News & Upcoming Events

The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons

I forgot I had a story in The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons. When the author copies appeared in my PO Box last week, I opened up the package and blinked at the two books inside for a while wondering why the hell I’d ordered a duplicate. This shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on the book – I mean, shit, I looked at the names on the front cover and there was no doubt in my mind that I might have pre-ordered a copy. Instead, it’s  a reflection of the long lead-times in publishing and my own scattershot state of focus over the last twelve months. The timeline goes something like this: Paula Guran commissioned the reprint rights for One Saturday Night, With Angel, back in August of last year. The payment for the story came through in November. I put the details into my rights tracking sheet and promptly focused on other things.  The books showed up. I paged through them.

PeterMBall 04/06/2013
News & Upcoming Events

4 Things: GenreCon, Novella Diary, Upcoming Workshop, A Reminder

NEW GENRECON GUESTS Wait up, I’m going to deploy the banner, ’cause I *really* love our banner this year: We made some pretty big announcements over on the GenreCon site yesterday, all in the form of names being added to the conference guest list. I won’t belabour the point here, except to just post some names: John-freakin’-Connolly (best-selling Irish crime novelist who understands a thing or two about other genres); Kathryn-freakin’-Fox (best-selling Australian thriller writer who knocked the Da Vinci Code off a bunch of best-seller lists a few years back); John-freakin’-Birmingham (my family will know him for He Died With a Felafel in His Hand; everyone else should get to know his Weapons of Choice series which have been taking over bookshops over the last couple of years). Add those names to Chuck Wendig, Anne Gracie, Anita Heiss and Kate Cuthbert and I start to get really excited about programming this year’s conference. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a

PeterMBall 30/05/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Pick Your Poison: Upcoming Trashy Movie Writing Schools

Every now and then, my flatemate and I argue about whose responsible for the ongoing #TrashyTuesdayMovie phenomenon. I say the blame is entirely his, since he’s the one who maintains the schedule and the associated wiki and generally makes sure that we have copies of the movie. He blames me on account of the fact that I continue to show up and tweet every week, and I keep talking it up among people I know. Also, that people I know keep adding fucking films to the list. I think, with the creation of a banner graphic to accompany this post, I have officially lost the argument. Not that it’s a great banner, nor even likely to be the final version, but I was having a slow evening and felt the need to crack open photoshop. Tonight we’re going to kick off the first of Six goddamn Josh Kirby films, which I gather are actually one long film that’s been broken up

PeterMBall 28/05/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

Charlotte Nash on Project Based Writing

So Charlotte Nash came across my radar last year, courtesy of some recommendations people made for emerging writers who’d be a good fit for panels at GenreCon. Unfortunately I missed the panels she was on – curse of being an organiser instead of a punter – but all feedback suggests that Charlotte was a) very smart, and b) knows her stuff. My own experience with her written work hasn’t been as in-depth as I’d like, but pretty much everything I’ve seen supports the smart-and-knows-her-shit theme. Her recent blog post, Project Based Writing, came about in response to my ranting about writing advice last week. Charlotte isn’t a write-every-day-and-hit-2.5k writer either, but her discussion of the issue offers up an interesting alternative. Here’s a snippet: Engineering work is often project-based – a well-defined “deliverable” by a certain date: a tunnel, a bridge, a rocket. And since, to my mind, a piece of writing (a novel, story, blog, whatever) is a fairly clearly

PeterMBall 27/05/2013
News & Upcoming Events

The Anatomy of a Blog Post in 1200 words or Less

This blog post is written to support a piece of my Year of the Author Platform workshop that’s running for Queensland Writers Centre today, breaking down the anatomy of an individual blog post for the participants. However, since I’m a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I’m sharing it here in case anyone else gets some use out of it. Since my readership consists of folks who are enormously smart about this sort of thing, I’m also going to use this as an opportunity to grab some feedback. Is there anything I should be telling these folks that I didn’t? Any resources you’d recommend? We’ve got a team of hungry aspiring writers who are eager to siphon your brainjuices, folks, so feel free to throw your two cents in once we hit the comments. Alright, here we go. Strap yourselves in folks, ’cause we’re going to get meta. Things to Pay Attention To Above This Text 1) CATEGORY There’s a handful of things to

PeterMBall 25/05/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

You Have Great Taste: Ira Glass on Creative Journeys

This week has been a lesson in the ways of the internet. I put a handful of links to a brilliant Ira Glass video on creativity and taste in the middle of my post about On Writing and only 3% of you fuckers went and watched it, despite the fact that I talk the damn thing up ’cause it really is that useful and awesome. I put one link in a post about Robot Jox where I mention that the writer is shitting on his own project, and all of you motherfuckers go traipsing off to snicker to look at Joe Haldeman being all “yeah, this film is a dog, man. What were we thinking.” You people, you people worry me. And I know the excuses that people will throw my way. I hear you sitting up the back, being all, “”No, Pete, it’s not like that, we swear.” To that I say: “bullshit, motherfucker. I’ve got goddamn metrics. Three fucking percent.” “But it’s

