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

PeterMBall 22/06/2010
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

PeterMBall 15/06/2010
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.

PeterMBall 14/06/2010
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

PeterMBall 13/06/2010
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

PeterMBall 11/06/2010
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.

PeterMBall 10/06/2010
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.

PeterMBall 09/06/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

In Which I Wax Enthusiastic About Some Recent Reading

So Gail Carriger’s Soulless is pretty fricken’ awesome, assuming a given value of awesome that roughly equals me rabidly devouring the book like the unholy mixture of crack and mind-candy it is. I’d fallen for this book so hard after the first chapter that it could have spent the remaining pages kicking puppies and forcing kittens to recite Mein Kampf in their native lolcat and I still would have loved it. Yes, I lapse into hyperbole here, but the book deserves some hyperbole, for it is one of those novels that operates on the fundamental assumption that pure undistllled awesome will carry the day. It bypasses the critical impulses and pleads directly to the little part of the soul that’s been waiting for this book all along without ever knowing of its existence. It inspires the kind of unconditional joy that last emerged when I was sixteen and reading David Eddings.

PeterMBall 08/06/2010
Journal

Doing my best not to swear in this post

I keep trying to be online this week, but the world moves against me. It has ever since Monday, when my internet provider decided I’d had enough of a good thing five minutes from the end of the latest Doctor Who on I-Tunes. Since then my internet access seems to have been choked to the point where I long for the glory days of dial-up where webpages could load in ten minutes on a good day. It’s gotten to the point that I have no idea whether this post will actually post – I’m writing it, hitting the publish button, and walking away for three or four hours. There’s even odds the connection will have itmed out before this paragraph was loaded onto the webpage. Needless to say, this presents problems with e-mail (it takes an hour for gmail to load, longer to actually get into a specific e-mail message). If you’re waiting on something, I’ll get back to you whenever

PeterMBall 03/06/2010
Journal

My to-do list

At some point today I’m planning on making cupcakes, which means I have to clean the mixing bowl, which means I have to eat the salad currently sitting in the mixing bowl as it occupies a shelf of my fridge. And I frickin’ hate salad. There is no reasonable excuse for lettuce. At some point today I’m going to continue going through the Cold Cases draft, engaging in all the chapter-by-chapter tinkering that needs to be done before I hand the manuscript over. I am still unsure of this book, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I am unsure of everything I write that’s longer than 1000 words. At some point today I’m going to vacuum the seemingly endless carpet of shed hair that covers the floor of my house. On the plus side, that’s not going to be a problem for the next few months. There is some pretty simple math that gets done when your lazy, your

PeterMBall 31/05/2010
Journal

In Which Deadlines Make My Life Very Tiny

It’s one PM on a Monday. The rejection count has risen by one (6 for the year). I’m spawning new projects at a rate of knots instead of toying at the tangled web of problems that is the novella I’m meant to be finishing. I took this morning off to listen to Jeff Buckley’s Grace and watch the latest episode of Doctor Who. All in all, rather standard for the last-week-of-a-deadline rush. I’ve noticed that deadlines make my life very small and non-bloggable. I’m leaving the house today – just heading out to pick up groceries and check my PO Box – and I’m unfeasibly excited about the prospect of seeing other people for the first time in about ten days (I try to avoid this kind of non-contact, but last week was a mess of social engagements that got cancelled for various reasons and I didn’t have the energy to scrounge up replacements at the last minute). There will

PeterMBall 24/05/2010
Works in Progress

2010 Rejection Count: 5

It’s been 36 dayssince I clocked up my first rejection of the year, but as the submissions start going out more regularly things are picking up. 5 rejections done, 95 rejections to go in order to hit my 100 for the year. Of course, I’m being completely pantsed by my friend Chris Green whose already doubled my total, but that’s because Chris is made of awesome while my primary composition is slackness. Mind you, I’m going to catch up. I just have to remember how to write a short story, since I seem to have fogotten (yes, again)

PeterMBall 16/05/2010