News & Upcoming Events

Latest from the wordmines…

Now that the TOC has been made public over on Delia Sherman’s LJ we’ve been told we can go crazy with the blog announcements: I sold my story, Black Dog: A Biography, to Interfictions 2. The complete Table of Contents looks something like this: Jeffrey Ford, “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” M. Rickert, “Beautiful Feast” Will Ludwigsen, “Remembrance is Something Like a House” Cecil Castelucci, “The Long and the Short of Long-Term Memory” Alaya Johnson, “The Score” Ray Vukcevich, “The Two of Me” Carlos Hernandez, “The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria” Lavie Tidhar, “Shoes” B. F. Slattery, “Interviews After the Revolution” Elizabeth Ziemska, “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken” Peter M. Ball, “Black Dog: A Biography” Camilla Bruce, “Berry Moon” Amelia Beamer, “Morton Goes to the Hospital” William Alexander, “After Verona” Alan DeNiro, “(*_*) ~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof” Nin Andrews, “The Marriage” Theodora Goss, “Child-Empress of Mars” Lionel Davoust, “L’Ile Close” (“The Enclosed Island”

PeterMBall 12/02/2009
Smart Advice from Smart People

Thursday Linkfest

To kick it off, some members of WA fandom are putting to together a fanzine, Hope, to raise funds for the Bushfire victims in Victoria. A bunch of talented folks have already volunteered work, so much so that there will now be more than one issue. Worth keeping an eye on, all up. With all the doom and gloom surrounding small press publishing, there is at least a glimmer of hope that the recently deceased Realms of Fantasy may come back courtesy of a buy-out of the magazine/brand. Until then, a farewell by the RoF Sushmaster that includes a list of the accepted stories we won’t get a chance to see (With commiserations to my friend Ben Francisco, who unfortunately has a very fine story caught on that list). Something Positive on the tendency among American reviewers to associate the stop-motion film Coraline with Tim Burton. Speaking of webcomics, XKCD addresses an issue that does actually bother me. My old friend Villainous_mog, now

PeterMBall 12/02/2009
Journal

In which I am trivial and know it…

I think my office may be under some kind of curse. I say this because I’ve just lost my second office chair in the space of a few months to breakage and this one was brand new (unlike the previous chair, which was a mega-comfy seventies steel-and-vinyl job that I’m pretty sure my parents liberated from a staffroom two decades ago).  I’m less than impressed with this, especially since I can’t find my receipt to go return the chair to officeworks and get a repalcement. Not that I was a fan of the new chair – I dislike office chairs at the best of times and really mourn the loss of the old-school desk-chair I had – but I kinda need something to sit on here. On the plus side, it’ll force me to work on the laptop (away from the internets) for the majority of the day since I’m officially out of chairs to sit on while at the desk.

PeterMBall 12/02/2009
Works in Progress

On diving well and failing to swim

So Chris Lynch has posted a more-or-less up-to-date bibliography of things achieved by our Clarion South class since the 2007 workshop. He’s put this together, along with some thoughts, because the two of us are scheduled to go have a chat with the current crop of Clarion South participants about what it’s like to finish the workshop and go back to the real world. I have to admit that my first response to Chris’s bibliography was a panicked that can’t be right, but it is. The only thing he’s missed is the 100 word story I had in Brimstone Press’s Black Box e-anthology, although I start to feel a little better when I factor in the three forthcoming stories that don’t appear on Chris’s summary. Even taking into account the kind of low-key achievements that occurred around the publications, it seems like so little for two years of work once it’s listed like that, and its started me thinking about the

PeterMBall 10/02/2009
Works in Progress

Claw

The problem with writing a thesis is that it’s just no fun to talk about. The novella, on the other hand, creates the kinds of problems that I find interesting . And thus there is nattering on about it on the blog. The nifty thing about getting back to this story is that I’ve had the first scene in my head for a long while now – Miriam Aster holding a gun to a cat’s head, threatening it for information on the sly while the owner is off in the kitchen making some tea. The details around that image have shifted a bit since I first came up with it – originally she’d gone there looking for the cat, forcing her to bluff her way past the owner, but now seeing the cat is a by-product of showing up to talk to someone else. On the whole it’s lots of fun – both because Aster is the kind of character who

PeterMBall 07/02/2009
Works in Progress

Writing Sequels – it’s weird.

So today I resumed work on the novella draft that was once laboured with the working title The Girl Who Loathed Cats* but now has the working title Claw** and is probably better known as the follow-up to Horn which pits our protagonist against a talking cat and evil foetii***.  This novella is, officially, the weirdest thing to work on as far as process goes  – I’ve never really written a story that follows-up on a character or world I’ve already written, and it seems to involve a lot of time sitting around and wandering what makes a re-appearance and what doesn’t (There’s also a lot of time spent trying to reconcile how the world works, since Horn is all fairies & unicorns while a large chunk of this plot is driven by a magic cat and a deranged fan-boy/scientist). The nice part is that the process is going to be pretty leisurely – I’ve made a self-imposed deadline of March 31st to get this

PeterMBall 06/02/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Not that this will surprise anyone, but…

Things Disney’s Three Musketeers film has in common with the original Dumas novel: Character names Swords Hats France Things that seem remarkably different upon re-watching the film for the first time since reading said novel: Everything else.

PeterMBall 06/02/2009
Journal

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…

PeterMBall 06/02/2009
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

PeterMBall 05/02/2009
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

PeterMBall 03/02/2009
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

PeterMBall 02/02/2009
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

PeterMBall 31/01/2009