Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day One

So I’m setting out to write the third novella in the Miriam Aster trilogy this month. It’s been one of those projects that’s been sitting on my to-do list for far too long, and I’d largely blocked out the month of May in order to get it done when I sat down to plan out my year of writing. As my writing projects go, this one is fairly significant: approximately 30,000 words of narrative while dealing with two novellas worth of back-story and a whole heap of reader expectations that need to be met. This is at odds with my natural impulses when writing fiction – 8,000 words tends to be my comfort zone, and the only time I’ve ever revisited a setting is when I wrote Bleed as the sequel to Horn back in 2009. So I figured I’d try live-blogging the writing process, both to keep myself honest and ’cause I spend so much time writing about process

PeterMBall 01/05/2013
News & Upcoming Events

Whispers: Tooth and Nail

  On Saturday, May 11, 3:00 – 5:00 PM, I’ll be at QWC’s monthly Whispers reading event at the State Library of Queensland Cafe. This isn’t exactly unusual – Whispers has been a regular part of my calendar since it started – but this time around I’ll be there in an official writer capacity where I get to do the reading thing. I’ll join a team of awesome writer-types that includes  Kim Wilkins (The Infernal, The Resurrectionists, The Year of Ancient Ghosts), Chris Somerville (We Are Not the Same Anymore), Laura Elvery and Samantha George-Allen. Attendance is free, Kim Wilkins is awesome, and Chris’s short-story collection is proving to be a very enjoyable read. Plus, you know, there’s me, and you know I thrive on your adoration.

PeterMBall 30/04/2013
News & Upcoming Events

Conflux Panels

I’m off to Conflux down in Canberra over the weekend. I’ll be on a couple of panels over the weekend, handily summed up as follows: Guest of Honour Marc Gascoigne, interviewed by Peter Ball, 2:30 – 3:30pm, Friday 26th April The business side of writing, 5.00-5.55pm, Friday 26 April Putting the heart into superheroes, 10.00-10.55am, Saturday 27 April Conventions, what are they? How are they developed? What types are there?, 2.30-3.30pm, Saturday 27 April Star Wars—the rebirth, 8.00-8.55pm, Saturday 27 April Full details are over on the Conflux website, although I think the titles are pretty self-explanatory. When not at these panels, odds are I’ll be set up in the bar (along with all the other writers) or up in my room having a nap, given that I’m still fighting off a cold (read: I am the infection vector for con-crud this time around; avoid me like the plague).

PeterMBall 24/04/2013
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

You Do Not Back Up Your Work Enough

I live my working life – both day-job and writing wise – off a USB stick. It’s a necessity, ’cause I’m routinely shuffling between three or four different computers depending on where I am, and I like the option of being able to pick up and work on a particular project with an absolute minimum of planning ahead. So you can imagine what a pain-in-the-arse it was when I dropped Shifty Silas the laptop last night and did this:   USB sticks are not meant to sit at that angle, you know? This one was completely dead. Fortunately for me, this wasn’t a huge deal. Silas is still working fine and I lost about an hour of work, which sucks, but isn’t as bad as it could have been. But it’s a useful reminder: back-up your work. I used to do a semi-regular post on my blog reminding everyone of this, usually timed to coincide with  the anniversary of the

PeterMBall 19/04/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

So every Tuesday I get together with my flatmate and a random assortment of other people to live-tweet a trashy movie with (usually) some kind of SF-nal flavouring. We’ve been doing it for over a year now and, due to some weeks off on account of work, finally clocked up our fifty-third film when we tweeted our way through Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Turns out this was a particularly fine choice of film, for all there are folks who wail when you label Bill and Ted as “trashy.” For starters, it turned out Kathleen Jennings had never seen this particular stain of late-eighties awesomeness, so we lured her along for the screening. For another thing, it’s one of those films that ’caused a whole bunch of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie regulars to fire up their DVD players and join in, which makes this the second time one of our movie hash-tags has done the trending thing. Apparently, when #WyldStallyns trends, it

PeterMBall 18/04/2013
News & Upcoming Events

Year of the Author Platform

So I’m teaching this year-long course on building and maintaining your author platform for work this year, and we’re kicking things off with the first class this Saturday. It’s one of the handful of courses we offer to QWC members only, and it’s a fairly hefty chunk of change besides, so I’m definitely feeling the pressure to make sure it’s worth it. The one thing I hate about doing any kind of writing workshop is getting to the end and thinking, well, I didn’t really need that. There’s a guest-post up on the QWC blog that explains why we’re doing this as a long course over several months, rather than a one-day workshop on effective blogging or rocking the hell out of twitter. The short version, for the TL:DR crowd, is this: learning the tools is comparatively easy, figuring out how to deploy them over a span of years is hard. I’ve seen plenty blogs go through the excited rush of

