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…

PeterMBall 16/06/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Friday Youtubery

90’s Flashback Edition

PeterMBall 12/06/2009
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

PeterMBall 11/06/2009
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.

PeterMBall 09/06/2009
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.

PeterMBall 05/06/2009
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 🙂

PeterMBall 03/06/2009
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

PeterMBall 02/06/2009
Works in Progress

I’m sure I had a groove around here somewhere, if only I could find it…

Before anything else: if you haven’t read XKCD today, you really should. Given that I’ve spent the majority of today writing, the comic promises to be both entertaining and amusing in ways I cannot. Not much else to report, really. This afternoon was spent trying to reconnect with the Black Candy novel draft in an effort to stop myself from either a) hating it, b) mentally re-writing the plot, or c) actually rewriting things from the beginning in a different POV in an effort to fix the problem. The latter is particularly tempting, but I’m currently placing my trust in the awareness that it’s at least 90% panic-driven. My gut is not to be trusted when writing at novel lengths (at least, not yet). Now I get to head off and do some work on Claw before turning in for the night.

PeterMBall 01/06/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Friday Youtubery

Today we have The Unicorns singing I Was Born a Unicorn. Tangentially driven though it may be, I’m sure y’all are smart enough to be making the connection as to why I’ve been humming this song all week.

PeterMBall 29/05/2009
Works in Progress

Ah, yeah, that’s right, writing…

I’m having one of those “rebuild your process” kind of weeks where I remember how this writing thing actually works. That includes some long-delayed redrafting of Claw in an effort to produce an “other people can actually read this one” kind of draft. I’m back to remembering my issues with the first scene: so much back story, so little desire to explain it in one long dump. Things would be easier if I wasn’t dead-set on starting the story with a fight between the detective and the talking cat, but I like that opening a lot and it does something different to the opening pages of Horn. There’s a taste of the current (re-written) opening behind the cut, warts and all, for those who are curious:

PeterMBall 28/05/2009
Journal

Random Thought for Today

By this time next week I’ll be all packed up and in the grip of an “oh-my-god-I-hate-flying” panic in preparation for my trip to Adelaide. Now I’m going to wander off and enjoy my final week of television before the cable is gone forever. I expect there will be far more regular posting once I’m back from the con in two weeks.

PeterMBall 27/05/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Horn now available for Prepurchase

The latest news out of the Twefth Planet Press camp is that Horn is off to the printers and available for prepurchase – you can now reserve a copy and pick it up at Conjecture in Adelaide or have it posted to you.

PeterMBall 25/05/2009