Works in Progress

Projects Du Jour

It’s been a while since I talked about up-coming projects on the blog. Partially this is because there weren’t many upcoming projects over the last two years. Partially this is because I’ve become more reclusive in my old age, unwilling to throw things out there until they’re more-or-less done. I write slow, you see, and occasionally it struck me as faintly absurd that I’d mention writing a short story and it’d be another two years before I finished it. Longer, in the case of some projects, since we do not talk about the novel (or, for that matter, the third Aster novella, or at least one story that people occasionally ask me about that I still haven’t got ’round to finishing). It’s not that these things go away – I still have all of them in my active projects folder. I’m just, you know, slow. Today, at write club, I did some work on a story I started in 2007.

PeterMBall 04/03/2013
Big Thoughts

The Future is Kind of Awesome

Staying up late on Sunday nights is one of the true pleasures in life. I missed the hell out of it last year, when Mondays were a day-job day, but then, I missed a great many things in 2012 that I seem to have gotten back this year. It’s eleven o’clock and I’m listening to Antony and the Johnsons while I kick around the internet, gearing up for the few hours of writing that’ll kick off once I finish this post. Brisbane is in the grip of early Autumn already, hammering us with the kind of cold and relentless rain that has always made this one of my favourite times of year in a strange, melancholy kind of way. And, as I often do when I sit down to write a post, I find myself thinking of you guys. Back in the days when I taught writing a lot, I used to tell students that writing is an ongoing conversation

PeterMBall 04/03/2013
News & Upcoming Events

Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse

Cool Thing the First: I recently discovered that the StoneSkin Press webstore is live, which means you should now be able to pick up copies of The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables if you live in places like the US or Australia or, hell, I’m assuming you’re pretty much anywhere the internet reaches. There’s only a handful of times I’ve been really excited to work with an editor and, as I noted quite effusively last year,  this project was one of them. Robin Laws is one of those writer/editor/creative types whose work effectively crosses many areas of interest, and I was a long-time fan of his frighteningly smart observations about RPG gaming as a younger lad. Cool Thing the Second: The Buzzcocks are Touring Australia in April. I’m not sure I can truly explain why this makes me happy, beyond pointing out that Have You Ever Fallen In Love with Someone (You Shouldn’t Have Fallen In Love With) was one of those songs that

PeterMBall 27/02/2013
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

KPIs and Writing Data

So I have KPIs at the day-job this year, a neat little grid of goals that serve as the line between “doing my job well” and “not quite meeting expectations.” This is something of a first for me – for most of my life I’ve done contract work or found my way into jobs that were…well, lets say insufficiently defined for the purposes of generating things like key performance indicators. I’ve spent most of my life listening to friends talk about their office jobs and KPIs were part of that arcane language that floated around, reminding me of how little my work-life resembled theirs. I used to envy that KPI talk. Lots of my friends weren’t fond of the meetings, or found them a waste of time, but for someone who is, at their core, a moderately competitive person, they mean something important. They mean the day-job can be won. There is a line to reach and once I have

PeterMBall 27/02/2013
News & Upcoming Events

New Fiction: “On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V–”

So, news: my latest story, On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V–, is now free to read on Eclipse Online with a particularly lovely Kathleen Jennings illustration accompanying it (I’m not saying I submitted to Eclipse just ’cause they had Kathleen illustrating all the stories, but it didn’t hurt. Kathleen is kinda awesome). So I’m psyched. I mean, I’m really psyched. It’s been a long while since I had a story out there people could read without buying a book. Or, for that matter, a story out there at all. I’m going to be spending the rest of the day being all writing things FTW!, but for now I’ll just offer up this free taste-test of what’s on the far side of the link: Our tiny hotel room is boiling, even now, but heat doesn’t bother Patrick and he sleeps, shirtless, with the thin sheet coiled round him like a loving serpent. It’s a trick for him, nodding

PeterMBall 25/02/2013
Journal

A Damp and Drizzly November in the Soul

I’ve been back on public transport this week, regularly catching trains into work for the first time in about nine months. Usually I’m pretty fond of trains. The buses and me, we’re never going to see eye to eye, but there’s something remarkably civilized about rail transport. Especially Brisbane rail transport, which recently embraced the idea of giving people free wi-fi while they’re in transit (which, is apparently, the future once the car-loving baby boomers no longer have control of government). On the other hand, the train can also be a remarkably frustrating way to travel. I read an article a couple of years back that pointed out the inhibitor for most people when it comes to public transport isn’t the duration of the journey, but how often the services leave. Apparently we’re eager to be in motion when we’re trying to get somewhere and we’re grumpy as hell when we’re left to sit around on the platform. I spend

