Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Some Thoughts On Theatre, Set Design, and a Moment of Disconnection

I went to see the recent Queensland Theatre Company production of Tartuffe over the weekend, but this is not a review of that show. My review would run very simply: incredible work, great fun, go and fucking see it. Even if you have no idea what Tartuffe is and why Moliere is a big deal. Hell, especially if you don’t know why Moliere is a big deal. But what I’m still noodling about on a Tuesday morning, three days after I saw the show, is a very small slice of the overall show: set design. There’s been a run of QTC shows with incredible sets in the last twelve months. The set for last year’s The Odd Couple was an incredible piece of work, creating an apartment in the middle of the stage that allows for a lot of dynamic movement. The set for Tartuffe is equally incredible work: the rooms and balconies of a double-story mansion on a rotating

PeterMBall 30/11/2016
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

So you’re the kind of vegetarian who only eats roses

I saw Leonard Cohen live a few years back. The concert was the same week my father had his heart attack, and I was meant to be going with my dad and my sister. Instead, my father was hospitalised and being prepared for surgery, and my sister stayed with my mum. I was encouraged to go Cohen anyway, find friends who could make use of the spare tickets. I did. We ate Indian food. Leonard Cohen wore a suit on stage, and he performed with the kind of serenity and poise you’ve got no choice but to envy. I was not in good shape before my dad’s heart attack, and things were considerably worse after it happened. Seeing Leonard Cohen was the only time that month it felt anything close to okay. Now it’s been three weeks since Cohen died and I’m seated on the balcony of my parent’s apartment, listening to my dad watch the cricket inside. It’s thirty-something

PeterMBall 29/11/2016
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 starting to work through

PeterMBall 27/11/2016
Journal

Thirty-Eight Days

I am incredibly behind on everything. There are too man old things left undone, and too many new things that I want to get started on, so my procrastination of choice becomes tearing down old things and trying to build new things from the rubble. I’m revisiting plans, rebuilding systems. I have spent far to much time familiarising myself with Trello boards and adding projects to them, finding gaps in my planning systems. Trello is not my preferred solution for this, but I am out of places to hang whiteboards in my apartment. All this is trying to solve a single problem: 2017 is unknown terrain for me right now. There are too many things that I might be doing, depending on what happens in the next 30 days, and the ideal preparation for the two most likely options is very, very different. Certainty doesn’t arrive until December 23rd. It’s proving to be a very long wait. My notebook is full of

PeterMBall 24/11/2016
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 loaded up on jobs-that-take-up-writing-time,

PeterMBall 20/11/2016
Journal

In Which My Brain Finally Accepts What Should Have Been Obvious

Eleven days ago I noticed something weird – I hit the end of the two hours I’d set aside for writing and I was a good 400 words short of the word-count I expected. Not a huge deal, all things considered, but I’d been writing at a pretty regular speed ever since I went back to typing manuscripts. I shrugged. It was just a weird thing, and a little surprising after being so regular in my productivity, but I hadn’t been sleeping well and I was feeling a little uneven that week. Ten days ago, I kicked off a mild depressive episode. My first since going on antidepressants back in August. First my sleep patterns went to shit, and then I found myself wanting to shout at strangers for the cardinal sin of sitting at the table next to mine at a cafe, and the next thing I knew I’d spent thirteen hours glued to the couch spamming my self-loathing’s greatest hits

PeterMBall 16/11/2016
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 lost my way a

PeterMBall 13/11/2016
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? Moving forward on the second

PeterMBall 06/11/2016
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

18 Hours, 29 minutes, 16 Seconds

One of my goals for 2016 was gathering data about my writing process, so I could better anticipate what was actually possible in terms of planning my writing time and figure out how to patch the holes where writing hours seemed to evaporate. A lot of my grander plans associated with that goal fell apart, throughout the year, since one of the big holes in my process was basically depression and insane levels of stress. Gathering data fell by the wayside and I focused on just having a process at all, rather than refining it. That’s starting to change now, very late in 2016, thanks to the combined effects of antidepressants, a new job, and a restructure of my writing time in order to eliminate some of the temptations that usually distract me from writing. I implemented the goal of devoting 21 hours a week to my writing career a month ago, and started tracking it pretty religiously. Then, back on

PeterMBall 31/10/2016
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 finished off the Bad

PeterMBall 30/10/2016
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Sweet, Seductive Song of October Productivity

I have spent the last few weeks agreeing to do things, comfortable in the knowledge that time when I would actually have to do said things was comfortably distant in the future. Except now the future is almost here, and this will be my last week where all my writing time is actually devoted to writing-related tasks. I tend to forget that October is a good writing month. The weather is pleasant and there is a kind of lull in the yearly commitments, a quietness between the festival chaos of September and the beginning of the end-of-year chaos that comes in November. Every year October comes around and I do a whole bunch of work and I think, well, this is nice, it would be great if this was all year round. And then I start making plans, because everything seems so achievable. Then November reminds me that those plans are foolish, and December derails them entirely. It doesn’t stop

PeterMBall 27/10/2016
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Three Things Writers Actually Sell That Aren’t Books, Really

I keep meaning to sit down and write another extended post about writing and business plans, but the topic is large and tangled and crazy, and my time for blogging is short and controlled and subservient to the task of getting things written. So I have not written a blog post about basing your business plan off what you actually sell as a writer, not what you think you sell, but I have written 22,000 words of a novella in the space of seven days and stand a good chance of finishing the whole thing over the weekend. I am comfortable with that trade-off, right now. But the short version of the long and tangled post that I did not write goes something like this – if you are building a business plan about your writing, you need to forget about the book as the thing you’re selling and start considering the other things. First, that you’re actually selling permission to

PeterMBall 26/10/2016