Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Writing as a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut

There are weeks when my writing process feels like a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut, powered by a creaky engine and beholden to its own momentum. When everything is running correctly, I get an extraordinary amount of work done and quickly stack up pages. When things go wrong, momentum will carry me for a while even though the engine is blowing pistons and and leaking fluids. Then the momentum will falter and the fires of the engine will go dark, and the act of getting the whole thing moving once more feels impossible. Sometimes, the thing that goes wrong is needing to turn and head in a new direction. Or stop for a while, to focus on something else, then restart after a short break. Sometimes the thing that goes wrong is a problem in the engine itself–a loose screw nobody noticed that gradually rattles free. Either way, once the momentum is gone, it feels like getting the engine started

PeterMBall 25/09/2019
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 got distracted last week

PeterMBall 22/09/2019
Smart Advice from Smart People

The Information To That Point

I’ve been having an anxious week this week, which is not exactly a surprise given I had a big weekend of socialising and navigating responsibilities around devoting time to GoPlay, but it’s interesting to look at what boundaries have been crossed recently and where I’ve been letting myself make choices out of a place of worry. It’s also useful to be reading Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness, brought to mind after writing the recent post about Black Swan thinking, which contains some rather useful reminders if you’re inclined to anxious thought patterns: Things are always obvious after the fact…It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information. When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place. Our mind will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but the following ones. Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward,

PeterMBall 17/09/2019
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Two Weekends, and the Reasons for my online absence

Two weekends back, we drove out to a rescue shelter a few hours out of Brisbane and adopted ourselves a cat. She’s going by the name Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Wittingstall, and seems determined to win us over with the deployment of weaponised cuteness: The week that followed was a mad dash to make the cat at home in our small flat, either accumulating new things for a feline co-resident or upgrading things we’d underestimated. After nearly fifteen years of being pointed about not owning a cat in my long form author bio, it’s time to update and admit that I’m finally a pet person. # The weekend just gone, I headed off to the State Library to volunteer for GoPlay, Brisbane’s resident Tabletop RPG and Board Game convention: It was my first convention of any kind since the last GenreCon, and my first gamer-specific convention in over a decade. It was nice to catch up with a bunch of people,

PeterMBall 16/09/2019
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? Things got a little off-track

PeterMBall 15/09/2019
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Making Time, Picking Your Focus, and the ‘Fuck You’ Impulse

Earlier this year, I noticed this Tweet on my feed and flagged it as something I wanted to think about more: “Oh, I’d love to write a book but I just don’t have time!” Fuck. You. I wrote my first two novels during my lunch hours in a 9-5 job while also teaching and training kung fu every evening and weekend. You make time. — Alan Baxter (@AlanBaxter) March 10, 2019 I was intrigued by the tweet, for two reasons. On hand it, it’s because Alan is right about this–something that’s bourn out in the suite of writers that offer their own experiences making time to get work done in the early days. It’s a useful read, if you’re interested in being a writer. The kind of advice I’ve been talking about in writing classes for years, among the self-selecting people who show up to learn such things. But I found myself really irritated at the tweet when it first

PeterMBall 11/09/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

RECENT READING: The Five Book Catch-Up

I am probably offline when you read this. Of late, I’ve been programming Freedom to block my internet access for eight or nine hours a day. No social media, no checking sales numbers, no logging into this blog to check stats. The net result is a lot of writing, and a whole lot of reading. Right now, this series is running several books behind my actual reading. I’m starting to forget things and get the order all mixed up in my head. So here we go, a quick-and-dirty catch-up of books I heartily recommend. Go and read Mary Robinette Kowal’s THE CALCULATING STARS. Obviously, you don’t need me to tell you this, given that it just won a Hugo and seems poised to win all the other awards in short order. Short version: It’s great. It’s really, really great. I gave a copy to my partner, and it largely sparked off a week of good book noises and momentary pauses

PeterMBall 10/09/2019
Smart Advice from Smart People

Capitalism As Lovecraftian Force

From a recent (re)post at Warren Ellis Ltd: Capitalism is lately cast as that Lovecraftian force that some people should not look directly at for fear of going completely mad and being banged up in the Arkham Sanitarium. Maybe meditating upon it as some Dark God From Beyond Space that is crushing the world into new shapes just leads some people to rub their mouths on it and plead for it to go faster. And never stop. Malign Velocities, WarrenEllisLtd It feels like an apt description of the state of things here in the early 21st Century. # It’s morning as I write this. My partner is brewing coffee and preparing to head outside, catching a few spare minutes on the balcony before she heads off to work. I’m writing in my pyjamas and the writing hoodie draped over my desk. I’ve been awake for far too long, but the coffee is definitely helping. My feet are cold, and it’s the

PeterMBall 09/09/2019
Stuff

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 got my eye on

PeterMBall 08/09/2019
Works in Progress

Status Post: 7 September 2019

ACHIEVEMENTS THIS WEEK: I’ve set up my workspace to deliver really loooooong stretches where I have no internet, just to see how it reshapes things. It turns out, quite a bit. I cleared my average weekly draft count in the space of three days, and I’ve started rethinking what that might mean for workflow. I also hit the point in Project Stairwell where I needed to stop throwing words at the draft and actually stop to figure out what I’m doing. I was sixteen thousand words in at the time, and still not heading towards anything approaching a structure, so I broke down what I’d done and rebuilt it. Definitely not a short story anymore. When I sat down and looked at what I’d done, then extrapolated outwards to figure how every subplot could be expanded and resolved, the result was approximately 37 major scenes I’d need to hit over the course of the story. At time of writing, there

PeterMBall 07/09/2019
Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links 006: Presentation Structure, Date Nights, Shuffling Cards, and Blogging

Every Friday I go through my well over-stocked folder of blog posts, articles, and other online produce that’s been marked “To Read” and clear out a handful. The best of them–aka those that still seem interesting or useful here in 2019–get posted here (and you can see the previous instalments using the Vintage Links tag). At some point I should find a version of that intro that I like and repeat it for every future instalment, but today is not that day. THE SECRET STRUCTURE OF GREAT TALKS (Nancy Duerte, 2011) Watch it here I spend a lot of time talking to people about writing–both now, and back in my dayjob at the writers centre–and about 50% of the gig is trying to get people excited about their own work and trying new ideas out (Heck, it’s 50% of the gig in regular blogging as well). This talk may have originated in 2011, but it floated through my feed in

PeterMBall 06/09/2019
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

My Next Life As A Spaceship

Over the weekend, Matt Farrer (AKA the Shira Calpurnia scribe and general literary bad-ass) did a small thing on twitter where he’d write a description of a spaceship named after you. It roughly coincided with one of those rare moments when I scanned my carefully curated twitter lists, so naturally, I signed on. I am rather pleased with my star faring namesake. Its official designation is "Human Lifepoint Pietro 47-R-Delta" but most Capellans refer to the spherical scaffold of O'Neill cylinders as "the Peter Ball". Famours for its libraries, festivals and zero-gee gardens, it is the only source of bio-grown coffee in the sector. — Matthew Farrer (@FullyNocturnal) September 1, 2019 Naturally, about 30 seconds after I nabbed the embed code for this, Twitter started up the outrage engines and I retreated lest madness find me. On the other hand, Matt’s whole list of ships is spectacular, and worth following all the way to the end. Fortunately, the nice thing

PeterMBall 05/09/2019