Peter M. Ball

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Hacking the Writing Process, August ’16 Edition

Every couple of months I sit down and look at my writing process, trying to pick up inefficiencies. I study my habits and the things that go wrong, and I double-check systems to make sure they’re working the way they should. The last time I did it, I noticed a bunch of slightly interrelated things that went something like this: My primary work-space had become my couch, which is also the place where I eat food, read books, waste time on social media, and stream television from Netflix. This meant I needed to be really conscious about writing, when I sat down, because there were so many other habits tied to the location that it was easy to get distracted. The desktop computer, which I’d originally intended to be my primary work-space, had gradually been ignored. Primarily this was because there were always multiple steps involved in sitting down and using it, starting with “move all the laundry off my office chair,

PeterMBall 30/08/2016

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Things You Want to Tell New Writers

There are things you want to sit every new writer down and tell them, right at the start. Things you’d like them to understand, because they’re things you didn’t understand back when you were starting out and they would have been useful to know. Or things you don’t understand now, even though you’ve been at this for a while, and it would be nice to spare them that particular slice of pain. You want to tell them its going to take work, and when they nod like they understand, you want to grab them by the arm and really make them comprehend what you’re saying. “No,” you want to hiss at them, “it’s going to take work. You think you know what you’re getting into, but your head is full of dreams and lies and myths that are fucking with you. It’s going to take so much more work than you’re thinking, and none of it is as fun as you’re

PeterMBall 29/08/2016

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 a little bit hit

PeterMBall 28/08/2016

Journal

Staying On Top Of Things

I woke up early this morning and sent off some writing emails. Discovered another couple of emails that really need to be dealt with, so they’ve been flagged for me to deal with tomorrow morning. I begin to see the benefits of the dedicated admin day, which Kathleen Jennings has mentioned on multiple Sunday Circles, but I’m still not entirely sure where it’s going to fit into my schedule. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, this week, about the new job and writing and how to establish new routines that support what I want to do. Because my old job was familiar; I knew its contours and its frustrations and its routines. I could work around it, after five years at QWC, because I knew how to predict the effect of things going on in the office. Not with 100% accuracy, but with enough certainty to plan with relative confidence. The new job is wild and unfamiliar territory. It

PeterMBall 25/08/2016

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Other Question Pro Wrestling Taught Me To Ask About Every Writing Preject

So yesterday I talked about where is the money? – the big question I’ve learned to ask of every writing project, courtesy of a shoot interview with former WCW booker Kevin Sullivan. It’s a simple question, and it’s remarkably useful for cutting through to the heart of what needs to happen in your story, novel, or blog post. Today I’m going to talk about the other big question I learned from paying attention to wrestling bookers, although this one comes from a bloke whose insights into wrestling have already taught me an awful lot about writing – the inimitable Al Snow. The question he taught me to ask is this: HOW DO I MAKE THIS GUY? In wrestling, “making” a wrestler means figuring out what you want the audience to believe and convincing them to buy into it. You can’t just send two guys out there and have them fight if everyone knows the ending is pre-determined – there’s no drama in it.

PeterMBall 24/08/2016

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Question Pro Wrestling Taught Me to Ask About Every Writing Project

I watch a fair bit of pro-wrestling. I mean, I subscribe to the WWE network and mainline NXT like a junkie. I have, in the past, collected an obscene number of shoot interviews and Guest Booker DVDs. I have watched an awful lot of indie stuff, from time to time. I get irritated, occasionally, that you can no longer buy the DVD’s of Paul Heyman’s run booking Ohio Valley Wrestling in 2004, ’cause I couldn’t afford to ship them to Australia then, but could probably afford to do so now. I like wrestling. And, because I like wrestling and it’s a form of storytelling, it is something I spend an awful lot of time trying to understand better and draw lessons from. Thinking about storytelling in wrestling is often a good way of learning something important about storytelling in prose, largely because it such a different form. A few weeks ago I watched a shoot interview with veteran pro-wrestling booker

