Journal

Random Saturday Things

Yesterday my partner read Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight and picked up a bunch of mistakes i’d missed, plus added a few notes about a point where the story offended her knowledge of science. This proved to be fortuitous, as fixing the problem gave me a new line of dialogue with a little more metaphorical punch than the original.  # Over on RPG.net, Capellan noted that the ending of Winged, with Sharp Teeth worked better the more he processed it, which is one of those reviews that makes me exceptionally happy. The “Lab” part of of the Short Fiction Lab isn’t just a nifty marketing gimmick–these stories are often places where I’m attempting to achieve certain things, and this time around I was deliberately experimenting with what Nick Mamamatas has referred to “leaving the ragged edge at the end” in his essay How To End A Story (via his criminally underrated writing book, Starve Better). Mamamatas argues against the neat ending, suggesting its

PeterMBall 24/11/2018
Journal

Friday Status Post – 23 Nov 2018

I am sitting at my desk and trying to corral all the projects on my immediate to-do list, which I’ve allowed to get slightly out of control. That was to be expected this week, so I’ve largely run with the wolves, but I’m not sure it would be a good idea to carry this level of chaos past the weekend. The most urgent is doing the final checks on Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight, which will roll out fro the short fiction lab early next week and therefore has a narrow window in which to make last-minute changes.  Almost as urgent is getting a new chapter redrafted in Warhol Sleeping, which is proving to be a slower process than I’d originally anticipated. My original goal with Warhol Sleeping was putting out a 25,000 word novella on November 30; now I’ve got seven chapters left on the revision list, after which I expect the final book to be closer to a short

PeterMBall 23/11/2018
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

How to pick up a free story and support this humble author

As promised in the last post, you can pick up a copy of Winged, With Sharp Teeth for free this week. Just follow the links here to claim your copy: Amazon US | Amazon Australia | Amazon UK And here’s a little taste of what you’re getting if you follow the link. The rain draped over Brisbane like a wet sheet, bringing with it a chill and sharp gusts of wind. Not the kind of weather you hoped for when planning a first date, but Steve wasn’t complaining. They were huddled together in the Siam Palace on Sandgate Road, seated beneath the watchful eye of a giant golden Buddha. They ate Pad Thai, traded stories about their lives: the events of the week, where they worked, what they studied at university. Wait staff hustled between the tables, delivering drinks and plates of fragrant curry. The wind chased new patrons through the front door, setting the candle flames on every table

PeterMBall 22/11/2018
News & Upcoming Events

New Stories

Well, then. This weekend did not go to plan in any way. My dad went into hospital on Friday, courtesy of a fall where he bumped his head in the kitchen. He’s okay, but it made for an anxious few days given his other health issues, and I ended up focused on learning new skills and long-ignored admin instead of writing. Initially, that meant doing updates of old Clockwork Golem products, preparing to get the backlist on sale. Lots of transferring of files and getting up to speed with the new version of Photoshop and InDesign. Useful busy-work for keeping me occupied, but I also wanted to put something new into the world. And I had a few weird, off-kilter stories kicking around that I’d drafted with the half-hearted idea of doing a Patreon (set aside when I realised I’m unlikely to maintain a regular pace long-term). And I had a few weird, off-kilter stories kicking around that I’d drafted

PeterMBall 20/11/2018
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 dad ended up in

PeterMBall 18/11/2018
News & Upcoming Events

Save Money on The Birdcage Heart This Weekend (& some project updates)

The Birdcage Heart and Other Strange Tales is on sale over at Kobo.com this weekend, ostensibly part of their US based November Price Drop sale but the discount is extended to all other territories. It usually sells for $4.99, but Australians can pick it up for half that until Sunday. With the money you save, you could nip out and pick up a copy of Alan Baxter’s new horror novel, Devouring Dark, which is not on sale but is newly released into the world and seems likely to scare me shitless by the time I finish it. We snuck off to the book’s Brisbane launch this week, where Alan and Angela Slatter were in conversation, and snapped a few shots of Al in full raconteur mode. Meanwhile, I’ve spent most of my waking hours this week doing redrafts on Warhol Sleeping. About 30% of this involves updating old scenes that were part of the original draft, written back in 2001, and

PeterMBall 16/11/2018
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? The Warhol Sleeping redraft continues

PeterMBall 11/11/2018
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Thinking about Time, Goals, and Social Media

A few years back, after I first installed RescueTime, I got it into my head to reduce the amount of time I was spending on Facebook and Twitter.   Lots of people decide to do this, but it rarely exceeds. For one thing, social media companies excel at luring you in. It’s easy to use them to fill the blank times, the little moments where there’s a break in your attention and you’re looking for distraction. For another, ‘doing less’ of something is one of those vague definitions of success. How much less do you want? How do you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts, beyond trusting your gut? I recently had a conversation about this where I realised how important RescueTime actually was in cutting back. The service tracked time I spent on apps or using certain programs, telling me exactly how many hours and minutes I spent on social media every week. I could weigh those hours against the

PeterMBall 06/11/2018
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Profit and Loss

I went and updated my profit-and-loss statements over the weekend, and noticed that I brought in as much from my RPG publishing books as I did the more recent Brain Jar Press releases. It’s tracking to do the same this financial year, although I’ll be doing my damnedest to keep that from being the case in the first half of 2019. All this means, in essence, the work I did over a decade ago is paying off more than than the more recent fiction work, simply because the sum total of effort I put in was checking the sales report. All the hard work was done in 2006, when those books came out, while the Brain Jar books required writing, layout, upload, etc. I’m making a note of this because I’m revisiting my business plan for Brain Jar over the next month, figuring out how I’d like to adjust things based upon the last twelve months.  There’s a bunch of

PeterMBall 05/11/2018
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? There’s five major projects on

PeterMBall 04/11/2018
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

New Project Week & Three Card Monte Drafting

With the Warhol Sleeping draft in the bag, I get to start a new project this week. It’s not a NaNoWriMo project, despite being started on November 1, because my current process is spectacularly ill-suited to doing NaNo. In fact, it’s one of those batshit crazy approaches that works for me in my current situation, but would make me shake my head if someone suggested it in a writing class. Basically, I’m trying to stay ahead of my anxiety and tendency to fret by treating drafting as a game of three card monte: three projects, three hours of writing time each day, and a timer that reminds me to swap between them at the end of every hour. The whole thing is focused on short, sustained bursts of focus on multiple projects, rather than three hours of trying to batter my head against a single book. No word count goals, just a specific amount of time staying focused on each

PeterMBall 02/11/2018
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Year, Date, Month Archiving

Some days I think big thoughts about writing. Some days, I’m just amused that the surprisingly useful little things you pick up as you build your career. Case in point: numbering invoices. I started out using the date as the basis for my invoice number. Anything sent on a day like today, for example, would be invoice 01112018-001. Day, month, year, followed by where it fell in the number of invoices sent that day (rarely more than one).  A lot of the invoices I processed from writers tended to do something similar. Then, one year, an American author’s invoice for GenreCon broke the pattern. They structured their invoice number using year, month, date instead.  For example, an invoice sent today would be numbered: 20181101-001 This is a really simple thing, but it made the invoice files incredibly easy to manage. Sorting by name immediately left everything in the date order, and it was easy to seperate out all the invoices

PeterMBall 01/11/2018