Works in Progress

The follies of the past week

1) I signed up for NaNoWriMo There’s plenty of folks among my circle of friends who do this every year, but for me it’ll be the first attempt at the nano-madness in seven or eight eight years. I primarily signed up because I miss the rigor of the public daily wordcount and it’ll be nice to have somewhere to put one without boring the hell out of everyone reading the blog. Should you be interested in watching me change the totals on a wordcount meter I can be found under the name PeterMBall on the nano site. I also promise there will be minimal wordcount updating on this here blog. Honest. 2) I started writing short stories again And it’s been a while, I tell you. I took a break from short fiction around the middle of the year with the goal of getting a novel drafted. After that I took a break in order to focus on getting the draft of Claw done.

PeterMBall 21/10/2009
Works in Progress

Juvenalia Week

After realising that the last few years have been rather good to him on the writing front, Jason Fischer has decided to take a quick tour through the lands of the writer he used to be and declared this Juvenalia Week. And since he’s under the assumption that the embarrassing mistakes of yesteryear are something all writers share, he’s encouraging others to join him in his public display of work from our misbegotten pasts. I’m nothing if not a joiner, but seeing as I can’t find my old book of short stories from when I was actually a jouvenile I set the way-back machine to the file on my computer marked “Poetry, 1998” and grabbed one of the hundreds at random. I wrote a lot of poetry over ’98 and ’99 – I’d decided that I’d write a poem a day while I worked on my honors thesis in place and white-space poetics – but this one seems to hit all

PeterMBall 14/10/2009
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Six Things About America That I Tend to Covet

It’s been a rough week thus far (yes, all two days of it) and I’m in a covety kind of mood. I can’t help it, honest. Coveting things is one of those survival tactics that kick in when I’m otherwise unsure of what’s going on in the foreseeable future. And I figured I’d share some of the coveting. A tiny big of it, anyway. It will distract me until my jelly is ready to come out of the fridge and do it’s comfort-foody magic. And so, in approximate order, the six things about America* that I tend to covet: 1) Home-delivered Chinese food that comes in neat folded cardboard boxes. Oh little paper boxes full of wontons, cashew and noodle, how I dearly covet thee. In the fifteen years I’ve actually been eating Chinese food (I started late in life, after some bad experiences in my childhood) I have always been disappointed by the plastic containers in which Chinese take-away

PeterMBall 12/10/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Yep, the internets are full of stuff I’ve been involved with this week…

…so I may as well go with the hat-trick when it comes to blatant acts of self-promotion this week and mention the following: 1) The Coming Dark at the Internet Review of Science Fiction A long-ish article about the apocalypse in its varied form, put together by my write-club peep Angela Slatter and featuring a bunch of talented Aussie writers (plus me, who is pretty lucky to be sounding coherent given that I was drafting responses to these questions during Gen Con Oz a few weeks back. Not to self – don’t agree to deadlines that coincide with conventions you’re working at). Spec-fic writers tend towards the strange, the weird, the unpleasant—that’s their writing, not their personalities. We’ve had the apocalypse penciled in for a while now, so how are some of us going about documenting the coming dark? How is our changing, frayed environment affecting the writing of authors on our side of the literary divide? A small chunk (really

PeterMBall 09/10/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Of course, it may just be the fact that I’m a prude…

The October edition of Apex Magazine went online this week, with my story To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament among the table of contents and available for free online or via print or PDF for a reasonable cover price. I should probably mention that of all the stories I’ve written, Horn included, this one is probably the weirdest and the squickiest. And since the working title was “John Flamsteed has sex with aliens to save the world” you should probably get fair warning that it’s a little on the smutty side,  so it’s probably not safe for work unless your co-workers are particularly forgiving of alien-sex. Not that it’s all squicky sex, or even that it’s the focus, but…well, you know…it’s there.

PeterMBall 07/10/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Some quick pre-order info as I head out the door…

I’m currently preparing to head off to the Gold Coast, primarily to spend a few days catching up with my parents who I haven’t seen for longer than a dinner since they came back from their trip OS a month ago (and, it must be said, to languish in the peaceful surrounds of their home and get some writing done while I’m away from the internets). With that in mind I’m going to forgo today’s entry and make mention of an anthology due to hit shelves in December. Of course, you don’t want to wait for December to organise your copy, because *all the really cool kids are preordering now*. You want to be one of the cool kids, don’t you?* Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Volume 1 Scheduled Released December 1st, 20009 Man, I’m excited about this one. Descended from Darkness collects a lot of the work that appeared on the Apex Magazinewebsite during the first half of 2009 (and

PeterMBall 05/10/2009
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Transition Periods

It’s weird – the business side of writing always creeps up on me and mugs me while I’m not looking. And it’s not because I never thought I’d need to paying attention to this stuff, just that I always thought the process would move a little slower than it does. Over the last couple of months I’ve had to set up two new spreadsheets in my writing folder. The first, originally set up a few months, is your basic quarterly profit-and-loss data – what’s coming in, what I’m spending, etc. I’d been avoiding doing this for a long while, but the realities of my working situation (heading into a year of long-term unemployment, albeit broken up by some short-term and part-time contracts) have made it necessary if I wish to continue paying rent and avoid some unpleasant conversations with the local social security office. The second spreadsheet, and the most recent to be created, is designed to keep track of

PeterMBall 02/10/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Don’t question, just watch

Yes, I’ve been very vid-centric lately. I acknowledge this. But, dammit, some things are sufficiently awesome that you just have to share immediately:

PeterMBall 01/10/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Hungry Like the Wolf

Between allergies, dust-clouds, lingering con-crud and deadlines I’m officially giving up on the possibility of saying anything coherant this week. Instead, I’m just going to share the earworm that’s been driving me crazy all week.

PeterMBall 30/09/2009
Smart Advice from Smart People

Mystery Boxes

Over the years I’ve gradually noticed that the people whose creative output fascinates me the least are often the most interesting to listen to when they discuss their creative process. Today I found myself losing twenty-minutes listening to JJ Abrams talk about the role of mystery in narrative and the process. Of course, by my earlier logic, one of these days we’re going to discover that Ewe Boll is a genius.

PeterMBall 25/09/2009
Journal

Your regular transmission is interrupted with this breaking bulletin:

Jason Fischer – Clarion Peep, Awesome Dude, and purveyor of zombie stories – has won the second quarter of the Writers of the Future competition and a trip to LA. The Fisch has been chasing this dream for about three years now, often coming tantalisingly close to earning a spot, and there are no words for how happy I am that he’s finally picked up the victory. Honestly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke. By all rights I should be kneeling in the rain, shirt torn, playing air-guitar to November Rain in honor of this achievement (ask Jason why and maybe he’ll explain). Instead I’m blinking, bleary-eyed, into the dust-cloud of doom that seems to have enveloped Brisbane (and Sydney), and somehow it just doesn’t have the same effect.

PeterMBall 23/09/2009
Journal

Home Again

The title’s actually a misnomer, since I’ve been operating out of my house for all four days of this year’s Gen Con Oz, but when you’re basically coming home to lapse into five hours of sleep before rising and returning to a convention it starts to feel a little like you’re living in a hotel room anyway. I’d given myself a break from the online world until Wednesday while I recovered, but once again I found myself having to link to something that’s far too cool to let it slide by. So today has been spent catching up on sleep, e-mail, and cool stuff I missed while at the con – and among the coolest stuff that happened in my absence is the review of Horn on Joy 94.9’s Outland Institute radio show. I missed out on streaming the show live due to the con, but I’m thankfully about to listen in courtesy of the fact that you can download the podcast (look

PeterMBall 21/09/2009