Peter M. Ball

Journal

2014 is Going to Hurt

I saw my flatmate in the kitchen this morning. For many people, this isn’t really notable. They probably see their flatmates every morning. For me, it’s a rarity. My flatmate gets up early. Seriously early. He’s usually on his way to work by the time I roll out of bed at 7:30 AM and start thinking about having a shower. Usually, if we cross paths in the morning, it’s ’cause I’m catching a flight scheduled to leave before rush hour. So he wasn’t entirely out of line when he looked at me, making coffee, around 7 in the morning, and asked: “who are you and what have you done with Peter?” “This is nothing,” I said. “I’ve been up since 5:30.” It’s a work day. It’s a writing day. It’s the year of the novellapocalypse. When these things meet, I have to get up early. # 2014 is going to hurt. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but in the

PeterMBall 06/01/2014

Journal

Your Audience: Building versus Earning

2013 was a hell of a year. I did a lot of stuff. A lot of that stuff was huge: I ran GenreCon; I produced eight or nine full-day workshops over the course of the year; I went to so many cons that I could spend 2014 sleeping and still not pay back my sleep debt; I went to motherfucking Vienna and rode the Wiener Riesenrad, which is one of the few tourist attractions anywhere in the world that holds some appeal to me (largely thanks to its prominence in The Third Man and Before Sunrise). I discovered that riding the Wiener Riesenrad is a fucking terrible idea if you’re afraid of heights. One of the smartest things I heard last year came via Chuck Wendig, who did an interview at the Get Read online conference where he talked about author platform and maintaining a career as a writer. I meant to post about it back then, when I first heard it,

PeterMBall 01/01/2014

News & Upcoming Events

Recent Publications in Daily SF and Coins of Chaos

So these my published stories, much like buses, tend to come along all at once after a very long period of silence. Also, much like buses, I have a tendency to get distracted by shiny things and miss them when they come along, which means I’m left to chase along behind and arrive places very, very late. I’m really not good with buses. And it’s possible this metaphor is getting away from me. Forgive me, I’m out of practice, and the blogging muscles have atrophied Suffice to say that the November-December stretch has been pretty good for me on the publishing side of things, however, since it saw my most recent story coming out at Daily Science Fiction, plus it saw the release of the Coins of Chaos anthology which features one of the few stories I actually finished in 2012. So now, somewhat belatedly, I give you excerpts and links. From Tuesday to Tuesday, Daily Science Fiction They’ve been together

PeterMBall 12/12/2013

News & Upcoming Events

Checking In

Back from Europe (which was awesome, except for the bits that weren’t). Back at work. Writing my last workshop of the year, THE SUBMISSION CRASH COURSE, which will be running at QWC this Sunday (spaces still available). Once that’s done, I have to go find a new place to live. And, you know, move. And I have to write some things. Which means I’m still prioritizing the juices squeezed out of my brain-meats for things that aren’t regular blogging for a little longer, although I expect to be about regularly in 2014 after scaling back my extra-curricular activities a little. Until then, have approximately nine minutes of early nineties AWESOME to tide you over.

PeterMBall 27/11/2013

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Hot for Teacher

If you looked at my buying habits, as a kid, you’d be fooled into thinking I was a huge fan of Van Halen. I owned a copy of 1984 on cassette by the age of twelve, acquired primarily ’cause I thought the smoking cherub on the cover was kinda awesome. My first CD – acquired, begrudgingly, when cassettes ceased being available – was a copy of the Van Halen. We were deep into the nineties by this point, long past the age where the distorted guitar of Nirvana had put hair metal to death, and there was something deeply uncool about liking Van Halen at that point. And, if I’m honest, Van Halen, as an album, did nothing for me. I’d picked it up ’cause I was collecting guitar magazines at the time, and kept coming across references to Eruption and the rest of Eddie Van Halen’s solos. I learned something really important from that CD: don’t front load your album.The three

PeterMBall 18/10/2013

Journal

Help Wanted: Writing and Travelling

This time next week, I’ll be on flight to England, wending my way towards the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton. There’s a lot of Australian folks doing that at the moment. I’d wonder how Brighton is going to cope, if it weren’t for the fact that England seems to be overrun by Australians as a matter of course, so they’re probably used to it. Right now, I’m on a lunch break, trailing the not-quite-a-computer set-up that I’m planning to use as a trasnportable word-processor/blogging platform while I’m overseas. That consists of the Samsung Galaxy 2 tab I acquired earlier this year, plus a battery-operated Ligitech bluetooth keyboard that works way, way better than the peice of crap I gold sold when I first picked up the tab (the lag on the first keyboard was bad, and I tend to type really fast). The Logitech is working out pretty well. It doesn’t quite cope with my typing speed, but it catches

