I woke up this morning and mainlined Rihanna’s Work in the hopes of easing my way into marking. Mostly, it resulted in sitting there thinking that the genres we once thought of as “popular” grew increasingly more interesting once the mass market collapsed and there was no need to produce hits that were palatable to everyone. People try and seperate technology and the market from the aesthetics of art, but they’re far more intertwined than people think. 5 assignments left at time of writing. If I can get my focus back, i should be finished tomorrow. # Robin Laws has a new book out, Beating the Story: How to Map, Understand, and Elevate Any Narrative. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I’ll recommend it to you right now for a very simple reason: Robin Laws is fucking smart, and he thinks very deeply about the mechanisms of narrative. Lots of folks who read fiction don’t know this yet, because he’s

The marking continues, moving into the final third, but things have now reached the Heart of Darkness stage. The cycle of the last week has been pretty consistent: I grade papers until my brain fries, then flake out in front of the TV watching bad movies until I fall asleep. There’s been no time for writing or research over the last week, and very few opportunities to leave the house. The system the university uses for submissions means I need to have an active internet connection in order to mark papers, and that means a lot of my usual change-of-scene haunts aren’t feasible. Net result: I’ve been getting a little stir crazy, and I’ve started ranting to my partner on a semi-regular basis (never a good sign). Fortunately, I was far enough ahead that I could afford to take today off and get out of the house. I headed for breakfast at the Low Road Cafe, went late-night shopping with my partner,

I woke late this morning, allowing myself a sleep in after binge watching teen movies with my partner overnight. It didn’t start that way. We’d kicked off with Gods of Egypt, Alex Proyas’ take on the sword-and-sandal epic fantasy, which felt an awful lot like someone’s Dungeons and Dragons game rendered on screen. The D&D player in me can usually take enjoyment from that even if the film isn’t good–God knows I have an affection for Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films for much the same reason–but things dragged as the film went on and effects budget took over from the narrative. I also think Proyas did himself a disservice with the casting. Not just in the whitewashing, but in actors like Brian Brown and Geoffrey Rush who felt out of place. Rush can do genre—I’m a fan of his turn in Pirates of the Caribbean—but he just feels off-kilter as Ra, and disappears beneath the effects. Brian Brown is so recognisably

I wanted to start this entry with I have just come back from a weekend in the mountains, but we returned from the mountain on Sunday and the fact that it’s now Tuesday renders the opening inaccurate. Instead, today’s the day when my brain returned from the mountains, kicking back into gear after three days away to celebrate my beloved’s birthday. It was pretty, up in the mountains. We woke to a sea of mist every morning, broken by occasional islands where peaks rose through the white. There were cows, and whip-poor-will, and access to a store selling a vast array of flavoured liquors and whiskeys. I drank far more than is usual for me, slept far less, and didn’t think about writing for several days in a row. A post shared by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jun 8, 2018 at 2:44pm PDT Now my beloved is in the next room, watching Kobo and the Two Strings on my recommendation. She