PeterMBall 23/08/2016

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

In Which I Go See Suicide Squad…

I went to see Suicide Squad last night. Not because I had any real hopes of it being a good movie, but because it’s a comic book film and I will end up seeing all comic book films eventually. Even the Zack Snyder one’s, which ’cause me actual pain to watch. I will watch them, when it costs me nothing, and then I will hate myself. Suicide Squad did not cause pain. Mostly because it’s an incredibly tedious couple of hours, by virtue of someone taking all the core beats of six different stories and throwing them in the air, then figuring “eh, good enough,” when the pages are re-assembled. Suicide Squad is what happens if you try to make the Magnificent Seven and do the assembling the team sequence, then throw out oh, by the way, these guys are meant to be saving a Mexican village. It’s the film that happens when you kick of Die Hard with Hans Gruber taking

PeterMBall 22/08/2016

Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PeterMBall 21/08/2016

Journal

At 5:00 PM today, I stop answering questions about writing for a paycheque…

Today is my last day at Queensland Writers Centre. As of 5:00 PM this afternoon, I no longer have a job where people get to ask me questions about writing or publishing. Figure I may as well celebrating that by doing my favourite thing to do here on the blog: answering questions about writing and publishing. If you’ve got ’em, let me know. Putting together answers will help me ride out the withdrawal as I face the existential horror of being technically unemployed for until the new job starts on Tuesday…

PeterMBall 19/08/2016

Journal

This Morning.

This morning is coffee and Patti Smith and Lou Reed. This morning has been getting out of bed too late because I was reading Catherynne Valente’s The Bread We Eat in Dreams and falling in love with story after story, falling in love with each shiny little jewel of language that’s deployed. This morning is porridge and a warm shower and a mild irritation about the fact that I have to shave. This morning is listening to Piss Factory, over and over. This morning is thinking, well, two days to go, and realising that I still haven’t quite locked down the details for next week. This morning is an alert from the transit app letting me know all trains have been delayed. This morning is missing Melbourne, just a little. This morning is looking forward to lunch. This morning is getting jealous at the friends who have wandered off to Adelaide this weekend, in order to attend the Romance Writers of Australia conference. This morning is

PeterMBall 18/08/2016

Journal

Horses. Horses. Horses.

Back in December I read Patti Smith’s M Train, a book that starts with (and frequently returns to) Smith’s daily ritual of heading to her local cafe for a coffee, toast, and a period of reflection where she writes in her notebook. M Train gets sold as a memoir, but that doesn’t feel like an adequate representation of the experience. It’s a book about thinking, much of the time, and there’s an incredible serenity and ritual at work. A place and an action imbued with meaning through repetition. Just Kids is a memoir about Smith’s life up to a certain point. M Train is a memoir about Smith’s interests, thoughts, and habits. I started going to my local cafe a lot, after reading M Train. Not because of the book, directly, but because I started to pay more attention to the habits in my life that brought me satisfaction. I started meeting a friend there for breakfast once a week. Occasionally I’d duck over

PeterMBall 17/08/2016

Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Crazy Thoughts

Tomorrow it will be eight weeks since I started on antidepressants. Since then I’ve cycled through three different types, found one that seems to have manageable side-effects, and stuck with it long enough that I’ve actually had to go back and refill a prescription. This is, apparently, a good thing in terms of seeing the effects kick in and…well, yeah. While I’m not conscious of things being different, every now and then I’ll look up and realise things are different. I also spent a lot of time catching up with friends I don’t see often over the weekend, which meant I found myself talking about the depression and the meds a bit more than usual. And I discovered that I’m extraordinarily bad at it, in a lot of respects, because I keep describing things that sound kind of terrible and being all, actually, it was awesome. Case in point: there was two-week period at the beginning of July where I was

PeterMBall 16/08/2016