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Horn Review at Coolshite

Another review of Horn is live, this time courtesy Coolshite.net and the mildly notorious Dirk Flinthart. This excerpt, incidentally, may be my favourite thing anyone is ever going to say about my writing, ever: Peter M. Ball has got it right. This book is smart, funny, nasty, and wicked as hell. He gets the noir-ish tone spot on, delivers with action a-plenty, kick-ass characters, intelligent plotting, and good, clean evocative writing. Best of all, he takes a turgidly overused fantasy trope out behind the backyard toilet and puts a dum-dum bullet through its brain, after which he whips out his tackle and pisses all over the steaming corpse.

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19/06/2009 No Comments
Works in Progress

Doin’ Stuff

Yesterday I shaved off the scraggly neck-beard I’ve been sporting since Conjecture, cracked my knuckles, and proceeded to write like a furious writerly-thing until I hit the 30k mark on the Black Candy draft. Then I discovered – joy of joys – that I’d written myself up to the point where the narrative reconnected with the middle of the novella-length draft/outline I’d written last year, allowing me to cut/paste/edit the next 10,000 words without too much difficulty. Net result: ‘Tis a horrid, splotchy, unreadable mess, this draft of mine, but it is halfway done and actually feels halfway done in terms of narrative. Which is something of an evolution for me, because the last time I hit this point in a novel draft I was still trying to figure out exactly where the story was going. Maybe I will get the hang of this novel-writing thing one of these days. Of course, being a horrid over-achiever, I then wandered off and spent two hours revising Claw in which I resolved my issues with the structure of the novella’s first chapter. I can have more days like that one, I think. It’s kinda nice to be doing stuff again.

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19/06/2009 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Friday Youtubery

Proof that there are people out there who do murder-ballads era Nick Cave even better than, well, Nick Cave. If you want a real insight into how scary Tex Perkin’s truly is, try listening to the Elvis Costello version of the song first. One of these is a gentle ballad sung by a punk-rock balladeer. The other gave me nightmares for a week the first time I saw it on Rage.

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19/06/2009 No Comments
Journal

Yesterday

Yesterday I spent about seven hours doing my washing and watching romantic comedies while waiting for the spin cycle to end. Not the most well-planned of plans, but one grows used to the speed of laundromat washing machines (aka fast and basic) and both the pace and variable options available when using my sister’s machine took me by surprise. On the plus side I got to see a bunch of films I was mildly interested in when they first came out and feel relatively pleased that I hadn’t spent money on them at the time. More and more I’m starting to acknowledge that I’m just not a film person – I always seems to be hoping for more than a movie delivers. Yesterday was also about getting the writing back on track. I revisited my big list of novels I wanted to write and re-ordered them a little, setting them up so I know what’s starting next. This has become my cheap trick to keep myself focused on Black Candy whenever I feel the urge to stop and start something new – the idea gets added to the list and built upon, but once something is in the top of the list it gets stuck with until it’s drafted. Works surprisingly well, given that I got writing done last night and this morning. With luck I’ll be back at full speed sometime in the near future.

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18/06/2009 No Comments
Journal

Farewell, my lovely television

Yesterday I cancelled my Foxtel subscription. Not a huge surprise, given that I’ve been trying to get it cancelled for months, but it seems I was finally given the correct end-date for my contract and I could get the deed done without spending more on the cancellation fee than I would have spent keeping it going until the lease ran out. My credit card, who effectively made this decision for me, is justifiably pleased about this turn of events. I, on the other hand, am getting twitchy. Primarily this comes from the fact that pay-TV was my only real option for getting any kind of TV reception in my flat – we’re located in a ditch by the train-lines, which means that internal antennae are next to useless, and the sole external aerial doesn’t feed into my apartment. Since I live alone the television was the primary source of other human voices in my day-to-day life. The flat seems irritatingly quiet in its absence and running DVD’s in the background isn’t quite the same. On the plus side, I’m starting to make a dent in my to-read pile. And apart from the wrestling and the latest season of How I Met Your Mother, there’s nothing I was actually watching on TV that I don’t have pre-ordered on DVD.

