ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
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’ve just come off a very quiet week – the replacement CPAP machine had some problems with its power cord, which meant every goal outside of the day-job was a write-off until I got the replacement cord on Friday (I swear, the universe is giving me these little glimpses of what my life used to be like just so I’ll never go back there). So this week, CPAP and depression meds willing, I will actually finish the crocodile story and get the first act of Float started. I’m also firing up the pomodoro technique on the

Read More »
25/09/2016 23 Comments
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 seriously just spent about a half-hour staring at this question, because I am very fragmented after a week of bad sleep and my attention splintered a whole bunch over the last few days. Gathering the threads together and performing a little triage, I’m throwing the bulk of my attention behind getting the Crocodile rewrite ready to submit by next Sunday. My new writing time will be spent working on the opening chapter of Float, but I’m largely consigning that to the short bursts of writing I do before work and on lunch breaks. What’s inspiring me this

Read More »
18/09/2016 18 Comments
Big Thoughts

Poem

It’s 1994 and I’m sitting in a cinema with tears on my cheeks. Gareth has just died and Matthew is at the pulpit, reading W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues as the eulogy for his friend. It wrecks me as few things have wrecked me, in my young life. John Hannah delivers a performance that makes me a fan for life. A fan that will follow him through the third Mummy film and Sliding Doors, professing an affection for both. Three years later I see Auden’s poem on the page. I’m twenty years old, studying poetry, getting ready to spend two years writing an honours thesis about poetics and space and the city I live in. I’ve been published, as a poet. Performed my work at festivals. I wander the streets with notebooks in my backpack, writing draft after draft, hundreds of poems every year. I embrace the idea of quantity as a means of learning craft. It turns out, that’s not a bad way to learn. I write some okay poems in those two years. I write a lot of bad ones. They were about girls, mostly. That’s why I started with poetry, why I kept at it for years afterwards. I was young and awkward and funny-looking. I didn’t know how to talk to people at all, let alone the opposite sex. And I was foolish enough to believe that writing poetry would be my way of forging connection with the world around me. And foolish enough to happy, when that finally worked.

Read More »
16/09/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Creed and the Subtle Build of Stakes

I sat down to watch Ryan Coogler’s Creed last night, and immediately started thinking about what a remarkable film it is. Fortunately, I don’t have to, because the inimitable Grant Watson has already written the best review of the film you’re going to see. So good, in fact, that I immediately went back and re-watched bits of the film that he talks about so I could appreciate them all over again. But from a writing point of view, I do have things to add, because there are things that Creed does that are worth learning from. In this case, it’s a film of enormously subtlety, with a script of enormous subtlety. It isn’t afraid to set things up, then let them pay off without you noticing. Case in point: There is a scene, early in the first act, where our protagonist Adonis Johnson tells his mother, Mary-Anne Creed, that he plans to be a full-time boxer. She immediately tries to talk him out of it. “Do you know how many times I had to carry him up those stairs because he couldn’t walk?” she asks. “How many times I had to wipe his ass, because he couldn’t use his hands?” It seems like a throw-away series of question, three seconds of dialogue that demonstrates the dangers of boxing and establishing the stakes. And they do that, admirably, but they also do more, because both of those questions and the way they are phrased set up stakes for things that happen

Read More »
15/09/2016 No Comments
Journal

Reporting In

I’ve grown complacent about travelling in recent years. I went from doing very little of it, to doing a whole lot, and somewhere along the line I stopped fretting about the logistics of getting places and packing things. I paid for that, over the weekend. Three nights in Melbourne with antidepressants and a power chord for the CPAP machine meant I was feeling particularly blunted by the end of the trip. I yawned a lot. I got light-headed in the afternoons, just like I did before the apnea was treated. I had headaches and wasn’t quite so in-charge of my emotional state as I’ve grown used to in recent weeks. Now I am home and medicated and catching up on sleep. Still blunt, but getting sharper, and vowing not to leave things behind again. I went to see Nerve last night, and it was terrible, but exactly the right kind of terrible for my mood and mental state. If you’re okay with cheese, teen melodrama, and a plot that takes common sense out back and shoots it, Nerve is not a bad C-grade movie to pass an idle hour or so. The script is bad, the depiction of the internet makes 1995’s Hackers look state of the art, and the leads are charismatic enough that you almost don’t mind too much. A photo posted by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Sep 12, 2016 at 12:21am PDT

