ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

There were parts of Float that start becoming scenes this morning. The early stage of a draft is always sketching out possibilities, laying in little bits of narrative that are obviously wrong, so that I can later come back and start figuring out the bits that bug me. This character is too passive, getting dominated by another. This scene lacks the kind of narrative spark that will make it interesting to read. All this is goddamn bloody awful, and you should probably do something better with it. And I ignore all those things, for as long as possible, ’cause they are a pain in the arse to fix. It involves deleting things, and I do not want to delete things this early in the piece. I do not want to reduce the word-count, when that’s the metric that allows me to measure progress. And, eventually, I break. I delete something and fix it. Give a character a snarkier line, so they’ve got a bit of an edge. It costs me fifty words or so, but I can make that up, with some focus. And once that bit is right, it closes down other options. If the character is snarkier here, then they need to be snarkier there. They need to start being snarky in the first scene when they appear, so the snark doesn’t seem like it’s coming out of nowhere. And, slowly, the problems get solved. Bits and pieces – little scraps of narrative where I try to lock down a

The storm hit and it rained a lot. I stayed in bed, reading, an awful lot. When that got dull, I got up and wrote, and did exactly as much as I needed to, this weekend. Then I ducked over here to write the laziest update on the 40 Day Rush possible. So how was your weekend?  PROGRESS ON FLOAT A photo posted by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jun 4, 2016 at 9:57pm PDT

I was at the grocery store today when my phone started pinging with me with notifications, many of which consisted of friends going hey, nice story. I was confused. I did not think I had any stories coming up this early in the year, but it turns out On Discovering a Ghost in the Five Star just went live over on Daily Science Fiction website, bringing together some of my favourite things: gyoza, laundromats, ghosts, and anger. Daily SF is free to read, so you just have to follow the link. Which I encourage you to do, because as a writer, I live and die by the application of your eyeballs and attention things I have written. So much so that, if left to my own devices, I will wander the moors whispering read me…reeeeead me. No-one wants that. Of course, there are only so many things I can do at once when multitasking, and that number of things is generally one, so figuring all this out while in the middle of a supermarket largely means that I forgot to pick up a half-dozen things on my shopping list. And this matters, this coming weekend, because there is apparently a monster storm hammering into the East Coast of Australia tomorrow morning and it promises to be exceptionally wet and exceptionally chilly in my neck of the woods. Perfect weather for staying home, writing things, and eating tasty comfort food. And so I am loaded up with the fixing for glorious toasted cheese sandwiches (assuming

I don’t sleep well at the moment. The plague that wiped me out last week was of the cold-and-cough variety, which is one of those that goes from minor inconvenience to major inconvenience when you strap a pressurised breathing mask to your face every evening. The moment the breathing mask pressurised, I would start a coughing fit and pull it off. The cold part of the equation is largely gone, but the cough lingers. And so I sleep in two hours bursts, packing in as much shut-eye as I can before the coughing starts and I wake up. I get, maybe, six hours of interrupted sleep a night that way. Enough to function, but not enough to be particularly happy. Thursdays I go to work. For the next two weeks, they are days when eight hours of work is followed by a two hour workshop. I still have to wedge writing in there, find the time to get the manuscript for Float up to 2,000 words before I go to bed. Naturally, I was afflicted with horrific insomnia when I went to bed at a reasonable hour last night, and did not actually sleep for several hours. This is my starting point for the day. And so I rolled out of bed at six-fifteen in the AM, humming the chorus to Rufus Wainwright’s Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk. I showered and ate my first complete breakfast in nearly a week. I drank coffee. I realised how much I’d missed coffee. I

So my exceptionally ordered routine spiralled into chaos about two months back. And, being me, I did what I always do when chaos ends up visiting – I stepped back, re-evaluated my priorities, and started adjusting my schedule to meet the demands being placed on me. Eventually, I figured, things will return to normal. I will find the new equilibrium and learn to plan around that. My writing suffered, as that happened, ’cause other work impinged on writing time. Lots of other things suffered too, ’cause the last two months have been crazy in good ways and in bad ways, but when I sit down and try to figure out why I’m stressing out, the lack of writing is always a big part of it. Writing workshops and applications are not an adequate replacement for creative work, in terms of keeping me sane and focused on what matters. And, since it been two months and the chaos shows no sign of leaving, I am wedging writing back into my schedule whether it fits or not. There’s an idea that’s been kicking around inside my head for a couple of months. Something novella-length, very short, very focused. One of those rare projects where I can actually sit down and plot out scenes, rather than make it up as I go along. One of those rarer projects where I actually know what excites me about the story, before I sit down to start writing. So, today, I start a new novella project – working title