Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writing and Shame

One of the interesting points explored in Elspeth Probyn’s exploration of shame, Blush, is the connection between shame, interest, and exposure. Building upon the work of psychologist Sylvan Tomkins, Probyn looks at shame as an emotion that only arrives after an interest or joy has been activated: When we feel shame it is because our interest has been interfered with  but not cancelled out. The body wants to continue being interested, but something happens to “incompletely reduce” that interest Blush, 14 While it can be felt in private, it is often an inherently social phenomena as the reduction of interest is predicated on external influences demanding said interest be reduced. Probyn looks at shame as an eruption: the secret made physical through our skin and the sensations that accompany it. The body warning it cannot fit in, even though it wants too (72). When we attempt to shame another, it is a demand they rise up and meet with the interests, ideals,

PeterMBall 18/09/2018
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Cohorts

When you first start writing you find your cohort–people figuring out their writing process at the same time as you, submitting work to the same places you are. You built your networks at the same time. You develop new work at the same time, establish reputations, see each other at events and cons. It feels like you’re building from a similar place, heading towards a similar destination.  Somewhere along the line, careers begin to advance at different paces. One of your cohort makes their first pro sale, or wins an award at a conference. Someone has their first book come out. Someone gets sick and has to slow down, or a family tragedy interferes with their writing process and they disappear for a few years. Someone looks at the daunting prospect of making a living from their writing and decides, quite reasonably, that it’s not something they want to pursue with the same fervour as others in their cohort. All

PeterMBall 17/09/2018
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? I hit a point where

PeterMBall 16/09/2018
Gaming

SMAX #173: Panic on Earth-Adrift

I was a GM before I was an writer, which means I occasionally awful affliction that many gamers suffer from where I get all Let me tell you about my game. I’m also a GM who’s had a few recurring items on my to-do lis like run better sessions, do better prep, and test drive rules from the upcoming Cortex Prime set that may do things better than the Marvel Cortex rules. Since I’ve been running a superhero campaign on Thursdays for…gods, years now…I figure I may as well combine the above with that note on my to-do list that says write regular blog posts and start thinking about ongoing series of posts.  With that in mind, I’m going to experiment with doing post-game reports here on the blog–giving myself a chance to reflect on what’s worked, and what doesn’t. Think through my thoughts about superhero gaming outside of the every-hundred-sessions-or-so list post (which, weirdly, continue to be the most read posts on this site).

PeterMBall 13/09/2018
Journal

Midweek

My problem with morning commutes is the time spent in my head. Give me forty minutes to an hour on a densely packed train, where the primary task is suppressing the mild anxiety that kicks in when surrounded by people, and there’s a good chance my internal monologue will go in all sorts of negative directions. Like most commuters, I rely on distractions to get me through it: reading comics on my phone; flicking through a book; watching the scenery. Spend some quality time observing the other passengers, figuring out how to render the as fictional characters. That kid with the brolgas on his three-quarter pants becomes an antagonist in whatever I end up writing next, probably showing up as something supernatural; the middle-aged couple who board the train home every day and immediately stand together, face to face, locking the rest of the world out…well, who knows what they’re going in, but they’re logged and ready. A nice little

PeterMBall 12/09/2018
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Lord Darcy and New Amsterdam

I’m reading Randall Garrett’s collection of LORD DARCY stories at the moment, and it’s proving to be hard going. The kind of book I dip into a story at a time, then set aside for a long stretch while I go find something that’s more my speed as a reader. I have issues with Garrett’s pacing, but that’s a conceit of the genre–he’s essentially doing Sherlock Holmes stories in an alternate universe where magic exists and thaumaturgical forensics is a studied art–and I have never been a voracious reader of the pure mystery story.  I’m making a concreted effort to finish the collection because it plays into my thesis, being a significant source of inspiration behind Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam stories featuring the forensic sorcerer Abigail Irene Garrett and the immortal vampire detective Sebastien de Ulloa. Those stories I devoured at a rapid clip when I first encountered them, immediately pre-ordering collections every time they were announced. The difference isn’t

PeterMBall 11/09/2018
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Some thoughts on that moment when Once Upon A Time made me surprisingly okay with mass murder