Read More »
14/09/2016 No Comments
Journal

Nine Topics I’m Obsessed With Right Now: September 2016 Edition

Towards the end of 2015 I sat down and wrote up a list of my current obsessions, which tend to inform my creative work and the types of things I end up blogging about here. By their very nature, obsessions are a short-term thing: they may stem from long-term interests, but I tend to follow them down the rabbit hole while answering a particular kind of issue or momentary curiosity, and then they get replaced by what comes next. It’s been a while since that post was done, and a hell of a lot has changed in my life, so I figured it was worth revisiting. Here is a list of the current obsessions that are dominating my reading and thinking, and will inevitably lead into the blogging. ONE: THE WORK HABITS OF ARTISTS AND CREATIVES This is one of those recurring obsessions that comes up every week or so, and it’s been stoked by a weekend in Melbourne where I got to sit down and talk to a bunch of different people about what they’ve been up to. But I’m in one of those phases where my life is in transition, and I’m able to throw a lot more focus on creative work than I have in recent years, and so I find myself diving into artist biographies and posts about daily habits and productivity/time management books that have a particularly creative bent. TWO: THE PERSONAL ESSAY I have a weakness for a good essay. Not the dry, academic

Read More »
13/09/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Some More Thoughts on Writer and Business Models: No Plan Survives Contact with the Enemy or Reality

Last Monday, I talked about the need for writers to develop a business model. It’s not the first time I’ve said this and I doubt it will be the last, but it was the first time I’ve said this here on the blog and in such am easily sharable form. That meant people started giving me feedback, which largely came in two camps: How, exactly, do I do this business model thing? GIVE US DETAILS; or Dude, I’ve got a business model, but it’s not working the way I want. I’ll address both of those eventually, but given that I’m Melbourne today (and I’ve gone three days without medication and CPAP, thanks to poor packing on my part) I’m going to hold off on answering the first. Mostly because I started and it got very, very long. As for the second: well, I’ve worked for a bunch of small businesses where exactly this has happened. This is the nature of running a small business, particularly one where you’re dealing primarily with other businesses who act as middle men, as most traditionally published authors do. Many of those small businesses I worked for had plans, but their plans were…flawed. Based on wild guesses and the way they expected (or wished) their customers behaved. Everyone does this. Think about all those small stores and restaurants that crop up, chug along for a few months, then fold.  These are business driven by hope and high expectations, then let down by the realities of their

Read More »
12/09/2016 No Comments
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? Got my PhD application in early, so this week has been freed up for out-and-out writing. My current goals: finish the crocodile story rewrite, write fourteen pages in the Float notebook, and try not to keel over in a pile after spending a weekend in Melbourne. What’s inspiring me this week? My Melbourne trip has been spent talking to various friends who work in creative business about their recent projects, business plans, and general creative life. It’s been enormously illuminating and its great to see what other people have been working on, so right now

Read More »
11/09/2016 19 Comments
Big Thoughts

Flight

It’s not that I’m afraid of flying. I am okay with being in the air. I like airports, and I like planes, and I like being in transit. There is a freedom to being between places, with little to do but wait. I read a lot, on planes, with a speed that I will never manage on the ground. Nor, as the old joke suggests, am I afraid of the landing if things go wrong, although I do think about it as we taxi down the runway. I close my eyes and picture the moment of impact. Or, rather, a moment of impact, as I expect the image in my head bears no relationship to the reality of connecting with the ground. In my imagination the human body is like a squishy china vase, tipped from the edge of a table and allowed to hit the floor. In my imagination we do not squish, but shatter. We disintegrate on impact, reduced to wet, pink shards that scatter and take considerably effort to clean up. But I am okay with that ending. It seems messy, but very quick. What bothers me is falling. The helpless moments as I tumble, watching the inevitable rush towards me. What bothers me are those terrifying seconds when the end is coming and panic seems a perfectly sane response, because there is nothing at all I can do to stop me and the ground from connecting. There is time to think, as you fall. To realise what will come. And it’s this

