Stuff

The Future is Weird

Last night the storms sweeping across Brisbane took out my power around 8:00 PM. I nodded and continued working on my laptop for another three hours after that, occasionally pausing to check the internet or chat with friends via messenger and my cell phone’s 4G connection. I could have kept working for another four or five hours, just on the raw laptop power floating around my house. Somewhere in the middle of that, I realised I no longer owned a battery-powered torch. Eight to ten hours of computer time after a power failure, but no light. The future is fucking weird. Also, highly appropriate, given that I kicked off a new project yesterday that is all what would happen to society if dinosaurs came back? and Where in Rockhampton would you hole up to wait out the dino-pocalypse? The logical answers have no place in the book, of course, because once you start with the phrase dino-pocalypse you can pretty much assume that

PeterMBall 31/03/2017
Journal

Words to go

Three years ago I bought an apartment and began the process of moving in. I remember thinking, at the time, that I should probably stop buying new books because the ones I had already didn’t actually fit in my one-bedroom apartment with its outright rejection of right angles. Obviously, I failed at that. It’s not really a surprise. I’d made a similar promise when I moved into my previous place, crashing in a friend’s spare room for a few years, and the bulk of my book collection went into storage. That promise resulted in nearly thirty boxes of books getting moved when I left.   Part of me resents the fact that I don’t get to move any more. I’m used to living like a hermit crab, always searching out a new shell when the one I’m in starts to feel restrictive. In another world, where I stuck with renting, I’d be spending the next month searching for an apartment on the

PeterMBall 29/03/2017
Journal

Planning

Tomorrow I’ve cancelled my usual Wednesday plans and set aside some quality time to tidy my flat, revisit my quarterly plan, and generally wind the key on all the systems I rely upon to keep my life running. There will probably be white boards. There will definitely be laundry. I’m not a natural born planner. In fact, I kinda loathe the process. I’m totally on the pantser side of things, when it comes to writing, and I will generally defer any kind of collaborative planning to the other person as much as they’ll let me. I dislike making decisions, and I dislike being responsible for things. Worse, I resent time given over to planning. It always feels like wasted time that could be spent doing other, more useful things. It doesn’t matter that planning always saves me time, ’cause I get bogged down in fewer dead ends and panic spirals and I-don’t-know-what-to-do-next apathy… My gut tells me that planning is a

PeterMBall 28/03/2017
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 packing a bunch of

PeterMBall 26/03/2017
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Things You Should Be Going To In April If You Are In Brisbane And Into Spec Fic

It’s rare that I leave the house for reasons that are not gaming, uni, or terrible movies, but next month I’ll be making the effort twice to support a couple of spec-fic-type happenings taking place in Brisbane. And since I don’t want to go to these places and hang around, all awkward and knowing no-one, here’s a heads up for people who may share my interest in all things science fiction, horror, and fantasy who might be interested in coming along. LAUNCH: CAT SPARKS’ LOTUS BLUE and THORAIYA DYER’S CROSSROADS OF CANOPY Where: Avid Reader Bookshop; When: Thursday, 13 April, 6:00 PM; Cost: Free (but preregister) Why should you be going? It’s rare that spec fic writers from outside Queensland launch their books locally, and even rarer when the authors of those books are published by overseas presses. Sparks and Dyer are both great writers and they’re coming to town to co-launch their first novels into the world. Register you interest in attending at the

PeterMBall 24/03/2017
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I am the worst possible judge of what will actually be useful

Over the weekend I dropped three hundred bucks to pick up a Dell Inspiron that was on sale at my local JB HiFi. I’d been edging around the idea of getting a small netbook capable of running OneNote while I’m gaming for a few weeks, and I seriously thought that would be all I used it for – a small computer that weighted less than a hardcover, tucked into my gaming bag alongside the dice and session notes. Not good for writing, I figured. 4 meg of ram. Ten inch screen. Itty bitty keyboard. Who in hell is going to use that for writing work? Then I proceeded to take the damn thing everywhere for three straight days, because it’s about the same weight as packing a hardcover Moleskin into my bag. And the keyboard is surprisingly functional, after the first few attempts at typing on it. And because the Inspiron will actually handle Scrivener better than my desktop, which means

PeterMBall 22/03/2017
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? Typing up a short story

PeterMBall 19/03/2017
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Two-Bear Mambo, Joe Lansdale

It would be wrong to say that I pitched a PhD topic about series just so I’d have a legitimate reason to read Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard books and call it work, but I do not know that it would be 100% inaccurate. It was cold as an Eskimo’s ass in an igloo outhouse, but it was clear and bright and the East Texas woods were dark and soothing. The pines, cold or not, held their green, except for the occasional streaks of rust-coloured needles, and the oaks, though leafless, were thick and intertwining, like the bones of some unknown species stacked into an elaborate art arrangement Joe Lansdale, The Two-Bear Mambo. It’s one thing to learn the big, macro-structures of narrative that will allow you to tell a decent story – and make no mistake, Lansdale’s got that shit down. But the thing that impresses me, over and over, is his control on the micro level, putting together

PeterMBall 13/03/2017
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? Splitting my time between a

PeterMBall 12/03/2017
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

How to Become a Writer

It starts with the question you get asked when you’re young, and the answer that comes into your head is something to do with books, maybe? It starts with being shy, and moving around a lot all through your childhood. It starts with the trinity of SF from your childhood: Star Wars, Buck Rodgers, and G-Force. It starts with David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune, which you saw far too young because you liked science fiction and there was no home video back then, so it wasn’t like you could just watch Star Wars again. It starts with hearing your dad read The Hobbit in his classroom. It starts with the soundtrack of your pre-teen years, inherited from your father: Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, Queen singing Flash, the Rocky Horror soundtrack. It starts with your first William Gibson short story at fourteen and having your mind blown. With Neil Gaiman comics at sixteen, which blow your mind again. With

PeterMBall 10/03/2017
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Some Thoughts On Writing and Mental Illness

Every night I take 25 mg of Valdoxan before I go to bed, nudging my brain towards a healthier normal. Every morning I start tracking data on my preferred stress, depression, and anxiety management app, marking hours of sleep and minutes of exercise and whether I’ve had contact with the outside world. Every week I’m learning to pay more attention to the default narrative in my head, and the defence mechanisms set up because of those narratives, so I can better at identifying which are actually useful and which need to be dismantled. Every couple of months I get a blood test to see if the Valdoxan is doing unhappy things to my liver enzymes. I still have bad weeks. I was in the midst of one seven days ago. My stress responses still need work, because they’re currently front-loaded with the message: for the love of god, procrastinate to the point of self-destruction. I was stressed last week, but

PeterMBall 09/03/2017
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

On Organising Shoes and the Failures of To-Do Lists

So I used to have a problem with shoes. Not a problem with owning them – although you could argue, at the point where I had twenty-odd pairs of converse sneakers, there was a problem there as well – but a problem storing them. I’d wear a pair of sneakers out for the day, shuck them off after arriving home and sitting on the couch, and then I’d forget to move them to the cramped box of shoes in my wardrobe after I finished watching TV or reading. This cycle would continue over a week or two, until all twenty-odd pairs of sneakers were residing on my living room floor and I’d trip over them in the morning when I wandered to the couch with my coffee. It wasn’t terribly efficient, but it was the path of least resistance. Two months back I acquired a shoe rack. It spent about twenty-four hours living in my wardrobe, which was not a good

PeterMBall 07/03/2017