Stuff

Oh No

I’m currently writing a short essay on TikTok and Instagram Reels for my Patreon, which has meant I’m playing around with both platforms. I’m over at @PeterMBall on both, having a bit of fun and talking about books/writing, but I did want to share one creation here because… well, cat. And it amuses me way too much. @petermball Its always hard to explain the economics of what you do to your pets. #writertok #writerscats #fantasyauthortok #publishersoftiktok ♬ Oh No – Kreepa Brain Jar Press announced a fantastic new short story collection by Tansy Rayner Roberts this week. If you’d like to keep our cat in kibble, you can pre-order now.

PeterMBall 23/09/2022
Works in Progress

Knock Knock: an interactive serial (Part 3)

This is part three of my occasional sci-fi serial about a science team dealing with an alien intruder on their romote research bate. After each installment, readers get a week to make a choice that will inform what happens next. You can read the first two installments on the series page. When last we left our intrepid heroes, one of them had snapped and elected to threaten the intruder with a gun. I asked the readers to vote on how things played out, and this is how things broke down. With 50% of the readership choosing the path of peace, we rejoin Captain Finn and the crew of Remote Research Station Denki as they try to calm things down. KNOCK KNOCK (A Serial With Reader Interaction) Part Three: Breaking Protocol Finn broke eight kinds of protocol and turned his back on the intruder. “Luce, I need you to put the gun down,” they said. “Tse’s hurting, but she’s in one

PeterMBall 10/08/2022
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

The 5-2 Focus List (A Useful To-Do List Alternative)

So here’s a neat variation on the to-do list I’ve picked up from Mark Foster’s Secrets of Productive People, where he replaces what I have to get done with what I’m going to focus on as the primary entries on your notepad. The 5-2 The process goes like this: Step One: Put five tasks you want to give your focus to on a sheet of paper. Works best with a mix of complex and simple tasks, but you do you, etc. Step Two: Work down the list in order. You don’t have to finish a task, just do something to progress it. Then: If you start a task and don’t finish it, cross the first entry off and add it to the bottom of your list.  If you finish a task, just cross it off. Step Three: Keep going through the tasks in order until you’ve whittled the list down to two, then add three new tasks to the end

PeterMBall 08/07/2022
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Indie Publishing and Business To Business Thinking

A general frustration I’m having with self-publishing/indy publishing circles right now Indies are, by and large, a business-to-business endeavour that primarily exist to provide ebooks to distributors and retailers who then sell them to the customer. Many of those distributors and retailers give an extraordinary level of control to the authors around pricing and promotion, convincing them they’re actually business-to-consumer. It’s become a foundational assumption in the rhetoric around indie publishing, even if it’s not true. So many people’s frustrations stem from this misunderstanding once they’re past the initial learning curve. The idea that you adjust some part of your product to make it appealing *to the business that actually sells it* is frequently met with all kids of denial, particularly when the suggestion involves increasing your prices beyond the just-barely-making-a-profit baseline. Indie authors have been trained to focus on the customer above all else, and have stuck to the strategy that undercutting traditional publishing’s prices is the only viable

PeterMBall 07/07/2022
Works in Progress

Knock Knock: an interactive sci fi serial (Part 2)

Part two of my sci-fi serial where readers get to choose what happens next. When we encountered the three-person team manning Remote Research Station Denki back in part 1, they were surprised by a mysterious knock on the door…and no details appearing on any scans. Readers go to vote on how they responded, and I’ve included the results below! Two readers had very specific suggestions (one bloodthirsty, one polite), but overwhelmingly, the response was opening the door and letting the visitor in. With that, it’s time to kick off part two. KNOCK KNOCK (A Serial With Reader Interaction) Part 2: Boarding Procedures Tse raised the first tentative hand, stealing a glance at the airlock door as she did so. “Not sure how long that’ll hold,” she said. “Whatever’s out there might not be hostile, but we know a breach will mess us up.” Finn squared their jaw, masking the gut-rending surge of fear beneath a veneer of command stoicism. “Luce?”

PeterMBall 06/07/2022
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Action, Reaction, Jackie Chan, & Gunpowder Milkshake

I often start workshops on story structure with the warning, “after this, you’ll never be able to go to the movies with non-writers again.” Lots of folks think I’m joking, but it’s essentially true: the three-act structure is the source code for an awful lot of TV and movies, and understanding its core beats means you can map out the bulk of a plot from a handful of details.  For me, this resulted in a different kind of enjoyment, more focused on teasing out the how-and-why of creative choices and where things go wrong, but there are plenty of folks who don’t enjoy that. Like, for example, my beloved spouse, who was so irritated by my response to the first three episodes of Star Trek: Next Gen that we’ve basically agreed to watch nothing Trek-related together for the sake of our marriage. They love the TV show unconditionally, and I…um…let’s say “sit there marveling at just how far TV storytelling

