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Youtube Nostalgia Friday

This song has been playing in the back of my head all week. I’ve been saving it up until Friday, when I needed it most. It does make me wonder, though: is it really possible to love Guns and Roses without a feeling of irony or faint embarrassment? I think Jason can, but he’s certainly one of the few people I’ve met who can approach their appreciation of GnR honestly.  Me? I just filter it all through nostalgia as a defense mechanism…

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06/02/2009 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Thursday Linkfest

Jay Lake says sensible things about writers and psychotic dedication. ASIF has posted their recommended reading list for 2008, with much love thrown in the direction of the ever-awesome Angela Slatter. The 2007 Clarion Blog Nostalgia Extravaganza continues over at Lee Battersby’s site, with entries by clarion peeps Michael Greenhut and Helen Venn. A photo-series on dead Asian themeparks. (snurched from Elizabeth Bear’s livejournal). Gen Con Australia and  my former/sometimes current boss Hooly talks candidly about the 2009 convention (I am, for the record, involved in the con this year, but at a greatly reduced capacity – hence he’s only an intermittent boss these days) If you’re in Brisbane and an aspiring writer-type trying to figure out what happens next, I’d recommend signing up for Marianne de Pierres workshop at Sunnybank library. It’s free and I can say from experience that Marianne’s workshops tend to be both informative and eye-opening. And for the more artistic types – Small Beer Press is holding an open-call to find the cover-image for the next Interfictions anthology. Sean Williams pokes people with a stick regarding the Australian Natcon in Adelaide and the ‘sploding comments thread of doom reminds me of why I’m booking flights to Adelaide regardless (That I’ve been part of a con that had similar public-communications issues and still managed a to hit a level of awesome on the day helps as well;). Jeff Vandermeer talks about the genesis of Shriek: An Afterword complete with scans of annotated manuscript pages; my inner fascination with how

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05/02/2009 No Comments
Works in Progress

Oh baby, here comes the fear again

It starts with what may well be the most dangerous question in the world right now: “So Peter, what happens after you finish your thesis?”  Were I the melodramatic type, or at least the type in the mood for a different kind of melodrama than I’m running on right now, today’s entry would consist entirely of a you-tube clip of Pulp singing The Fear in answer to the question. It may yet come down to that – it’s been that kind of day, and The Fear is feeling very soundtrack-of-my-life right now, but with brave abandon I’m going to press on and risk letting some of the gloopy inner workings of my paranoia seep onto the web. The answer: I don’t know. It scares the hell out of me. That’s probably why I’m procrastinating. It’s not entirely true – I know, more or less, what I plan to start writing the day the thesis is off the plate. Hell, I know what I plan on writing for the next five years. The problem lies in my inability to conceptualise some form of support mechanism around the writing (since having a writing support system is actually one of the attractive qualities of doing a PhD). Today I’ve been distracting myself with paranoia over where I’m going to live, flitting between pleasant day-dreams about moving away from Brisbane and desperately cataloging things that can be thrown out should I find myself needing to go the cheaper option of renting someones spare room rather than keeping

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03/02/2009 No Comments
Journal

rain, dammit

When I woke up this morning there was rain – a nice, pleasant kind of rain that looked like it had some longevity to and spoke of a pleasant day getting words down and reading on the couch. It was a writerly kind of rain, if you will, and I immediately celebrated its presence by banging out a hatfull of words and finishing off the novel I started reading over the weekend. Sadly, it was not to last, and now it’s lunch-time and the day is muggy and the computer is not my favourite place to be. Even reading isn’t all that pleasant – the muggy heat is watching-TV kind of weather, encouraging neither concentration or movement, and I force myself to remain at the keyboard only through an act of will. Now off to read through lecture notes before the meeting tomorrow, so I don’t get any surprises when I say “sure, I can do that week’s lecture” without knowing if, in fact, I know a damn thing about what we’re discussing.

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02/02/2009 No Comments
Journal

January is almost done

Congratulations to Elena Gleason, whose story Erased picked up the chocolate in Fantasy Magazine’s  best story of 2008 reader poll. Congrats also to my Clarion South peep Michael Greenhut, whose story Watermark finished in the top-five, and thanks also to everyone who put in a vote for On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves – to my surprise, it snuck into the top five as well. The temperature seems to have dropped to reasonable levels here in Brisbane – today I walked into my office and saw the temperature was below 30 degrees for the first time in weeks. That probably explains why the last twenty-four hours have been more productive than usual, although that could also be because I’m now loaded up with projects again after giving up January to the thesis exclusively (I suspect I’m just not built for the singular focus approach, especially not when I’m fretting about the things I’m not doing. There is still thesis work to do, quite a bit of it, but I’ve hit the point where I can’t put off other stuff anymore. There is rent to pay, if nothing else, and one can only put that off for so long). With that, I return to work, but before I go I’m going to suggest heading over to SF Signal’s recent Mind Meld featuring Advice for Writers if you haven’t seen it already. It’s a solid read, chock-full of useful things to know.