PeterMBall 24/05/2013
Works in Progress

Nine Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Robot Jox (1989)

Robot Jox is a fucking awful movie. It’s got an average review rating of 4.9 on IMDB, which is actually pretty good for something we watch as part of the Trashy Tuesday Movie series (and if you’re interested in seeing my immediate reactions to the film, the twitter stream is archived over on the TTM wiki), but it doesn’t change the basic problem. This film is a mess. A glorious, glorious mess. Personally I think people on IMDB are rating the film too high. Of course, I personally don’t really think Robot Jox deserves to be called a film, since it utterly fails to achieve all but the most basic requirements. I mean, it is filmed, and I suppose we could call what’s happening on the screen acting if we’re being generous, but that’s really about it. And yet, I’m going to suggest you go find a copy of this absolute dogs breakfast of a movie if you’ve got an

PeterMBall 23/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-Two

Context: Solid writing sessions this morning, charging towards the end of a specific scene. Stuck now, ’cause there’s a multiplicity of things that could come next, and they all seem to be leading me off into an expansive approach to the narrative that’ll lead me into writing a novel. I am not writing a novel. Which is why I spent 51 minutes messing around with the opening part of the next scene and wrote pretty much nothing; I’m about to engage the Kress protocol and go back into the previous scene to chance something and see how if affects the narrative. I need to be bounced off into a new direction. Session 22.1 (7:56 AM – 8:24 AM) Word Count: 610 Session 22.2 (8:36 AM – 8:50 AM) Word Count: 385 Session 22.3 (8:03 PM – 8:54 PM) Word Count: 191 Total Daily Writing Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes Daily Word Count Total: 1,186 Total Manuscript Writing Time: 22 hours, 4 minutes

PeterMBall 22/05/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Why King’s “On Writing” Can be Dangerous to New Writers

So my boss caught up on the Novella Dairy yesterday and commented on the fact that I was crapping on Stephen King in my post asking for feedback about the future of the project. “I crapped on Stephen King?” I said. “I don’t remember doing that.” “Sure you do,” she said. “You basically quote him and then talk about all the ways he’s wrong. You’re all It’s all very well for Stephen King to write about sitting in the chair until he hits 2K a day, but some of us have day jobs…” I’ll admit, at this point, that my record of this conversation probably isn’t 100% accurate, but it captures the gist. It refers back to an ongoing conversation we’ve had at work, where I’ve brought up the fact that I think On Writing has the potential to be a dangerous resource for some new writers and it bothers me that it’s so…omnipresent, I guess, as a source of advice.

PeterMBall 22/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-One

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-One So last night I stayed up late, writing a moderately detail plan for the scene I wanted to get done this morning. It was a pretty good plan. Laid out a lot of stuff. This morning I woke up and wrote a completely difference scene. Potentially invalidating all the stuff I’d planned. This is why I’m not, by inclination or any real practical process, a plotter. Session 21.1 (7:18: AM -7:28 AM) Word Count: 107 Session 21.2 (8:03 AM -8:23 AM) Word Count: 470 Session 21.3 (8:35 AM – 8:57 AM) Word Count: 542 Total Daily Writing Time: 52 minutes Daily Word Count Total: 1,119 Total Manuscript Writing Time: 20 hours, 31 minutes Total Manuscript Word Count: 16,283

PeterMBall 21/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty

Write club. Which, if you’ve been following this diary for a stretch, should give you some context for what’s about to happen. I spent the first hour catching up with Angela and hearing all the latest from the Aurealis Awards in Sydney, and the second stretch finishing up my WQ article in preparation for submitting it later tonight. With that done, it’s time to dig into some words. Session 20.1 (12:50 PM – 1:12 PM ) Word Count: 275 Session 20.2 (1:28 PM – 1:37 PM) Word Count: 296 Session 20.3 (8:48 PM – 9:33 PM) Word Count: 599 So, none of that went terribly well. This represents tree attempts at the same scene. Finally seem to have hit it, albeit not in a form that I’m happy with. Taking a short break before returning and trying to clock up another four hundred words, just so I can get back into the 1k a day habit. Session 20.4 (9:49 PM

PeterMBall 21/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary: Looking for some Feedback

I started May with this bright idea that I’d get Claw all neatly wrapped up inside of a month, which is one of the reasons it seemed like a prime candidate for tracking the process in front of a crowd. In terms of the words-on-the-page level, my assessment of the time it’d take was pretty accurate; even with a handful of dead days, working on other projects, I’ve still clocked up about twenty thousand words in as many days. Sure, a whole lot of these have been cut out of the manuscript, but that’s always been part of my process. I’m a pantser, and one of the realities of that is writing far more than you ever release out into the wild. My big problem is me: I’m rusty. My ability to gauge how long things take is at least three years out of date, predicated on having scads of free time, and I’ve written far less than usual. The novella

PeterMBall 20/05/2013