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Journal

Winter

All my friends keep moving to Melbourne and I do not. I find this kinda tiring, ’cause I’m not the kind of guy who makes new friends easily. I make new acquaintances. I’m good at new acquaintances. Making friends is harder. I don’t like to impose on people, especially now we’re in our thirties. I need clear signs that acquaintances would like to take things further. I assume, for the most part, that people have their shit down and don’t want me to show up and mess with it. I don’t bother ’cause I don’t want to be a bother. Besides, making new friends is all kinds of awkward. There are friends who skip Melbourne and just go overseas. I cant even imagine how to migrate like that. It’s not in my DNA to relocate that far. There are days when moving to Melbourne seems all kinds of daunting. I keep saying I’m going to do it, and keep failing to go. At first there is study. Then there is unemployment. Then there is employment and I like my job too much. “When they’re done with me,” I tell people. “When they’re done, I’ll head South and join you.” Secretly I hope that my friends will come back. I know it isn’t happening, that Brisbane has no appeal left for those who have departed, but I miss them and there are all these nights when all I want is the chance to hang out for a while. Some days I

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09/07/2013 4 Comments
Journal

Unicorns, on my Feet

So I showed up for write-club today and these were waiting for me: And now I am home and wearing them and, really, the world should beware, for there is nothing more terrifying than a chap wearing unicorns on his feet (because I am classy, I haven’t yet taken off my socks). They do feel, rather oddly, like you’d expect shoving your feet into a pair of unicorns to feel (by which I mean rather soft and cloud-like in their fluffiness, rather than a gross congealed mass of blood, sinew, and dead flesh) They’re a gift from the inimitable Angela Slatter, and yet another in a recent string of reminders that I have much better friends than I deserve.  

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08/07/2013 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Exercise, Writing, Momentum, and Control

I’m often fascinated by the psychology behind the way we do things, usually because there are all sorts of parallels between other things and writing. Case in point: I was recently pointed towards Gretchen Reynold’s article about exercise while perusing  Lifehacker, and was immediately struck by the similarities between the way she talked about regular exercise routines and the way I think about submitting short stories. Endurance…fades if you skip exercising for too many days in a row. The same is true, sadly, with motivation. In study after study, researchers have found that one of the primary reasons people continue exercising is that they enjoyed yesterday’s exercise or the exertions of the day before; they felt healthier and more physically masterful afterward and wish to relive that sensation. Longer periods between exercise sessions potentially could dull that enthusiasm. Ask Well: How Often to Exercise, The New York Times Now one look at my somewhat portly figure should tell you everything you need to know about the relationship between me and exercise, but that’s not why I latched onto this quote. ‘Cause it articulates something I’ve never really been able to nail down. See, ever since I started submitting stories again, I’ve kinda noticed that things are…better. Over the last week or so I’ve been writing more, blogging regularly, and generally rocking my day-job with a little more energy than I had. This isn’t a surprise; I knew this response would happen, ’cause I’ve been through this cycle before. When I’m

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04/07/2013 1 Comment
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Four Things Writers Can Learn From The Josh Kirby Films

So we spent a couple of weeks making our way through the first few films in the Josh Kirby, Time Warrior series for the #TrashyTuesdayMovie. After the first week I more-or-less swore I wouldn’t do a Trashy Tuesday Writing School post about this series until we hit the end, but the contrast between the first film (which was dull and awful) and the second film (which was an batshit crazy and awful) was marked enough that I kinda changed my mind. The first Josh Kirby film, Planet of the Dino-Knights, probably ranks among the most god-awful films we’ve watched on a Tuesday night thus far. It’s not quite bad enough to slip into my bottom five, but it’d certainly earn its spot in the bottom ten. The second film, The Human Pets, is better, but it’s greatest strength is being not-quite-as-poorly-made as its predecessor. In this respect, they’re actually an interesting duology in terms of the lessons they hold for writers. With that in mind, here are some things to make note of should you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of seeing these two films (incidentally, you can probably find them on youtube). 1) EXPOSITION, MOTHERFUCKER, YOU DON’T NEED IT You know that old saw where writers are all “show, don’t tell!” like it’s meaningful advice on writing? Watch these two films back-to-back and you’ll understand what we mean. Planet of the Dino-Knights is all about the exposition. I mean, it really, really likes to explain things. People