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31/01/2009 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

A good reason to be in Adelaide in June…

Twelfth Planet Press has announced their 2009 Publishing Schedule over on GirlieJones’s livejournal. While there’s a bunch of fine-looking publications on that list (many of which will inevitably be showing up on my bookshelves once launched) there’s one announcement you might be particularly interested in: Horn, by Peter M Ball – the second in our novella series. This book is currently scheduled to be launched at Conjecture: the 2009 Natcon in Adelaide, June 5-8. Horn is a hardboiled urban fantasy detective story which may contain unicorns and a formerly dead person. Read about the conception of this story from the writer himself I am 1) excited by this, 2) slightly terrified that people looking forward to seeing the book, and 3) definitely not getting naked at the launch, no matter how many people call for it (if for no other reason than I’ve been quietly laying away unicorn t-shirts to wear for the entire con).

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30/01/2009 3 Comments
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Interview Meme, part three

Another round of questions, this time from the ever-stylin’ Ben Francisco. He starts with a big genre question that’s very close to the thesis that’s rattling around my head, then asks a bunch of tricky questions to follow up, so I’m going to be long-winded for this one. Consider yourself warned: 1. You were once somewhat active with the Goth community, and your stories are still often influenced by Gothic tropes (and noir tropes) just as much as they are by spec fic tropes. What is it about these other, darker genres that attracts you? Is it just the make-up and sexy black outfits, or is it something deeper? I think the phrase you’re looking for is “just barely active within the goth community” -I was a goth lurker, for the most part. At the time I was living on the Gold Coast, which is one of those places that’s fairly isolating if you’re young and you don’t have a car. The Gold Coast goth community as I knew it basically consisted of the dozen or so other folks on the University campus who wore black, listened to Bauhaus, read Sandman comics, and recited “I’m not a goth” like a litany every time the local surfer-types wondered what we had against board-shorts and thongs as day-wear. The only time I got a real sense for Goths as a community was when I trekked to Brisbane for the occasional club night or trip to a comic store, and there wasn’t much interaction there.  🙂 I’m

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29/01/2009 1 Comment
Smart Advice from Smart People

Thursday Linkfest

Yesterday was busy and thus thesis-less, plus I got very little sleep thanks to some very unfomfortable shoulder pain, so odds are I’ll be saying little of interest today. Instead, I’ll entertain you with links to stuff that I’ve found interesting over the last week (or so): My good friend Chris Slee reflects on the Edisonade (aka the pre-history of Science Fiction) and what was the best thing *before* sliced bread. The ever-stylish Ben Francisco cherry-picks the SFnal highlights of the authors@google youtube series and gathers them together in a single handy post (although he’s missing Neil Gaiman in the line-up). If you’ve not seen these, particularly the John Scalzi, I recommend going and taking a look. The Aurealis Awards are announced and the results posted on their website. Cat Sparks has posted photographs of the night, in which a bunch of writer-types have scrubbed up pretty well (and I show up looking marginally less shabby than usual in the vast flicker list of the night.). Mick Foley (aka Cactus Jack, Mankind, Dude Love) reviews Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Steve Kenson on the lack of randomness in contemporary RPG character creation. (My first reaction to this post? To go roll up a Marvel Superheroe’s Character and convert it over to the point-by driven system of Kenson’s near-perfect supers RPG Mutants & Masterminds) And, as if there’s not enough of me on the internets already, I sneak on over to Lee Battersby’s blog and guest-post my memories of the first week of Clarion South

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29/01/2009 2 Comments
Works in Progress

Today

I’ve done a short guest-post over at Lee Battersby’s blog to kick off a short retrospective about Clarion South 2007. I talk a little bit about what makes clarion great and a lot about the influence one of my classmates had on the first draft of what would eventually become Horn (formerly known around these parts as the untitled Unicorn novella). Go check it out, if you’re so inclined. The rest of the day was pretty busy, by my standards. A trip to the Gold Coast to discuss a subject I start co-teaching in a couple of weeks, a brief fight with the university library about fines for books I’ve already paid fines on, and a trip out to the movies to see The Wrestler. The latter really deserves a post all on its own, since it’s a solid and enjoyable movie (and I say that rarely), but suffice to say that I’d recommend it. Micky Rourke is as good as you’ve heard, the film itself is very engaging, and it’s probably the first film about wrestling ever that didn’t make me furious by condescending to either the sport/performance or the fans.

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28/01/2009 2 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

My inner reader is sad.

A few weeks ago we lost The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, a book with a twenty-year history and a mainstay of my to-read list every year. Today I discovered that Realms of Fantasy is closing its doors after a fifteen-year run. It’s looking like a dark time to be a writer of short fantasy fiction,  but I think the reader in me is far more bothered by the loss of these publications.

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28/01/2009 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Not a meme-post.

With the Aurealis Awards announced and the big surreal weekend of Brisbane being full o’ writers over, the AA judges have released their reports over on the Aurealis Awards website.  Among the notes for the Fantasy Short Story I spotted the following: Review of Honourable Mentions Peter M. Ball, ‘The Last Great House Of Isla Tortuga’ ‘The Last Great House Of Isla Tortuga’ is a thoroughly engaging story with crisp and enjoyable prose and vividly three dimensional characters. The reader becomes completely lost in the world described by the author. Which is pretty cool, all up, ’cause I didn’t even know that the AA’s had honorable mentions.

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27/01/2009 2 Comments

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