ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I so wanted this to be a better book than it is

So I’ve been trying to read Edgar Rice Burroughs A Prince of Mars for over a month now. It…ah…it isn’t going at all well. So not well, in fact, that I actually put together a photograph of the book, the Spokesbear and my frowny-face of extreme displeasure as an illustrative aid, but that plan was thwarted by the fact that I’m house-sitting and brought the wrong thingamywatsits* to connect the camera to the computer. Hell, I suspect reading this book is actually making me a little crazy and there is some form of retaliatory planetary romance pastiche in my writing future**. Were I a saner person this is the point where I’d cut my losses and give up on the book, acknowledging that Princess of Mars is so deeply ingrained in the cultural prejudices of it’s time with not enough cool stuff around the edges to ease me past the knee-jerk string of “for fuck’s sake” responses I get while reading. Sadly, I’m not that sane person. I keep reading regardless, determined to get to the end. I just take my time. I loathed every minutes of Gabriel Garcia Marqeuz’s 100 Years of Solitude and it took me four years to finish, but I did it. And it’s a pity, really, because Marquez’s short fiction is often extraordinary and it took me years to discover that due to the slow pacing of the novel. I suspect it’s going to take me much longer to finish Princess of Mars. I also

Read More »
08/07/2010 1 Comment
News & Upcoming Events

Bleed available for pre-order

So yesterday the various forms of mail brought in my contributor copies of the new Horn layout, my ninth rejection of the year, and the following news: Bleed by Peter M Ball Cover art by Dion Hamill, design by Amanda For ten years ex-cop Miriam Aster has been living with her one big mistake – agreeing to kill three men for the exiled Queen of Faerie. But when an old case comes back to haunt her it brings a spectre of the past with it, forcing Aster to ally herself with a stunt-woman and a magic cat in order to rescue a kidnapped TV star from the land of Faerie and stop the half-breed sorcerer who needs Aster’s blood. Ten years ago Miriam Aster learnt a simple lesson: when a faerie asks you to kill someone, the worst thing you can say is sure. Today she’s about to learn that worse things can happen when the past refuses to stay behind you. Bleed will be available at Aussiecon 4 in Melbourne, September 2010 and is now available for preorder.

Read More »
07/07/2010 1 Comment
Works in Progress

One day I’ll make things easy on myself…

Today I’m having a running conversation with my brain where I say “time to work now, buddy” and the brain says “dude, you’ve taken industrial strength antihistamines, why don’t you just sod off and let me sleep, yeah?” Fortunately I once spent three or four years living with a girlfriend who had cats, so I know exactly how well I can work while living on industrial strength antihistamines. The brain gets no free passes, there will be work. The real problem, of course, has nothing to do with the brain-clouding chemicals that are currently allowing me to cohabitate with two felines without, you know, dying. No, the real problem is that rewriting the opening of Black Candyis hard, and that I’ve made a hash of it several times prior to this. Part of it is the world-building, since I’m trying to jam together a bunch of concepts that don’t quite fit together, and the rest is a familiar problem. One of these days I will learn: not everything I write needs a tangled back-story. One day I may even introduce a character to someone they don’t know.

Read More »
06/07/2010 No Comments
Works in Progress

July Plans

And lo, the edits are sent back to the editor and the novella once titled Cold Cases is going through the various transmogrifications it goes through to become a book titled Bleed instead. Various things contribute to the feeling of done-ness – seeing concept sketches for the cover art, finally settling on the new title, hearing that the ISBN-type stuff is being put into motion. There will still be work to go, presumably edits and proofs, but this book has officially evacuated the portion of my brain that requires tinkering and subconscious thought. It’s no longer a project. Which means it’s time to get started on what comes next: rewriting Black Candy. And since I’m house-sitting this month, taking care of the cats and chickens that belong to some friends who have dissappeared into the wilds of Europe, I’m going to try and pack the bulk of the rewrite into July. Once more into the breach and all that.

Read More »
05/07/2010 2 Comments
Works in Progress

Almost Done

I’ve been writing a sequel to Horn, one way or another, since February 6 of 2009. I suspect I’d started even earlier than that with ideas scribbled down in notebooks and such, but Feb 6 is the first time it migrated to a computer file that’s usually the start of my writing process. Since then I’ve voluntarily scrapped an entire novella draft, rewritten the plan for how I thought a series of Miriam Aster books should progress, and written a second novella to fit the new concept that was about 75% longer than projected. Some days I dispaired that I’d ever actually see the end of the process – what started as twenty-thousand words about Aster and a talking cat ended up in a very different place. Trying to get there scared the shit out of me more than once; I have a comfort zone as a writer, and this was well outside it. But it appears it’s very close to being done. I came home from my D&D game tonight to an e-mail containing edits from TPP and they contain the phrase “mostly line edits with a few comments.” After months of stressing over plot holes and backstory-wrangling, those words are freakin’ magical. It means at some point in the future I can stop thinking about the novella and it can go off and be a book. The curse of seeing this news at eleven o’clock at night is that there’s no-one to call and say “holy freaking shit, its