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02/07/2013 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Man Versus Bear

You may notice some changes going on with the website this week. I’ve added a new title – Man Versus Bear – and finally changed the subtitle away from the description of writer, gamer, and angry nerd that’s been sitting at the top of the page for a long stretch. Partially this is a response to the way my life’s evolved over the last two years. The majority of the old subtitle is still true: I’m less angry than I used to be, but there’s still plenty of writing and gaming happening. I still rant about creative practice at the drop of a hat, read far less than I’d really like to be reading, and generally spend a lot of time watching bad films and wrestling. On the other hand, I’ve also got a job unlike any other that I’ve ever had, and I frequently find my attention split by the demands of work, writing, and having fun. The things that used to consume me on a daily basis are now balanced against going to an office, managing some pretty major projects, and generally embracing a schedule that’s unlike any I’ve worked with before. Busy is a State of Mind My flatmate is fond of reminding me that I’m the worst part-time employee in existence. It usually happens right before I leave the house on a weekend, heading off to a workshop, conference, or reading that I’m attending as part of my role at Queensland Writers Centre. For someone who

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01/07/2013 1 Comment
Journal

Saturday Morning

It’s Saturday and I have spent the morning in bed, reading books. The great curse of the day-job is that I don’t get to do this often enough. My narratives get consumed through moving images on screens these days, rather than on the page, ’cause television lets me multitask. Or, at least, I don’t feel guilty when I cheat on television narratives by doing other things while they’re on. These are dangerous kinds of Saturday’s to set out and write a blog post. The results are always sprawling and full of weird little tangents and, ultimately, break all kinds of rules about having a point and making it worth the readers time. And frequently, at this point, I discover that I don’t really care. It’s Saturday. It’s cold and quiet and my belly is full of porridge. My head is full of other people’s words, which in turn fills the heart and nourishes the soul. I want to document that, to trap the moments and keep them safe, because they become so increasingly rare that I forget how important they are. I don’t often have days off that are actually days off anymore. I’m usually writing, or putting together a course, or putting off either of the two activities I’m meant to be doing with some hardcore procrastination that’s almost as much work doing things would have been. Today isn’t a day off, but the morning is all mine. I feel a powerful need to squander it on important frivolity.

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29/06/2013 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

For those of you needing to chill out a little this morning….

My head is full of complex thoughts today, largely on account of the increasingly mind-boggling craziness of Australian and American politics, so I find myself falling back on the search for distractions. Thus, you get a link to Kurt Kuenne’s 2007 feel-good fable, Validation, which stars T.J. Thyne (aka that guy from Bones who generally brings the awesome). If you need sixteen minutes to chill out and get your mind off the complexities of the world, it’s not a bad way to pass the time:

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27/06/2013 No Comments
Journal

Hoodie

I have become the kind of man who wears a hoodie without apparent irony. I’d blame it on the cold snap Brisbane seems to be experiencing, but really i just like to pretend I’m a ring-wraith hunting hobbits across the Shire. I think we should all be worried about the implications of this development.

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20/06/2013 2 Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

The Keyboard Shortcut that Rocks My World

I spend a lot of time on the internet, opening up new tabs. It’s an occupational hazard for writers and anyone who works at the Queensland Writers Centre, so I’m always happy to learn things that save me time and help me rock my job a little better. This post is about one that I learned a year or so back, which is proving to be a lifesaver on a day-to-day front. Ready? Here we go. Control-Shift-T  Or Command-Shift-T for you Mac people, scourge of the earth that you are with your fancy-pants non-standard keyboards. If you’ve never used it before, Control-Shift-T is the shortcut that tells your browser to re-open the last tab you just closed. For someone who frequently has twenty-plus tabs open, sorting through them as I construct the steady stream of links I run through the twitter feeds for @Petermball and @AMWonline, it gets used on a daily basis. It lets me backtrack like a backtracking ninja, saves on anguish when I accidentally close the wrong tab, and generally ranks up there with unicorns, beer, and coffee in terms of things that make my life better with their existence. Whoever came up with the shortcut get mad props, and I honestly can’t remember how I got by without it. It’s a simple thing, but it totally changed the way I engaged with the internet. Control T (for a new tab) gets a little bit of a workout too, but it’s generally just a quick-and-easy time saver – it’s

