Journal

Quick Posting from the Trenches

At the QWC online promotion seminar, which is very cool but hitting a lull now that folks are learning to set-up wordpress and I already know. After lunch we return to the learning off stuff, but until then: A belated public congratulations to the most awesome Jason Fischer (he of the zombie camels and much other coolness) whose newborn son has arrived in the wide world of late. Do not discover the Middleman series the day before you have to get up at seven am to go to a workshop. It virtually guarantees you’ll get no sleep. That said, I’ve not been this eager to see the next episode of something since, oh, Season Two of the new Doctor Who. Or Buffy. No writing of note lately; it’s too damn hot. But I heard back from the supervisor, who says very complimentary things about the first story in the thesis collection And since it needs to go here somewhere, it appears I

PeterMBall 16/12/2008
Journal

Bacon

One of my neighbors is cooking bacon. There is nowhere in my flat I can go to escape it. Any minute now, I’m going to break down and go to the shops.

PeterMBall 11/12/2008
Journal

For the record: peanut butter soup is awesome.

2013 Update: I Need Your Help If you’re reading this in your RSS feed, please let me know in the comments. It’d also be really helpful if you could let me know which RSS reader you’re using and/or which RSS for the site you’re following – it seems my attempts to spring-clean some old posts have resulted in said posts going out as if they’re new, and I’m trying to rectify the problem.  Also, for the record, Laura Goodin’s Peanut Butter Soup Recipe is still awesome five years on, and she posted it on her blog a few years back.  I figured that, if anything, was sufficient reason to use an edit this post as a means of doing this test. Thanks in advance, folks, and I now return you to the thoughts of Peter M. Ball from 2008… Yesterday I thought I was meant to be at a QWC workshop, only to discover that I had the dates mixed

PeterMBall 10/12/2008
Gaming

Doom is coming to Arkham in the form of a 16 year old goth girl…

Not an actual writing post; I’m going to indulge my inner game geek for a moment. Consider yourself warned (unless you have no idea what I’m talking about, in which case check this out and consider yourself informed). Chris Slee has just posted his summary of the last four sessions of my CSI: Arkham campaign over on his site, which serves as a pretty good summary of “what I did with my weekend” really. My inner geek is so damn happy with this campaign, it has to be said. Especially last night’s session. The post-title is stolen from Chris’s write-up; probably a far better summary of the game of anything I can come up with and, since I remain too lazy to do proper write-ups of my sessions these days, I’m just going to point you over there if you have an interest in such things (much as I did for session one).

PeterMBall 08/12/2008
Works in Progress

Morning.

There is a very peculiar quality to the light outside my study window today. Very white, a little too midday for this early morning hour, and it leaves the view (such as it is) a little bleached out. And although it’s cool and pleasant in my house there’s a very nifty heat-haze rising up off the corrugated iron roof of the neighbor’s place. Soon the cloud cover will shift a little and it’ll all disappear, but right now I’m amusing myself with looking out the window and taking notes. Junked the Black Candy draft last night after long hours of debating its various merits against its various elements of wrongness. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom for new novel writers and will probably come back to haunt me in the near future, but I’m more-or-less convinced it was the right call – I have a novella that shows my love of The Big Sleep already, I don’t actually

PeterMBall 05/12/2008
Works in Progress

It was not an exciting day at the word mines…

Word tells me I’ve added about 800 words to the Queen of the Winter Sea today, along with miscellaneous tinkering and cutting, so it should be counted as productive by any reasonable metric. Unfortunately my head still hasn’t got with the program and continues to tell me that I’m making no discernible forward progress – I’m blaming the fact that there seems to be a conflict between my thematic plan and the subtext that’s coming up during the writing process, which largely means that it all feels muddleheaded instead of clicking into place. Solution: call this a draft, let it sit fallow for a few days, and start a new draft over the weekend while working on other stuff. I’ve got enough of a draft down that there’s a shape, so I figure I can give the writer-brain a few days to dwell upon it and trust in its ability to deliver something worthwhile, thematically, that will amuse me as much

