News & Upcoming Events

New Story At Daily Science Fiction

My latest story, Counting Down, went live at Daily Science Fiction on Friday. There are all sorts of reasons to write a short story. Sometimes you write them because you have something you want to say, or because you’re trying to chip away at a problem that you can’t seem to tackle any other way. Sometimes you write them because you want to entertain one of your friends, and you think there’s a good chance that you can write something you think they’ll like. Sometimes you listen to Release the Bats on repeat, and after the fiftieth time you’ve shrieked HORROR, VAMPIRE, BAT BITE! you start getting nostalgic for the time you were stuck in Brisbane, overnight and without a place to stay, because the DJ dropped the Birthday Party at a goth club you were at and you decided that dancing to Release the Bats was more important than catching the last train back to the Gold Coast. There were four or

PeterMBall 06/03/2017
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 kicking around a new

PeterMBall 05/03/2017
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

CS Pacat on how to rock the Aaron Sorkin approach to dialogue

I was going to show up here and write a long post about dialogue this evening, given that I’m rewriting a story where I’m trying to do things I don’t ordinarily do with dialogue, and that’s seeping into the new story I’m trying to draft. Then I remembered that CS Pacat already has one of the most kick-ass posts about dialogue structures that I’ve seen on the web, so I’m just going to link to her post about manipulating topic patterns instead. Or, as it should be titled, a quick primer on how Aaron Sorkin does all those Aaron Sorkin things in dialogue. Go forth and read, peeps. I’m going back to my story.

PeterMBall 28/02/2017
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

On Resistance and Roll-Top Desks

I inherited my father’s roll-top desk over a decade ago, after my parents renovated their study. It’s travelled with me from apartment to share-house to apartment, sitting in lounge rooms or the corner of my bedroom, frequently serving as a site for storage and the accumulation of junk rather than an actual work place. This is the tyranny of a modern workspace where a computer is prominently featured, and the desk was designed for an era where computers weren’t really a consideration. It was always easier to buy a small computer desk that sits in the corner work there when I needed an actual desk,, and spend the rest of my writing time on the couch or the bed. This weekend my problems with the desk came up against another problem: the PhD needs space to spread out when I’m working, layout out research books and notepads and index cards with raw ideas so they can be absorbed and synthesised into the

PeterMBall 27/02/2017
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? The white-boards are basically running

PeterMBall 26/02/2017
News & Upcoming Events

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Other Things We Called the Band is probably the longest title I’ve ever used for a short story, and it’s still shorter than the working title I used all through the first draft. The finished version is currently published at Speculate, the short-story series hosted by Evil Girlfriend Media. The title for this one is a pretty direct homage to REM, who used the name Hornets Attack Victor Mature to book a secret gig in their home town back in the 80s. It’s the sort of thing one picks up when one is seventeen and obsessively reading band biographies, and it stuck in my head for twenty-two years before I finally started building a story out of it to justify the mental bandwidth it’s taken up over the years.

PeterMBall 22/02/2017
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? I’m sent a story out

PeterMBall 19/02/2017
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Friday is a collection of small things

For the first time in a long time, Fridays are a day where I’m primarily writing and researching. Here are some things that have been on my mind this week. Angela Slatter launched a Patreon this morning. It’s full of shiny options for supporting her career and getting cool things in return. You know what to do. Cat Rambo is doing a re-read of a whole bunch of Doc Savage novels and making notes about her thoughts as she goes along. The first of them covers Doc Savage: Quest of Qui, and I’m largely flagging this here for my friend Chris who is my designated person-I-talk-to-when-I-talk-about-pulps. Bloomberg has a guide to making incredible nachos that makes me excessively hungry and glad there’s a Guzmon and Gomez on campus. Chris Hemsworth continues to be an adorable Thor, who is,in turn, a terrible flatmate. Kat Mayo did an incredible piece on lazy journalism about feminism and romance fiction, to which I basically find myself

PeterMBall 17/02/2017
Stuff

Routines

My friend Allan has a useful theory about running weekly games when you’re in your all in your forties and people have lives: you don’t run the game for the people who aren’t there; you run the game for the people who show up. You don’t cancel because someone can’t attend, you game regardless and people will either start showing up or fall by the wayside. It works incredibly well when you are the one who shows up every week, less effectively when the person running the game is the one most prone to flaking out. Tonight, I’m running a session of my superhero campaign for the first time in about eight months. It fell off the weekly to-do list months ago, right about the time I started loosing grip on 2016, and by the time I was coherent enough to actually think about running sessions many of the players were doing other things with their Thursday nights. I kept

PeterMBall 16/02/2017
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Why I’m Using Scrivener as a Multi-Project Writing Workspace

I am surprisingly tolerant of cluttering in physical space. I take comfort in stacking books around me like a defensive wall, scatter notes across my coffee table along with errant mugs, and pile my laundry by the doorway leading from the bedroom to the balcony/laundry because I’ll remember to actually do it that way. I’m far less tolerant of clutter in digital systems, to the point where I actually feel excessively uneasy and reluctant to work when my email, RSS feeds, or work folders start to get out of control. Talking to people who leave thousands of emails in their inbox make me break out in a cold sweat, and I will say nothing of tab junkies who just keep opening a new page on their browser every time they want to add something to their to-read list. Dealing with any kind of shared server within a company or organisation, where files are often layered seven folders deep via arcane and confusion

PeterMBall 15/02/2017
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 working on short story

PeterMBall 12/02/2017
Stuff

Transit

This was going to be a post about productivity systems and white boards, but I spent yesterday playing chess with my dad instead. Now I’m on a train, with the backpack that serves as my mobile office on my shoulder, pondering what the best use of the five hours a week that will now be spent on trains as I commute to and from uni or the QWC offices. Right now, the optimal use of this time is writing a blog post, so I can erase that off the to-do list. And, really, this is the point of productivity systems and white boards. They aren’t a magic trick that will make you especially awesome, even if the shiny allure that draws you in is the promise of being like yourself, but better.  They’re a tool for cutting down resistance that talks you out of doing things – oh, I won’t blog on the train, the phone keyboard isn’t built for

PeterMBall 06/02/2017