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19/06/2013 1 Comment
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

What I Learned About Author Platform By Spring-Cleaning My Blog

I’ve spent a significant part of the last twenty-four hours doing a spring-clean of petermball.com, going through a bunch of old posts and cleaning up broken links, adding tags that didn’t previously exist, and generally cleaning up some of the clutter in the category section to make it easier to find old content. This proved to be a considerably weird task. I set out with no real plan when I launched the site in 2008, basing my approach to blogging on my experiences with livejournal and mimicking the style of blog posts used by authors whose platforms I particularly enjoyed. And this worked, for a time, but as with most long-term projects that writers start, it grew more complex and thought-out as I went along. It’s also proved valuable to look at my old blogging habits with the benefit of hindsight, especially since I kicked things off with a very different mindset than I bring to the blog today. Since talking about author platform is one of our things at work (and I’m teaching Year of the Author Platform for QWC this year), I found myself taking notes as I went along. IT ALL STARTED WITH CONNECTION I found myself wincing an awful lot when I went through the first few years of posts. After going through the first six months, I felt the need to track down everyone who followed my blog in those days and apologise profusely for wasting their time. While a lot of those early posts

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18/06/2013 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Joe Hill’s Secret to Achieving Creative Focus

One of the things that makes the great truly great is their ability to make difficult things seem effortless, at least when they’re looked upon from the outside. It’s one of the reasons I’m intrigued by seeing the process of great writers up close, even if I’m long past the stage where I believe there’s some mysterious secret to writing that will unlock everything. In this respect, Joe Hill’s tumblr post on creative math achieves greatness twice over. It makes his writing itself seem effortless, while simultaneously acknowledging the effort that goes into his work, and its a distillation of a great deal of complex thought and experience into a single elegant point: what’s my trick for staying focused on a project? Happiness. I follow pleasure. It makes me feel good to stay focused on one thing at a time, to pour myself fully into it, so that’s what I do. I think any creative act usually grows naturally from enjoyment. Experiment with your approach and see what gives you the best high… then do that. via Creative math: 1 > 2 at Joe Hill’s Thrills When you consider the overall complexity of Hill’s creative output – he’s a novelist, a comic-book writer, and a damn fine short fiction writer – this advice seems wildly counter-intuitive. Monthly comic books have deadlines that roll through faster than novel deadlines, which means you naturally end up having to stop one and work on the other. Judging by the rest of his post, Hill’s secret doesn’t

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17/06/2013 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

10 Thoughts On Shame and Writing

ONE I rocked up to Angela Slatter’s place for Write Club earlier today, went through the usual process of getting buzzed into her apartment block and climbing upstairs. When I finally reached the front door, Angela pointed out that I didn’t really sound like me when I talked into the intercom. “Huh,” I said. “It’s probably because I was cheerful.” TWO I spend a lot of time thinking about shame these days, particularly in the last few weeks. I ran out of money back in late June, for certain definitions of running out of money that triggered all sorts of bad instincts that built up during my three years of unemployment. This means I immediately went into the same coping mechanisms that got me through that period, counter-productive as they were: I cancelled social engagements; I hid from the world; I avoided any activity that could potentially draw attention my way, including writing (If you want to trace exactly when all this started, go back and look at the point where the novella diary stopped being posted). This is a pretty natural response to feeling shame. It’s an emotion that’s predicated on the desire to cover yourself, to turn away from things, to hide. When we blush, our own body works to obscure us, throwing a scarlet camouflage across the face to protect us from prying eyes. THREE The worst thing about shame is the way it betrays you, revealing the gap between who you are and who you believe

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14/06/2013 1 Comment

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