PeterMBall 04/12/2008
Works in Progress

This is not a reason to panic…

Earlier this week I put together my writing-based to-do list that covers all the stuff I’d like to achieve between now and the end of February. It basically consists of a novel draft, an exegesis draft, a novella draft, and a dozen stories that either need to be written or re-written. It’s the kind of workload that seems reasonable inside my head, but experience says that real life will not let it run as smoothly as I expect. Especially since the work breakdown says I should have a story draft done by this Sunday, as well as a small chunk of novel and a 3500 word outline for the exegesis. My brain is refusing to do any of it and demanding to watch Predator 2 instead (No, I don’t know why Predator 2 has become the topic of fixation, but apparently my subconscious is convinced it’s a reasonable facsimile for work). I’m not panicking about this, which is my usual

PeterMBall 03/12/2008
News & Upcoming Events

Year’s Best Australian SF & Fantasy

My internet access is  wonky at the moment, so I’ll be making this brief and hoping it goes through before the modem crashes again. The page for Mirrordanse Book’s Year’s Best Australian SF and Fantasy 4 has gone up along with a copy of the recommended reading 2007 list from the very back of the back. 2007 wasn’t really a big year for me, publications wise – I was still finding my feet post-Clarion and the stuff I did get published was mostly flash – so I was kinda surprised to spot my little SF Flash “Avenue D: The Tankboy’s Ride” among the list. Admittedly it wasn’t a surprise I got today – I picked up a copy of the book while I was down at Conflux – but one calls attention to good stuff when the opportunity presents itself. It’s a damn good read by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s one of the three Year’s Best collections I now pick

PeterMBall 01/12/2008
Works in Progress

More Last Short Story

Another mention from Last Short Story today, this time from GirlieJones: “The strongest story for me in Fantasy this year was Peter M Ball’s “On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves”, which was also when I perked up my ears and hopped on the Peter M Ball train. It’s tender and odd and sad and bittersweet. And beautifully beautifully written. I’m looking forward to reading what Ball does next. “

PeterMBall 30/11/2008
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Last Short Story

If you’re a fan of the speculative fiction short story, you really do owe it to yourself to be following the Last Short Story blog. It’s maintained by a small group of dedicated readers committed to reading every short story published in the field over the course of a year and making note of their favourites. I was a big fan during the blogs first year, 2007, when it directed me towards some outstanding anthologies I would have otherwise missed – New Space Opera & Interfictions – and directed me towards what would become one of my favourite stories of the year, Garth Nix’s Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go To War Again. Being such a fan of the blog, it’s been kind of neat to watch some of the nice things they’ve said about two pieces of my fiction over the last couple of months. About The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga in Dreaming Again   – BenPayne: “… tells

PeterMBall 29/11/2008
News & Upcoming Events

So today it was officially announced…

That Twelfth Planet Press is releasing my novella next year. Nabbed from the announcement: Twelfth Planet Press is pleased to announce that the third novella in our ongoing series will be a hardboiled urban fantasy detective story by Peter M Ball. (Warning: may contain unicorns and a formerly dead person)Peter M Ball is an exciting writer, recently appearing in Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again with his story “The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga” and in Fantasy with “On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves.” His novella will be released by Twelfth Planet Press in the second half of 2009. As you’d expect, I’m pretty damned pleased with the news. As my clarion peep Jess notes, “It may have started life as a dare to write a Very Wrong unicorn story that avowed unicorn-hater and week 2 tutor Lee Battersby would like, but it’s become so much more.”

PeterMBall 28/11/2008
A close-up of a typewriter page with the word "Writing" typed on it.
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Talking Dirty: Why Writers Should Focus on Being a Business

Over the weekend I headed out to a Professional Writing Seminar held by Marianne de Pierres which covered the terrain that’s common at such things, but also hit a few key points that I hadn’t come across before. Part of what she talked about during the seminar was taking responsible for your own professional development (and, well, your career), and as someone who has done a lot of development (as a student) and developing (as a tutor, and a lecturer) it got me thinking about the gaps in my skill set. I’ve done a lot of stuff to develop my skills as a writer – undergraduate and post-graduate writing programs, workshops, six-week courses like Clarion South – but more and more I’m feeling like I’ve got the writing part down (kinda) but still need to work on the day-to-day business side of things: dealing with page-proofs, handling contracts, and taking care of what little money I make via writing. We

PeterMBall 27/11/2008