffee (which is somewhat akin to saying “flee, mortals, for I will lay waste to your world”), so for obvious reasons there will not be much by way of bloggage this evening. So instead I’m going to point you towards Narelle Harris’s review of Bleed and another review of the same over on Averagely Inadequate. And if you remember the mysterious squee and snoopy-dance of acceptance that I was being very vague about just prior to Worldcon, there might be a clue as to what I was freaking out in the last paragraph of today’s post on Jonothan Strahan’s Coode Street blog.

PeterMBall 21/09/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

What I’m Watching: Xena, Warrior Princess

So I’ve been watching the first seasons of Xena for the last couple of days. Largely I blame Tansy Rayner Roberts for this, since I borrowed the DVDs from a friend after reading the Xena Rewatch Notes on her blog. I can recommend going and checking those out, should you want to follow an in-depth discussion of the first season, for although I’m enjoying the show I’m primarily going to note the three things that are really, really bugging me. Surprisingly, it’s not the casual relationship to history – I’m totally down with the mix-and-match approach to myth and historical reference points. It’s not the dodgy CGI monsters either (although I’m struggling to figure out where the hell the bat-winged, skeletal dryads came from in one of the early Season 2 DVDs). It’s not even Gabrielle, who is irritating for the first half of the season *with a damn purpose*. It’s not even the complete disregard of the laws of physics

PeterMBall 20/09/2010
Gaming

Tonight’s Hijinx

Tonight I’m off to see Scott Pilgrim Versus the World and hobnob with my DnD/Pathfinder Peeps for the first time in a month. Lo, it shall be an evening of hardcore nerdery, and I shall return all revitalised and ready to geek at the world. I should probably go through the module I’m running again, just in case, although it’s likely to be a futile exercise given that three-quarters of the party have perfected the art of using the guilt trip as an offensive weapon. Were I the kind of guy to ramble on about roleplaying games, which I am under ordinary circumstances, I would wax philosophical about the good old days when Charisma was a dump stat and we fireballed the kobolds prior to whacking them with a broadsword. Of course, before that can happen, there must be words. And stories must be sent out once more, to brave the perilous winter of the outside world. And I should

PeterMBall 16/09/2010
News & Upcoming Events

Just Sayin’

Should you find yourself in the market for a signed copy of Bleed and not be in a position to corner me in my natural habitat, it’s worth noting that Pulp Fiction Bookshop in Brisbane’s Anzac Square Arcade got me to sign a bunch of the stock when I was in there earlier today (which also included a few copies of Horn, should you be looking for one). This isn’t a regular occurrence for me (in fact, it’d be the very first time I’ve done it), so I have no idea how long they’ll have said signed copies in stock and such. But they have them. On sale, like. For you to buy. And I get to add one more reason to the long list of reasons I fricken’ heart the Pulp Fiction staff. Of course, should you not be in Brisbane, then this probably doesn’t help much. Sorry about that. Although I should probably mention that there are still

PeterMBall 15/09/2010
Works in Progress

Thoughtful Writer Face

I have drunk the coffee and eaten the toast (with ginger marmalade yet, and lo it was delicious) and deployed the thoughtful writer face. All is in readiness and it’s time to work, dammit. Fear me, works of unfinished fiction, for I am mighty and today you will fall before me. Or, you know, something like that. I’ve been wearing my viking PJs* to bed this week, and they make me somewhat belligerent in the mornings. That said, I could truly use a day where one of the projects I’m working on achieves some kind of measurable progression. I’m working on a pair of drafts (1 short-story, 1 novella) where the endings are far more well-defined than the beginning, all of which is relatively unusual for me, so I’m spending a lot of time circling the stories and working out which way is the best result. This will continue until I get frustrated and just belt out a beginning. I used

PeterMBall 15/09/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

5 Books

If you were to ask me for book recomendations right now – and yes, I know you aren’t, but lets just say you were – you’d probably get a list that runs something like this: The Thin Man, Dashiel Hammett: Screw The Maltese Falcon – if you’re only going to read one hardboiled detective story by Hammett then you really should start with this one. I picked it up on the back of watching Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist when it was mentioned that the title characters in the film were based on the relationship between Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles in the film version of this book, and it’s not hard to see why they were taken with the couple. Nick and Nora Charles are fricken’ awesome – their banter, their affection for one another, their goddamn chemistry as a literary couple – and it’s refreshing to see a hardboiled investigator who is actually happy much of the time.

PeterMBall 14/09/2010
Works in Progress

Once more into the breach, dear friends…

We’re fighting the doldrums here in the word-mines this week, trying to bully my work ethic into something resembling its normal state after house-guests, cons and the furious rush of getting a new book into existence. Such lapses are not unexpected, but they are unacceptable, and so I’ve deployed the Spokesbear into his advisory position and sat down with my giant to-do list of doom to work out what needs to be done for the rest of September. And so, September gets declared a win if I achieve the following: – Write the first 25,000 words of Claw, the third Miriam Aster Novella (This is the only non-negotiable thing on my list at the moment, since it has a deadline of November 15th and I want plenty of time to whip it into shape) – Revise the first 25,000 words of Black Candy (I tried to get this finished this book before worldcon, but redrafting led me to realise I’d

PeterMBall 13/09/2010