PeterMBall 05/07/2022
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Bullet Journals Revisited, And A Defense Of Rapid Logging

A few weeks ago, I read Ryder Carroll’s book The Bullet Journal Method. I’ve been using bullet journals for years at this point. Not the pretty art-pieces that you’ll find on the internet, full of scrolling calligraphy and Washi tape, but a series of beat-up journals that are filled with messy handwriting and scribbled notes. Notebooks with no interest in being beautiful objects, but plenty of practical use as a tool. I picked it up around 2012, after being impressed by the way my friend Kate Cuthbert organised her work at Harlequin Australia. Ten years of relatively consistent bullet journaling is a long time. Over the years, I’ve gotten large chunks of my family into the habit — there’s often a family Leuchtturm shop around the end of the year. I’ve experimented with different approaches, from one dedicated bullet journal for everything to bullet journal by project to bullet journal by context (writing/work/life). I’ve researched and experimented with layouts and

PeterMBall 04/07/2022
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Disruption, White Space, and New York City in 1979

The first lines of text of Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979 are short and succinct: SOME people say New York City is evil and they wouldn’t live there for all the money in the world.  These are the same people who elected Johnson, Nixon, Carter President and Koch Mayor of New York. But of course, rending it like this undoes the impact of that statement, because it’s divorced from the important context of the page. When viewed in the book itself — or, in my most recent re-read, the ebook file — that same collection of words is framed very differently by the white space around them.  I come back to this opening — this prologue — repeatedly to appreciate the heavy lifting it does within the text. The content of the text sets us up for the book that follows, but I’d argue the presentation of the text is equally important. The book starts with an immediate

PeterMBall 29/06/2022
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Cortisol and Coffee

There’s been very few stretches of my adult life where I haven’t woken up and reached for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It’s a core part of my daily routine, as non-negotiable as urination and feeding the cat, and I’m hardly alone in the habit. One of the easiest ways to make my spouse happy is having a cup of coffee waiting for them the moment they wake up, perched on their bedside table beside the phone delivering their wake-up alarm. Fortunately, this is pretty easy for me to provide, given that we live on slightly different schedules (I get up early to write, they sleep in because they find it harder to fall asleep than I do). Unfortunately, drinking coffee first thing in the morning is actually a pretty terrible thing to do to your body. The logic here comes down to cortisol, aka “the stress hormone”. Despite it’s nom-de-plume as a stress marker, bodies

PeterMBall 22/06/2022
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

POD, Publishing Mad Science, and White Mugs

Two years ago, when I first two my business plan for Brain Jar 2.0, one of my long-term goals was taking the philosophy we used to create books and use it to find other places for written work to exist. Webcomics and artists had been monetizing their art with merchandise for years at that point, and print-on-demand merchandising systems like Redbubble had flourished.  It’s taken me a bit to move on the idea because, frankly, the learning curve and the technology weren’t really at the place I wanted it to be for the audience size I was working with. Much as I love Redbubble and the artist friends who sell there, the lack of integration with other storefronts presented a problem for me — putting merch on Redbubble means pushing people to Redbubble, and 2020 was basically a long exercise in figuring out how important direct sales could be. Other services offered better integration, but were location-centric in a way

PeterMBall 20/06/2022
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Making First Moves

This morning I’m pondering the right first move to bed into my daily routine. Right now, I have about four first moves that will kick of my day, depending on which groove I’m in:  Getting up and journaling to park ideas;  Getting up and writing directly into the computer;  Getting up and doing the day’s Worlde, then posting it to my family chat;  Getting up and brain dumping my top-of-mind thoughts into an Omnifocus inbox, then doing a project review and building my diary for the day. Of the four, Wordle is the worst option. Logging in to finish a Worlde puzzle only takes about three minutes, but it puts me in a social mindset because the next step is going into chat, and from there it’s a short skip to spending the entire morning answering email and tooling around on social media. Journaling is probably my favourite kick-off, but the chain of events that follow that meditative writing often

PeterMBall 08/06/2022
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Greet The Day

My desk is a disaster zone at the moment. A jagged landscape of poorly stacked notebooks, contracts, and opened mail, with the detritus of my BWF office placed over the top. I love working at my desktop, but I can’t fathom the notion of sitting down and writing there. Our kitchen is a disaster zone at the moment, too. So is our bathroom, our living room, and my car. Our bedroom is relatively well-composed, although I’m behind on cleaning the CPAP machine and that’s taking a toll on my sleep.  Other disasters: my writing process, my publishing timeline, my PhD deadlines, my planning systems. Invisible chaos that’s largely unnoticeable unless you’re inside my head and trying to wade through the detritus in order to get things done. The great temptation of chaos is this: nothing is fixable unless everything is flexible, and if you let things slide long enough, the very notion of getting ‘caught up’ is the stuff of

PeterMBall 01/06/2022