PeterMBall 17/04/2013
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Dear Google: Thank You

I try to be pretty sanguine about changes to the tools I use to access the internet. A lot of them are free, for certain values of free that translate to “we make money by getting you to come here and generate data,” which means I’m generally pretty low-key in my responses to, say, Facebook changing the layout of its feed. Various Google tools have always been the exception to this. For a few years there I worked from a suite of Google apps that pretty much ran my life: Gmail; Reader; iGoogle; GoogleDocs; Calendar; etc. They pretty much let me run my online life like a ninja, filtering everything I wanted to see through a single iGoogle page that was there when I loaded up my computer. Then the Gmail layout changed, and it bothered me. Fortunately, this was back when I was working for the dreaded day-job where I didn’t actually do anything, so I had the spare

PeterMBall 29/03/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Men Without Hats

Some mornings you just need to rock this joint. Also, the eighties were fucking weird.

PeterMBall 19/03/2013
Journal

And now we are thirty-six

And we start this post with the traditional Morning-of-my-birthday-self-portrait-that-will-cause-my-parents-to-complain-about-the-things-I-put-up-on-the-internet (except I think I kind of broke them of that habit after six years of doing this).   This year is going to be pretty low-key, even given the relatively muted standards I use to celebrate my birthday. My plan, such as it is, consists of sleeping, hanging out with the Spokesbear, and collecting mail from my PO Box. At some point, I should go get groceries. And do the post-travel washing, so I don’t spend the rest of the week surrounded a travel-induced fugue.

PeterMBall 18/03/2013
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

7 Notes from my First Two Days in Adelaide

1. Dreadlocks Adelaide is a city that has a love-affair with dreadlocks. Maybe it’s just that the festival is on. Maybe it’s got something to do with cannabis being decriminalised this far south. I don’t really know for sure, but I’ve been really *aware* of the number of people getting about with dreadlocked hair since we arrived yesterday morning. 2. Day One, Show One: Deanne Smith, Just Do It  (Comedy) My mother has pretty amazing tastes when it comes to stand-up comedy. The same woman who is slightly baffled by self-referential and deconstructionist narrative approaches in film and/or television picked Deanne Smith’s Just Do It as our first show of the Fringe, and thus far it’s been the best thing we’ve seen in our two days of shows and exhibitions. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. My mother and I have never really agreed on movies, television shows, or fiction, but she’s always had a truly sophisticated appreciation for

PeterMBall 13/03/2013
Journal

Leaving, on a Jet Plane

It’s been about twenty years since I went on holidays with the rest of my family, but it seems we’ll be breaking that streak on Tuesday when all four of us gather and fly down to Adelaide to spend five days at the Fringe Festival. We fly back Sunday night. And on Monday, I turn thirty-six.  It wasn’t until tonight, looking at a calendar and planning my work week after I get home, that I realised that last bit. Birthdays are weird. I expect, this year, I’ll be reducing my celebrations down to the absolute minimum: sleeping in, re-reading Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, getting on with things. I mean, what little celebratory energy I usually have is going to be burned out by five days of awesomeness as the Fringe, and any reserves are going to be needed to get me through the week that follows at the day-job. In theory, the coming week is a holiday. I want to

PeterMBall 10/03/2013
Smart Advice from Smart People

The Lefsetz Letter

…those who win will have two qualities. One, they’ll be great. Two, they’ll persevere. Getting Lucky, Lefsetz.com On the surface, the daily Lefsetz Letter that arrives in my inbox doesn’t have much to do with writing. Bob Lefsetz writes about music and the music industry, mailing out his thoughts every weekday, and the tagline, first in music analysis, really says it all. And yet, on busy days at work, it remains one of the few things running through my various feeds that I’ll actually take a time-out to sit and read. The Lefsetz Letter may be about music, but the music industry was one of the first to get utterly freakin’ pantsed by the internet. It spent years standing there, shorts around its ankles, wondering what the hell happened and why people with freakin’ computers came along and changed everything. And this is what Lefsetz writes about, day after day. He’s a smart guy who looked at the industry that changed around him and

PeterMBall 07/03/2013