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17/06/2009 No Comments
Works in Progress

Horn Review

It appears we have the first review of Horn live on the internets, courtesy of awritergoesonajourney.com. Meanwhile I’m peeling myself off the couch after three straight days of Veronica Mars DVDs and trying to figure out how to get back to work. My current to-do list: Black Candy draft, Clawredraft, third Miriam Aster novella draft (since I now have a plot for it), short story redrafting, marking of student assignments. I suspect what I really need to do is the latter, since it’s going to have the most psychic drag associated with it, but I do so hate the marking process…

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16/06/2009 No Comments
Journal

Adelaide/Conjecture Recap

There’s always a lingering feeling that I should do a recap or con-report after I get home from a convention, but it never gets done despite my inner guilt. Part of it is due to the nature of my participation at cons (primarily based around the bar, regardless of whether I’m drinking) and part of it’s because I’m a lazy bugger who’s acutely aware that if I did start reporting it’d quickly become about me (and who really wants that?). So instead I’m going to take a page out of Sean William’s con report and summarise: Adelaide was fricken awesome. It involved good food, monkeypunk, the cognitive dissonance that occurs every time I have a conversation with Dirk Flinthart and realise he’s not just a character in a book I read too many times when I was twenty-two, much time spent rejoicing with friends old and new, a panel in which I seemed to confuse everyone as to the nature of Magic Realism, and the launch of Horn which went off splendidly. I also came back with a cold on Tuesday night, but that seems to have abated after forty-eight hours of bad DVDs and cold tablets. Special thanks goes out to the family Fischer, who put me up for the week, and to Crisetta MacLeod, who was the first person to ever interview me about fiction and also provided me with frog cakes and free copies of her chapbooks.

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11/06/2009 No Comments
Journal

Home Again

I am back in Brisvegas after a long, eventful and very rewarding Natcon. Horn is officially launched, meaning it’s now out in the world being read. Now I’m going to bed and sleep for a few weeks. See you all when I recover.

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09/06/2009 3 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Friday Youtubery

Today is one of those “living in the future is damn cool” kind of days. Case in point: Y Can’t Tori Read (aka the eighties incarnation of Tori Amos) – I saw this clip on Rage once, in the very wee hours of the morning, and found it amusing given the direction Amos’ career took in afterwards. Today marked the second time I’ve seen its entirity, but I looked for it for a long time when I was a Tori Amos fan in my early twenties. The closest I got, after catching it on Rage, was seeing the vinyl single when I was walking past an intimidatingly cool record store in Fortitude Valley (I didn’t go in). Then I saw the new Tori Amos album in the shops this week, remembered the existence of the eighties Tori, and thought “I bet that’s on youtube.” And lo, there it was. I would have killed for youtube in my early twenties.

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05/06/2009 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Things I need to do in Adelaide

1) Eat a pie floater. Maybe two, if I survive the first one. 2) Eat a frog cake. Oddly, the pie floater does not fill me with fear, but this little sugared treat does. Insidious looking things, I tell’s ya. Insidious. 3) Launch Horn on Sunday (5pm) 4) Pick up a bunch of Horn pre-orders for family & friends who aren’t attending the con. 5) Remember the names for the beer sizes in SA (you have pints, right guys? right?). Find a pub that has Cooper’s Stout on tap. 6) Slap Jason with a big steel gauntlet of iron resolve until he starts working on his novel. 7) Take part in the Urban Fantasy, High Fantasy, and Magic Realism panel on Saturday morning. If you’re trying to track me down at any point during the con, that’s your rough guide for finding me. All offers to help me go find pies and black beer will be gratefully accepted 🙂

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03/06/2009 1 Comment
Works in Progress

Ineffective Panic Stations

This week I’m bringing the crazy in a big, big way. Not that I noticed, at first. It just crept up on me and mugged me while I wasn’t looking, and it wasn’t until I found myself re-arranging the furniture in my bedroom at two am on Monday morning that I realised what was really going on – uncertainty stress. I tend not to think of myself as a control freak, but there’s an interesting pattern to the way I react to big ol’ globs of uncertainty. Stage one seems to revolve around a kind of mental explosion during which I start a series of low-reward, low-effort projects that serve very little purpose beyond shoring up my self-esteem. Stage two revolves around asserting control over my physical environment (or day-dreaming about it) – rearranging furniture or bookshelves is a big indicator, as is hitting real estate agent websites and researching the possibilities of making a big move interstate. Stage three usually comes once I realise what’s happening, upon which I take all the uncertainty out on my writing – projects are re-conceived and re-built from the ground up, small flaws in drafts become painful thorns in my side until they’re re-written, and I turn into an insane over-achiever who sets myself a dozen impossible career goals before breakfast. Not that knowing this is keeping me from making any further screw-ball decisions about my working process, but it does give me a momentary respite when I step back and try to

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02/06/2009 No Comments

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