Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Seven Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

I re-watched Hellboy II: The Golden Army recently. Not, alas, as part of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie series, which is on hiatus for the foreseeable future, but simply ‘cause I was in the mood for a certain type of movie and Hellboy II was in my DVD collection, waiting to be watched, and I found it before I found my copy of Blade: Trinity. One of the nice things about re-watching movies—particularly movies that fit into the flawed-but-interesting category, such as this one—is the way it allows you to look for patterns. What starts out as a disappointing movie experience gradually mutates into a narrative puzzle; you take it apart, look at all the components, and figure out how you’d take an alternate route. Somewhere at the core of Hellboy II is a brilliant genre film with mass-market appeal, a film that’s both pulpy and smart in equal measure. A film, quite frankly, that does exactly what Victor Shklovsky says all art should do—make

PeterMBall 01/07/2014
Works in Progress

What I’m Doing This Quarter

So, June 30th. We’re about to slide into the second half of the year, which I’m kinda looking forward too, ’cause Exile is currently scheduled to come out towards the end of July. More details on that in a couple of weeks, once there’s details to talk about, but I’m looking forward to it. Better yet, tomorrow I’m scheduled to turn over Frost to the folks at Apocalypse Ink. It’s a strange kind of thing, hitting deadlines in the US. There’s a seventeen-hour time difference Brisbane and the parts of the USA where I’m mailing the file, which means the first of July becomes a really, really long day if it needs to be. In a strange, unsettling departure for this series of novellas, I don’t actually need it to be a long day. Frost is more-or-less ready to go, so all I have to do is give it a final read through and attach it to the email. Two books

PeterMBall 30/06/2014
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Adventures in 80s Terror

THE HYPOTHESIS Ladies and Gentlemen, I posit that you will not find a clip that packs more 80’s music video cliches into three minutes than Cameo’s Back and Forth, released in 1987. THE EVIDENCE This has it all: big hair; bad fashion; Flashdance leotards; synchronized dancing; a vaguely glam metal guitarist performing a home invasion where he plays riffs at people. The only way you can cram more 80’s into this thing is the addition of a Corey. I DARE YOU TO PROVE ME WRONG In fact, if there’s something more 80s out there, I really want to know about it. Links in the comments, people. Links in the comments.

PeterMBall 06/06/2014
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

No, Not Black Leaf!

Okay, I’ll admit it. When someone first told me there were people transforming Jack Chick’s Dark Dungeon’s screed against Dungeons and Dragons into a feature-length movie, I kinda thought there were too many people in the world with a surplus of free time on their hands. But this? This looks like fucking genius: Couple this with the news that Wizards of the Coast will be letting us download the PDFs of the Basic Rules for free (and, hell, the fact that there is a basic rules set, which harkens back to my boxed-set-loving gamer roots), and this may be as excited about D&D as I’ve been since 2006 or so. Which is…kinda weird, actually. I thought me and my interest in the big RPG brand had parted ways more-or-less permanently for a while there. Seems we’re not quite done yet, even if I never quite get around to playing a session of 5th Edition.

PeterMBall 02/06/2014
Journal

Exile, Frost, and the Return of the C’Thulhu Peeps

So, the three things I’ve got planned for my weekend. LINE-EDITING EXILE The final round of Exile proofs edits landed in my inbox this morning, confirming that I’ve more-or-less managed to patch the big ol’ story holes that were in the first submission but left in a bunch of numpty-headed mistakes that need to be fixed. I’ve got about a week to turn these around, but I suspect it’ll take less time than that ’cause of the holy-shit, this is almost done factor. Which may make this the first deadline I’ve actually hit in the process of getting Exile together since Jenn at AI contacted me back in February of 2013, asking if I’d be interested in turning Flotsam into a novella series. I suddenly find myself thinking of a Neil Gaiman quote from his Make Good Art commencement address: “You get work however you get work, but keep people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is

PeterMBall 30/05/2014
Journal

A Small But Important Victory

Woke up early this morning and wrote 2,000 words. Not a bad start, since I’m aiming to have the draft of Frost finished by June 9th, which means 2000 words is the minimum daily rate I need to hit in order to achieve that. After all the dramas that surrounded Exile, Frost is going in on time if I have to kill myself to do it. It’s also the rate I’m aiming for that’ll make my big yearly to-do list achievable, if only I can maintain the pace, so it’s an important victory in this rebuilding my writing process process The rest of the week will not be quite so manic; I’m largely planning on running my ‘writing day’ from 9 AM to 9 AM, which means I’ll be getting a jump-start on tomorrow’s 2000 words when I come home from work tonight. It’s a routine that’s worked for me pretty well in the past, particularly when writing longer works. It should keep