PeterMBall 17/10/2013

Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

GenreCon 2013: The Aftermath

So I’ve been organising a con for the last few months, and now it’s over. GenreCon 2013 has been laid to rest, the attendees have all departed and flown back to their home cities, and my twitter feed is filled with people either thanking me for putting the con on or congratulating me on its success. Which means my life returns, more or less, to what passes for normal around these parts. A least until October 24th, when I fly to the UK to attend World Fantasy and get to experience the whole con thing from the attendee’s side. The internet is slowly starting to fill with people posting con reports. Some of the ones that have crossed my path are here, here, and here. This is my report, which isn’t really a report, ’cause when you convene a conference, you don’t really get to see much. Perhaps a more accurate thing to say is this is a series of

PeterMBall 16/10/2013

Smart Advice from Smart People

Writing, Not Blogging

I keep reading articles that say blogging is mandatory for writers nowadays. That agents and editors won’t take you on if you don’t already have a platform. This is hooey. Let me repeat that. Hooey. Cat Rambo has a sensible blog post about not blogging up on her website this week, which I’m linking to because: a) it’s good, common-sense advice that syncs into the things I routinely tell people who ask about writing and social media and stuff; and b) it neatly explains why I’ve been absent around these parts, and left everyone hanging half-way through the Die Hard series. The TL:DR version: I’m being mugged by life at the moment, and most of my brain-meats have been expended getting the GenreCon Program up and running. The head-space I’ve got left over goes on projects in order of deadline, ’cause when you’re working with limited time and mental resources, ya gotta prioritize the things that need to be done and

PeterMBall 27/09/2013

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Avril Lavigne Channeling Tank Girl? I Am Down With This Combination.

As predicted at the tail end of my Die Hard post last week, blogging service is somewhat irregular this week and we’ll be picking up on my narrative deconstruction of Bruce Willis’s greatest movie role next Tuesday. However, ’cause I love you all, and because I’m fairly sure I’m about to put together a sequence of words that will make my friend Kevin spontaneously combust, I’m going to do a spot of youtubery. I was alerted to Avril Lavigne’s latest video clip via this article on SF site Tor.com and, for the love of god, it really is all the shiznit they promise it to be. If you’re not interested in following the link, let me give you the short version (Kev, brace yourself): Avril Lavigne and Danica Fucking McKellar team up to channel Tank Girl while fighting knife-wielding Lobsters. Also, bad guys in gas masks. Plus, you know, self-referential meta-text as part of the set-up. Presumably this clip could have ticked more

PeterMBall 22/08/2013

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Two

So my friend Kevin was in town this weekend to talk about a project he’s putting together, which meant we spent a lot of time talking about narrative structure and the way character works and how to do a lot of effective storytelling without wasting too much time on things. Die Hard, unfortunately, wasn’t in the list, but it’s amazing how much you start noticing when your reading of an episode/movie moves from the passive to the active. I do this kind of thing for fun, since I’m kinda obsessed with structure, and even I start noticing different things when I have to actively explain how things work to someone else. What follows is a pretty close examination of the Die Hard‘s first act, which means we’re going to spend a whole bunch of words looking over what’s effectively just twenty minutes of film. This post will probably stand alone, but it builds on some of the things I mentioned

PeterMBall 13/08/2013

News & Upcoming Events

A Call for Reader Questions: Dancing Monkey 2013

If you fire up the time-machine and travel back to August of 2012, you’ll notice that about this time of year my life gets increasingly hectic. Weekends that used to be free for writing and bloggery get siphoned up by Writers Festivals, Conferences, and other work-related things. I start spending more time in airports than usual. Projects that have been ignored for a little too long start lurching their way to the top of the to-do list.My brain, known to be unreliable at the best of time, starts misfiring like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve discovered, from hard experience, that it’s best not to set my own topics in this period. No-one is particularly interested in reading an endless cycle of well, guess how I fucked up today and seriously, me and airports, it’s like I’m cursed; I’m not particularly interested those posts either, but I know I will if I find myself ready to blog and unable to think of something. Which brings

PeterMBall 08/08/2013