I am watching the second season of Once Upon A Time and admiring the way they set up their antagonists. Regina the “Evil” Queen. Rumplestiltskin, the Dark One. The vengeful Captain Hook. The kind of glorious, cartoonish evil that you admire to a certain extent because they’re clever, they’re gleeful about the things they’re doing, and you see enough backstory to empathise and understand why they’re doing bad things.  I am watching the second season of Once Upon a Time and I am all about Regina and Rumples, in particular. Why every t-show is not casting Robert Carlyle as their villain. How carefully built the character of Regina has been, and how incredible Lana Parilla is delivering complex emotions in a lighthearted and often cheesy way. I am watching the second season of Once Upon A Time and I get have feelings when the bad guys are hurting. I care about the things they care about, and live in hope that

PeterMBall 10/09/2018
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? I’m 10k into Wail and

PeterMBall 09/09/2018
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Some Days You Want To Punch A Shark

Some days you want to punch a shark, but you don’t, because sharks are big and aquatic and in possession of teeth far sharper than yours. Some days you want to punch a shark, but you don’t have the bus fare to get the the aquarium. Some days you want to punch a shark, but if you cannot go to the aquarium, how do you handle the logistics? You have to get to the ocean and meet the shark in its home terrain, figure out how to handle the rigours of breathing or floating while throwing a punch that will mean something? Do you know how to scuba? Do you know how to surf? How do you even know where the sharks are going to be? Some days you want to punch a shark. Usually, it’s a Monday. Some days you want to punch a shark, but you fear what might happen when you give in to that impulse. Some

PeterMBall 08/09/2018
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Blackhouse

THE BLACKHOUSE is the first novel in Peter May’s Lewis trilogy, police procedurals set on the Isle of Lewis out in the Scottish Hebrides. It’s a novel about the isolation, the traditions that built out of that isolation, and the history of a protagonist who goes home, reluctantly, in order to investigate a crime. I bought it after seeing May at the Adelaide Writers Festival a few years back, then hearing people rave about his books over and over. I spent the entire read with a notecard beside me, jotting down page numbers where he deployed techniques I could lift for my own projects. Then it became a process of jotting down page numbers purely because May delivered a great description, deploying language with a precision that a lot of writers never manage. The Isle of Lewis may be a real place–the kind you can visit and touch and walk through–but for the vast majority of readers it needs to

PeterMBall 07/09/2018
Works in Progress

Eighteen Things I Ended Up Thinking While Working On My Current WIP Today

This would all be easier if it was done already. This will probably be okay, but it’s not really the best I could do, is it? I should pull everything down and start over, from scratch. I swear I could do better if I just started everything over from scratch. Life would have been much easier if I’d just said, way back at the beginning, that the setting for these novels was The Gold Coast, 2007, instead of pretending they were some mystical Ur-City that exists in every hardboiled novel. Because of Raymond Chandler, all hardboiled novels are set in San Fransisco or Los Angeles. Even the ones that are’t.  It’s hardboiled, not noir. Stop calling it noir. Noir is a colour. It only applies to film. I’d really like a hotdog. With mustard. A good hotdog would be nice right now. If you’re writing a series about a character who has returned from the dead twice, you’re kinda in

PeterMBall 06/09/2018
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Looking at MicroStructure in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Evil Robot Monkey”

EVIL ROBOT MONKEY is a short story by Mary Robinette Kowal, available for free on her website (in html, PDF, and audio) and included in her short collection, Word Puppets. It’s a little over 900 words long (or 6 minutes of audio); a complete story in a single scene, and it’s one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve ever come across for explain the way story beats works.  The premise of this story is simple: uplifted monkey wants to sculpt clay as a escape from his not-so-pleasant existence; circumstances conspire to keep him from doing this. That’s the guiding macro-structure, but it’s the individual beats that give the piece an incredible amount of nuance for its word-count. FOUR BEAT PATTERN There’s a lot of argument about what gets classified as a beat in a story, but for my purposes I’m looking at a specific pattern: we get a clash when two characters wants are in conflict, they each deploy a

PeterMBall 05/09/2018