Peter M. Ball

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,

PeterMBall 29/06/2013

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:

PeterMBall 27/06/2013

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.

PeterMBall 20/06/2013

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,

PeterMBall 19/06/2013

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

PeterMBall 18/06/2013

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.

PeterMBall 17/06/2013

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

PeterMBall 14/06/2013

Works in Progress

Embracing the Suck

I submitted a bunch of stories earlier this week. And when I say a bunch, I’ve now sent out more stories in the space of 48 hours than I have in the past two years. I’ve rebuilt my submission list; I know where everything’s going if the stories get knocked back. I’m embracing the mantra of the twelve-hour turn-around when an editor says no, getting it out to the next market as soon as it’s feasible to do so. I remember how this goes now: write, submit, keep submitting. And, really, the most important bit: be willing to let people see you suck. My failure to submit wasn’t because I didn’t write stories, it was ’cause I kept putting off redrafting and developing the stories I had. There were notes and ideas and a whole bunch of things I kept meaning to do, but I never got around to do them. I was chasing the idea of the perfect story,

PeterMBall 13/06/2013

Smart Advice from Smart People

All Writing is Political

I’m about to commit a metric butt-load of white-male-privilege sins by being a white-male-guy whose linking to another white-male-guy saying sensible things about writing and feminisim, but just this once I’m going to be okay with it. Chuck Wendig wrote a post about Sexism and Misogyny in Publishing. It got some responses, ’cause Chuck knows his shit when it comes to building an audience on the internet, and so people link his posts around. Then he wrote a response to the responses, and called out this particular piece of bullshit in a way that had me punching the air like a madman. “BUT IT DOESN’T SERVE THE STORY!” Worst excuse ever. I hate this excuse. I hate it like I hate the DMV, hemorrhoids, airline travel delays, and bad coffee. I hate it because it suggests that writers are not in control of their own stories, that they are merely conduits for some kind of divine unicorn breath, some heady Musefart that

PeterMBall 12/06/2013

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Completely Gratuitous Post of Newly Acquired Shiny Thing

So I’ve got a whole bunch of work on my plate this year where the income that’s generated is basically earmarked as “paying for Peter’s travel and con expenses.” It’s the stuff that allows me to go to the UK for World Fantasy at the end of the year, to Perth for the RWA conference in the middle of the year, and generally acquire a couple of shiny things (passports, luggage) that will make the increased amount of travel I’m doing a little easier. Today I got to pick up one of those shiny things that I’ve been patiently waiting to buy for a long while. Case in point: Picked this up on sale, along with a whole bunch of widgets, ’cause I’ve been looking for a portable computing option that isn’t Shifty Silas the Laptop. Something I can take along on those trips where all I really need is the ability to answer email, check out my RSS feed,

PeterMBall 08/06/2013

Journal

Bookshelves

The internet is full of gloriously sexy photographs of beautiful, artfully messy bookshelves. This is not one of them.

PeterMBall 07/06/2013