PeterMBall 26/05/2014
Journal

Sunday Morning

It’s the tail end of a Sunday morning, which is as good a reason to break out the Velvet Underground as I can imagine. ‘Cause if you have heard this song before, it’s probably time to hear it again. And if you haven’t heard this song before…well. You know what to do. I spent yesterday fixing up some stories so they could go into the submission cycle again. Mostly ’cause the thought of starting Frost from scratch is still vaguely irritating, and I’ll start coming up with wild maybe I’ll find the USB if I… type hypothesis every time I sit down to write. Today I have to ignore that feeling and get on with it. I’ve got, more or less, two weeks to get this baby written and mailed off to beta readers before my yearly schedule is in all kinds of trouble. And with that, I’m off to write something…

PeterMBall 25/05/2014
Journal

Thursday I’ve Got Friday On My Mind

So, on the plus side, I had a really good writing day today. Got up and did some early morning writing, then followed it up by joining Angela Slatter for our regular Write Club. Net result: about 2,000 words. A whole chapter of the novella done, plus half of the second one finished. On the downside, I lost my USB drive on the way home. I spent a couple of hours looking for it, went back to the grocery store where it most likely slipped free of my pocket, but I didn’t have any luck tracking it down. Which means it’s time to buy a new USB and restore things from back-up. This is the second time I’ve lost a USB in 2014 – the first time happened back in March, right on the deadline for the first Flotsam novella, when I dropped Shifty Silas the laptop USB first and snapped it in two. I’m pretty good about back-ups, so I only lost

PeterMBall 22/05/2014
Journal

Is Thumbalina Size 10 on a Wednesday?

Two hours at the keyboard this morning; 784 words written on Frost. Not quite the level of productivity I’m hoping for from this routine, but there’s a level of exponential growth happening as I settle in. If I can jam out a thousand words on Friday (aka my only remaining day this week that gets shared with the day-job), I’ll dub the changes to my work schedule a success. Unpacking goes well, at the new place. It’s slowed down a little now, ’cause I’ve been here long enough that all the boxes containing books have been emptied and placed on shelves, which means there’s an awful lot of oh, right, that. I really wanted to read that six months back and couldn’t find it. And then I’ll find myself on the couch, book in hand, until I’m lost in story and my alarm goes off to alert me that it’s time to go to bed. The biggest find thus far has been

PeterMBall 21/05/2014
Smart Advice from Smart People

Tuesday, I don’t care about you

Two hours of writing time this morning. In my head, this usually equates to about 1,000 words of writing. In practice, it resulted in 498 new words on Frost, which is not a rate that will get things done by the time they need to be done. Only 29,232 words left to write. # Weird day at the day-job today. One of the things you don’t expect about running a site like the Australian Writer’s Marketplace is the dead market factor. Sometimes it manifests in the form of irate users writing to complain about the fact that they’ve found a dead market in the database. More often, people write to complain that Market X isn’t included in the database, when Market X has been closed for a number of years. ‘Course, if I can’t remember said market closing, I’m obligated to go and see if it’s still around, just in case we do have a gap in the listings. Today I spend a

PeterMBall 20/05/2014
Works in Progress

Tell Me Why I Don’t Like Mondays

I worked on the first chapter of Frost this morning. Managed to drag 270 new words out of my brain over the course of two and a bit writing hours. Not the most auspicious start to my new writing routine, especially since it was followed with missing my train in to work. This means I shall have to do some drafting work this evening, which is okay. That’s the whole point of front-loading my writing into a morning shift, rather than scrabbling for time in the evenings. Also…new story. A new story that’s a sequel, and the middle of a trilogy. These things are always slow to start for me, ’cause you’ve got to strike the balance between something that works as an ongoing story and something that’ll engage a brand new reader. Six weeks to go before the book is due. 29,730 words left to write.  

PeterMBall 19/05/2014
Works in Progress

Everything I Know About Writing Is Wrong

I turned in the rewrites on Exile yesterday. And Apocalypse Ink has the novella listed as Forthcoming on their website, along with the cover image. The cover image is kinda shiny: I’m behind on getting this back to the folks at A.I., for a variety of reasons. Partially it’s ’cause I overestimated how much I can do while moving into a new house; partially it’s ’cause I’m a numpty who struggles to get his shit together; partially, it’s cause… Well, it’s because everything I know about writing is wrong at the moment. I look at a task – writing a new draft; going through editors notes; writing a blog post – and my instincts tell me well, it’ll take about this long to complete. So I allot that kind of time to the task, and discover that it actually takes much, much longer than I think. For example, I gave myself five days to process the Exile rewrite. This seemed reasonable, given that it’s how long

PeterMBall 16/05/2014