Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

I just realised that the Sunday Circle turns four years old this weekend, which is a lot of weekly check-ins about projects, inspiration, and identifying sticking points. It’s probably a sign that I need to revise the intro to these posts. A project to think about for the new year. The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project

PeterMBall 01/12/2019
News & Upcoming Events

EXILE pre-orders!

And lo, my urban fantasy thrillers about an occult hit-man running home to the Gold Coast in order to duck the start of Ragnarok will hit digital shelves once more in January 2020. Keith Murphy is back, yo, in a shiny new edition you can pre-order now. Keith Murphy’s coming home to a city full of demons. What’s following on his heels is much worse. Ever since he left the Gold Coast, Keith Murphy’s been the triggerman for the sorcerer-assassin Danny Roark. Then they screwed up a job and all hell broke loose, unleashing a vengeful cult of necromancers eager to take down the hit man who gunned down their leader and reclaim their master’s soul from the bullet around Keith’s neck. Roark was already running when Keith made it the rendezvous, and the old man left Keith three simple instructions: go home, lie low, and wait for me to call. Easier said than done. The Gold Coast is full of old

PeterMBall 29/11/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Netflix, The Christmasing: Phase One

Well, folks. ‘Tis the season in the lands of the streaming services, and the yearly inundation of dodgy holiday films have landed. Netflix, in particular, seems to have doubled down on the genre. What started with an unexpected hit in The Christmas Prince—a franchise due to get its third film in three years come December—is now bolstered with in-house movies made on the cheap and newly acquired made-for-TV fare all about the Christmas romance My partner and I aren’t the biggest fan of Christmas, but we do love a trashy film and that love isn’t limited to action and sci-fi projects. We’ve made ourself a list of unwatched Christmas trash and checked it twice, then fired up the ol’ Netflix viewer to make our way through the sixteen holiday films on our radar this year. Here’s some quick capsule reviews of the stuff we’ve watched thus far. THE KNIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS The Christmas Prince may be the franchise that started

PeterMBall 28/11/2019
Stuff

Are you Studying To Dream of Stars at the moment?

If my email and messages are to be trusted, we’ve hit the point of the year where a bunch of students are sitting down to analyse To Dream of Stars and discovering they have questions. I’m not in a position to respond to people one-on-one due to deadlines right now, but for those of you who have found your way here looking for more information, there’s a whole FAQ post about that story that might be useful. Then again, it might not. The interesting thing about writing fiction is the way other people see things in the work that you don’t, and that’s been particularly true for To Dream of Stars since I sent it out to my beta readers and they started pointing at interesting-things-I’d-done that I was completely blind too.

PeterMBall 25/11/2019
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? My deadline to get a

PeterMBall 24/11/2019
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? I’ve just spent two weeks

PeterMBall 17/11/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Fighting For Your Life With Shia LaBeouf

1. Here is a morning thought for a Friday: the glory of the internet is that there’s always someone who hasn’t seen Rob Cantor’s Shia LaBeouf. And there’s always someone who has forgotten the song and needs to see it again. Being the one to rectify either situation is a gift that keeps on giving. Go forth and be that person. 2. And here’s a challenge for your Friday: what can Rob Cantor’s 3 minute clip offer you as a creative person (regardless of how that creativity manifests). Yesterday I logged a quote from a recent Garth Nix in-conversation I attended: we are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read. This applies to three-minute clips as well as great works of literature and non-fiction. These days I run through a list from Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative designed to help capture creative sparks and insights. ARE THERE ANY PATTERNS YOU’RE EXPERIENCING THAT ARE SIMILAR TO SOMETHING YOU’RE WORKING ON? One project

PeterMBall 08/11/2019
Smart Advice from Smart People

Two Things I Took Note Of from “Garth Nix In Conversation with John Birmingham”

Last week, I ventured out into the streets of Brisbane to see Garth Nix in conversation with John Birmingham at the Brisbane Square Library. The in-conversation was nominally about Nix’s new book, Angel Mage, which got described as “Three Musketeers meets Joan of Arc with Angelic Magic and Kick-Ass Heroines.” As these events are wont to do, the conversation took a turn through inspirations, process, and industry lore, courtesy of two career writers digging into one another’s work and trying to figure out how they did what they did. Nix is largely a make-things-up-as-I-go-along writer, and Birmingham is not, and the disconnect in their respective approach proved fascinating. I walked away with two quotes from the event, both marked in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget them. Nix got the first of them, when talking about “research” and the slow filtering of everything he reads into his process: “We are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read.” Which is one

PeterMBall 07/11/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Book Math

I picked up a copy of William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2001, a shiny trade paperback find in a second-hand bookstore. The latest in a long line of Gibson books that started with my long-since read-to-death paperback of Burning Chrome that I acquired in high-school after our IT teacher showed us a documentary on cyberpunk. I purchased Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, brand-new in 2005. At the time I was reading Murakami a lot, was just starting to write my own short fiction in earnest, and taught classes in both Murakami and short story writing to university classes. I made a special trip into the city to buy Brandon Sanderson’s Alloy of Law from the inestimable Pulp Fiction Booksellers. I’d never read Sanderson before, but the reviews tempted me with its promise of a traditional European fantasy setting progressed to the point where it effectively contained a Wild West. I made a similar trip to

PeterMBall 06/11/2019
Gaming

Putting the Gamer Hat Back On

We recently dug out the big box o’ board games here in Casa Del Brain Jar, separating out everything that we can rock with two players and working our way through them. I haven’t played board games regularly in about six or seven years—not since my primary board-gaming friends decamped for Melbourne for good—and I have a bad tendency towards playing other people’s games when I do. Then we spent a week playing Zombies!!! and Killer Bunnies and my partner’s copy of the pirate-themed card game Splice, and my brain started poking at board games I might want to pick up soon. My partner started researching games and identifying those that looked interesting. At the same time, I’ve been poking at new RPG systems for the first time since 2011. Getting familiar with the Blades in the Dark system so we can pick it up in place of our now-completed-after-nine-years Thursday Night Superhero Campaign. Kicking the tyres on a Shadowrun

PeterMBall 05/11/2019
Journal

Bad Correspondant

There are currently 38 unread emails sitting in my inbox, a component part of 86 emails left in the inbox overall. The oldest dates back to September 12th and I barely remember September at this point. My comfort zone is keeping the unread email under 10, and not leaving things in the inbox at all. The drinks coaster on my desk is starting to feel appropriate.

PeterMBall 04/11/2019
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? My major goal this week

PeterMBall 03/11/2019