Read More »
09/09/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Talking Writing and Vigil with Angela Slatter

If you’ve been following me for any length of time longer than a week, you don’t need me to tell you who Angela Slatter is and why she’s awesome. She’s a friend, write-club buddy, and force of nature. For everyone else, here’s what you need to know: Angela Slatter is one of the smartest writers I know. Which would hurt less, were she not also one of the most talented and goddamnned hard-working authors you’re ever likely to come across. She’s one of those writers who pulled off the neat trick of having multiple books out before her first novel, courtesy of multiple short-story collections.  She’s won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, and five Aurealis Awards, and one can’t help but feel like that haul is just the warm-up. Her first novel, Vigil, was released a few weeks back. It’s outstanding, and you should buy it. Naturally, when I heard it was coming out, I jumped at the chance to sit down with Angela and pick her brain. So, this writing gig: what first attracted you to scribbling stories as a career? I always loved hearing stories as a kid. Being told a tale was like having a kind of magic happen to you. The voice of the person telling you the tale took on special significance; there was just something special about the act of storytelling, of hearing the tale, and of then going to bed with things to feed your dreams. When I got

Read More »
08/09/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Four Writing Lessons from Dan Charnas’ Work Clean

I find myself re-reading and chewing over Dan Charnas Work Clean for the second time this week, despite raving about it just seven days ago. I do this semi-regularly with the books I really love – the first read through is all about the experience, but the second is where I start to process. The re-read is where I slow down and take notes, reworking ideas and responses as I figure out how to make best use of what I’ve learned. And I will admit, this post started with a what-can-learn-that-will-be-useful-as-a-writer post, because most things do, in my head. I gathered up my notes, started putting them in shape. “This’ll be easy,” I thought. “Just find the writing angle.” There are lots of writing angles in Work Clean. It’s a book about understanding time, as much as offering a business process, and it tipped the notion of the most productive thing I can be doing right now on its head. Then I noticed that the stuff I really focused on wasn’t just useful in writing. The mindset seeped over into other parts of my life, and made things like putting together a PhD application, cleaning my apartment, and processing my ridiculous to-do list a little cleaner and easier than they were. With that in mind, this is a kinda-writing-focused, but kinda not list of the four most useful things I picked up in Work Clean. They’re aren’t all the book has to offer, by a long shot, and may not be applicable

Read More »
07/09/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Five Things Writers Can Learn By Watching Catwoman

So, let’s be clear: there are good superhero films, and there are okay superhero films, and there are atrocious superhero films. And then there is Green Lantern. The the Generation X telemovie and the first attempt to do a Justice League film in the nineties, and the version of Nick Fury, Agent of Shield staring David Hasselhoff. And then, somewhere at the tail end of that list, trashing Halle Berry’s career not long after she picked up a mother-fucking Oscar, there is Catwoman. For me, the quality of the film doesn’t matter. I love comic books, I love superheros. To convince me that I should not only avoid such films, you basically have to attach Zack Snyder as a director and fuck things up for everybody by ignoring…well, basically anything that resembles a film. In the realm of trashy movies, Catwoman is kind of glorious: a movie so goddamn bad that Halle Berry showed up at the Razzies to accept her award in person and hang some shit on the studio that made it. Because of this, I will sit down and watch it more often than is actually sane, and because I am a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I will start looking for reasons to justify putting myself through this particular cinematic experience. And, weirdly, if you pay close attention to Catwoman, there is actually some useful lessons for a writer to pull out of it. It’s like a cinematic what-not-do-do that hammers home some oft-repeated writing advice in

Read More »
06/09/2016 No Comments

PETER’S LATEST RELEASE

RECENT POSTS

SEARCH BLOG BY CATEGORY
BLOG ARCHIVE