Read More »
01/07/2010 1 Comment
Journal

Things that Happened While I Was Otherwise Distracted

I’ve been distracted of late – either by trying to get the latest version of Cold Cases ready or hole-in-my-head drama depending of the day –  and I somehow managed to miss a whole heap of stuff happening around the traps. 1) The latest edition of the Terra Incognita Podcast is up, featuring me reading my story Black Dog: A Biography that came out in the Interfictions II anthology last year. Unlike most of the previous podcasts of my work this one actually involved me recording the reading myself, an experience that forced me to realise exactly how inarticulate I am in the verbal form (seriously; apparently I drop the consonants out of words and rely on vowel sounds and inflections to get things right, and we do not speak of how many times I had to restart things in order to avoid this). 2) Angela Slatter’s Brisneyland by Night is the feature story over at the Twelth Planet Podcast at the moment, which pleases me greatly for reasons that may or may not become apparent if you’ve read Horn. Brisneyland is part of the forthcoming Sprawl anthology from TPP. 3) My sister returned live and well from her trek over the Kokoda Trail yesterday. Notable primarily because my parents didn’t send me crazy with phone-calls when there was news of trouble in the area, and because she returned bearing coffee beans ready for my caffeinated consumption. 4) My doctor continues to taunt me by having me come in for appointments where he doesn’t

Read More »
22/06/2010 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

It’s an Aster kind of day.

First, a public service announcement re-posted from the livejournal of my illustrious publisher: (The reprint of) Horn failed to be delivered today but I have rescheduled for tomorrow and they should then be out in the post to the preorders in tomorrow evening’s mail. If you’ve been holding off buying your copy of Horn til they were back in stock, as of tomorrow they will be and you can buy your copy here. Again, whilst stocks last – I expect to have copies for sale at Worldcon but there were quite a few reservations for this second printing as well. Which seems like as good a segue as we’re going to get to talk about the current state of the second Miriam Aster novella, Cold Cases. Today I was full of virtue. I rose early, I took my daily dose of penicillin, then I settled down at the computer with a cup of coffee and a Bob Dylan CD and vowed to remain there until the problem of not having a finished version of Cold Cases  was finally solved. I have convinced myself this is doable by promising that a finished draft today means I can take tomorrow off and prepare my next D&D game before we play on Thursday. That was about seven hours ago, and since then I’ve heard Bob sing Everybody Must Get Stoned about twelve times. It appears to be working too, but I suspect seven hours of Bob Dylan is my limit. The upside is

Read More »
15/06/2010 No Comments
Journal

Chaos and Rejection

It’s entirely possible that I’ll spontaneously combust at some point today. Somehow it’s become an intersection of deadlines, doctor’s appointments, social engagements and other madness that all needs to be done *now*. Naturally, I have a plan for getting everything done. Just as naturally, it’s all going to hell the moment I hit the doctor’s surgery. While I totally dig my local surgery, they’re often overbooked and the waiting times are haphazard. On the plus side, I seem to have moved past the nightmares where the stitches in my head split open and I bleed over my bed. Now the only thing waking me up is the stitches hurting when it gets really cold around 4 in the morning. In other news: the yearly rejection count hit 7 today, but this is counterbalanced by having the first new story sent out in a long, long while.

Read More »
14/06/2010 No Comments
Journal

Sleep

I went to bed around 9:30 last night and got up around 9:30 this morning. Partially this was a response to getting up around 5 in the morning to take my sister to the airport*, partially its a response to my inability to sleep for longer than an hour at a time since I had the cyst cut out. Near as I can tell, the twelve hours I spent in bed equated to about seven hours of fitful sleep. The rest was all tossing and turning and getting out of bed to make sure that my nightmare I’d just had about the stitches pulling open and starting to bleed really were just nightmares. Obviously, I am not a good patient. Me and bleeding have never been a good combination. And I really, really want to wash my hair. Now I have to go and make up for lost writing time. There is stuff that needs doing, and I’ve been slack ever since Thursday. *wish her luck – she’ll be walking the Kokoda Trail for the next ten days and I’m quietly expecting to get another story out of my parents growing concern.

Read More »
13/06/2010 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

More recent reading

So yesterday I had a cyst the size of a walnut removed from my scalp, which served as the catalyst for the rather enthusiastic bandage job posted last night.  The combination of restless nerves, a long wait in the surgery, and the complete inability to sleep due to the bandages constricting my jaw meant I spent a lot of the day reading. Changeless, the follow-up to the Gail Carriger novel I blogged about on Tuesday, was a fun read that didn’t really have the zomgawesomesauce feel of Soulless. Which is not to say that it isn’t full of Steampunky goodness and a readable book, just that I missed the added frisson of enjoyment that came from the intertextual Austen-esque moments that made the first book so much fun. Austen-esque doesn’t work when you’ve got happy, sexually active couples in the opening pages. I found myself missing that. Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, however, was the exact kind of comfort reading I was looking for around 1 AM. I picked this book up after listening to the DVD commentary by authors David Levithan and Rachel Cohn on the film adaptation (which is a gently charming coming of age story that I bought largely on the strength of the awesome commentary track featuring the novel’s authors, the director, and the screenwriter). It’s a sweet coming-of-age love story with all sorts of cool stuff happening around the edges (punk music, New York, characters who are gay as opposed to gay characters), and it’s

Read More »
11/06/2010 2 Comments
Journal

So my day’s been fun…

How was yours? This post is dedicated to my parents, who immediately asked whether they were going to see such a less than flattering portrait go up on the blog.

Read More »
10/06/2010 3 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Don’t think, just follow the link and order

Angela Slatter’s short story collection, The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales, is available for pre-order in hardcover or paperback. And you’ve gotta admit that it’s a pretty awesome-looking book:   The official launch is at Worldcon in September. It goes without saying that the book itself is going to rock and you should totally secure yourself a copy.

Read More »
09/06/2010 No Comments

PETER’S LATEST RELEASE

RECENT POSTS

SEARCH BLOG BY CATEGORY
BLOG ARCHIVE