Journal

Vale, Terry Ball

Last Monday, I turned forty-two and my father went into palliative care. On Tuesday night, he passed away. I stayed offline for a bit after it happened — no blogging, no real posting to social media beyond reading all the condolence messages, no checking my email unless there was something funeral-related coming through. I felt very out-of-phase with the world, and the grief felt very raw and new. It would be wrong to say that we didn’t see this coming — my father had Parkinsons, growing dementia, and issues with his blood. He’d survived a heart attack, back in 2011, and a few trips to the hospital for illnesses that disrupted treatment for his ongoing issues. A few years back, I wrote an entire essay about my father and what he meant to me and the inevitability of this day. It still caught us by surprise, when it finally happened. He went to the emergency room with a broken hip

PeterMBall 26/03/2019
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 feel a bit absurd

PeterMBall 17/03/2019
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Who Gets To Monetise Your Spare Minutes of Attention?

I’m writing the first half this post on campus at UQ. It’s approximately 7:03 in the morning, and the cleaner is working their way through the offices. I’m here early because I teach a class at 8:00 AM, because it’s the first week and I still don’t know exactly how to find the room, and because I like to get on campus an hour early for classes. That’s my buffer, should there be traffic problems or train delays, and on the days when there are no such problems, it leaves me with approximately 47 minutes of time to fill once I arrive. Occasionally I have a plan for this time: going to the library, for example. Catching up with friends before class. Today — and for most of the coming semester — my plan is this: Do not give this time to Facebook or Twitter without a damn good reason. Instead, I’m making a conscious decisions about the way you’ll

PeterMBall 12/03/2019
Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links 002: Warren Ellis; Short Crime Fiction; Washing Pillows; Unproductive Days

One of my projects for 2019 is clearing the archive of unread links tucked away in the “To Read” folder of my bookmarks bar. At time of writing, there are about 600 of them remaining, and I’m going full Marie Kondo on those fuckers: everything is checked, thanks, and cleared away so I don’t have to deal with it again. The stuff that brings me joy gets posted here, to be shared with others.  You can see the first round of things I shared in last Monday’s post. When read alongside this week’s recommendation, it should be remembered that I have a very broad definition of joy. I’m Warren Ellis, and This Is How I Work (Lifehacker, 2015) Read the post on Lifehacker I spend the first hour or two of the day at a table in my back garden, under a sloping roof, either just with the phone or with the Dell, the Pixel or a notebook, depending on

PeterMBall 11/03/2019
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? As the tenor of my

PeterMBall 10/03/2019
Big Thoughts

Backups

I’m coming up on my forty-second birthday in two weeks, which means I am officially middle aged and set in my ways. I do not discover new bands with anything approaching regularity. I tend to read the authors I know I’ll like rather than reach out for the cutting edge. Experimentation for its own sake makes me weary as a reader. Provocation for its own sake just makes me wish for something undercutting the attempts to shock and provoke. I’m now old enough that I get cranky with young people for parking tractors on my lawn. Old enough I can still remember the point that phrase got lodged in my consciousness, back in the nineties: an episode of Good News Week, repeating a statement by the British PM John Major out of context for comic purposes. I still prefer blogs to social media. Email to messenger programs. I get mildly irritated at tools like Slack every time I’m forced to

PeterMBall 08/03/2019
Works in Progress

Notebooks and Process Notes: March 2019

One of the side-effects of doing my Quarterly Checkpoint this week is the realisation that I’m going to have very little time for high level strategic thinking on the writing front. With that in mind, I’ve shifted my drafting process back to handwriting in notebooks–a tactic that’s served me well in terms of keeping forward momentum during highly stressful periods. Since it’s been a while since I did an update about the state of the notebook wodge I carry with me, I figured I’d take a quick look at what I’m carrying and how I’m using it right now. Fortunately, it’s a pretty slimeline wodege of notebooks for me—there’s currently four notebooks in my kit, and I’m only usually carrying two or three of them at any given moment: The notebook on the bottom is a large, dark green JS Burrows Journal from my local office supply store–essentially, their name-brand knock-off of the moleskine design. It’s a remarkably nice piece

PeterMBall 07/03/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Popular

I didn’t expect to enjoy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I picked a copy up on the cheap a few years back, part of a workshop I was taking where one of the exercises involved best-selling novels. There was a remarkable dearth of best-sellers on my bookshelves at the time, so I grabbed a bunch of ebooks to get me up to the quota I needed: Stieg Larson; one of the Alex Cross books; the most recent Nora Roberts I could find. I loved the Roberts. Didn’t enjoy Kill Alex Cross, but developed an appreciation for what James Paterson does via books like Zoo and his Bookshots Novellas. And yet, despite all that, I still went into Steig Larson’s crime novel with a sense of trepidation. It occupied that space: a best-seller. Not my thing. A book loaded with assumptions predicated on how much it sells, none of which it actually fulfilled when I sat down and devoured it

PeterMBall 06/03/2019
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Planning Quarterly, Rather Than Yearly, Writing Goals

Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative is full of good advice and habits for anyone making their living in a creative industry, but the part that has been most valuable for me is his recommendation to limit forward planning to a three-month quarter instead of a year. Henry recommends this because people (and organisations) have a tendency to develop permanent solutions to long-term problems, but it’s also proven a good timeframe for identifying upcoming disruptions that will impact on your process. There are some disruptions that are easy to predict. My own calendar has recurring disruptions between December and February due to the concentration of holiday events and family birthdays, and used to include regular disruption every September when I worked at QWC due to the surge of writing events and activities around Brisbane Writers Festival. But other disruptions sneak up on you without any particular warning, whether they’re good disruptions like an opportunity you weren’t expecting or shitty ones like a

PeterMBall 05/03/2019
Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links from the To-Read Folder: Word Counts, YA Editors; My Little Pony; Book Tours

Readers love to talk about the piles of unread books they’ve been accumulating over the years, breaking out plans to put a dent in the pile if only so they can justify purchasing new books to fill the gap. We can take a certain pleasure in what that unread book signifies, in both the look at all the pleasures that await me when I have time sense and the behold my default state of busy sense. We tend to be a bit quieter about the unread piles of links and bookmarks we accumulate, unless someone looks over our shoulders and spots a massive pile of unread tabs. Or, in my case, taps the “To Read” folder in my bookmarks bar and gets assaulted by the 300+ blog posts I’ve stored there to engage with later. Lots of these were put there during my days with the writers centre, flagging resources I might want to come back to later or could

PeterMBall 04/03/2019
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 spent a large chunk

PeterMBall 03/03/2019
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 finished the draft on

PeterMBall 24/02/2019