PeterMBall 21/02/2013
Journal

The New Thing

  One of the most disorienting places I’ve ever been was this hotel in Adelaide I visited last year. It’s one of those places that had the kind of endless sameness you get in movies when they point a camera at a hotel corridor and make it seem like a subtly alien kind of place. I stepped out of the lift and looked down the hall and said whoa all Bill-and-Ted-like. Then I hit my room and my room was huge (I got upgraded) and my plans for the evening rapidly became lie around this here room and marvel at the craziness of it, cause you’ll never be in a hotel room this huge and weird again. And that’s what I did. I ducked out to grab some fast-food, ’cause eating fast-food in a room like that seemed like the kind of sacrilegious that needed to be performed, just as I may have busted out a whole bunch of punk songs just to see how out-of-place they

PeterMBall 15/02/2013
Journal

Redrafting, Melbourne, Something Forgotten

This is my set-up for the day: I will not leave the bed until I have finished some short stories and polished them up, all ready to submit. This shouldn’t be too hard – there’s at least a half-dozen story drafts on my hard drive that are finished and critiqued and basically waiting for me to give them the time to day, but for various reasons I haven’t been doing that and that’s gotta stop. I constantly try to fight it, but the bed is pretty much my natural working place. I like being horizontal when I work. I like having room to spread out. I like being able to snuggle under blankets during winter and find a nice breeze in summer, and I like being close to my books (the vast majority of which live in my bedroom and always have). Further, there’s something indolent about working from the bed. As if the work you do there isn’t really

PeterMBall 11/02/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Bright Star

I re-watched Jane Campion’s Bright Star today. Once again I am filled with a powerful need to track down people who claim Avatar was visually interesting and punch them in the stomach. Avatar, at best, managed to put together a cinematic spectacle (and even then, I’ll argue); Bright Star, which was released at the same time, is put together by folks who understand how to speak in the visual language of film and create images that are meaningful in and of themselves. It’s been four years and this still pisses me off. Avatar remains a constant disappointment, a reminder that occasionally I hope too much. Bright Star remains a delight , a film rather than a movie, and one that over-delivers on every expectation. I don’t often watch movies that qualify as art these days. I’m not entirely sure you see that many out there, in the wild. Bright Star qualifies as art. It’s worth seeing. It’s also a very

PeterMBall 10/02/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I’m Hot and I’m Sticky Sweet…

Some days need a bit of Def Leppard. Some days do not. Today, well, it’s one of the former. Weirdly, I missed the period when Def Leppard was actually a big deal. Hysteria came out in 1987, which means I was both 9 years old and living in the middle of nowhere, far from the pop cultural embrace of TV and cinema and popular radio. I was far more likely to be reading books back in those days, getting exposed to music through my dad’s LP collection (although I wasn’t yet allowed to play records on my own) or the soundtracks to the handful of movies we saw when we came to Brisbane for the holidays. Basically, I didn’t even really process that Def Leppard was a big deal until they became a lyrical riff in Bloodhound Gang’s Why is everyone picking on me in the mid-nineties. They weren’t a band by then, not really; they were a pop cultural reference that

PeterMBall 09/02/2013
News & Upcoming Events

GenreCon 2013 is live

So yesterday, at the day job, we announced this: I was going to post it here this morning and give you the spiel about the limited number of early bird tickets and the crazy discounted prices they represent, but since going on sale at 4:00 PM yesterday we’ve blown through about 70% of the early bird tickets in twelve hours. So instead the spiel is this: if you want to come to GenreCon for less than $200, go book now, ’cause I fully expect the early bird rate to be gone by the end of the day. We’ve already revealed  the first two guests – Chuck Wendig and Anita Heiss – with the ever popular more to come still yet to be announced. It’s going to be crazy. It’s going to be awesome. And I’m getting the impression I should be really happy we asked for the big auditorium in the state library, ’cause we’re now at the point it took

PeterMBall 06/02/2013
Journal

Not in Melbourne

So I’m not in Melbourne anymore and that makes me kinda sad. For the last four days I’ve been aimlessly wandering the city, catching up with friends I don’t get to see too often, eating good food and exercising my low-key superpower of being the only person in the world who goes to Melbourne and drinks bad coffee. I’ve returned to Brisbane fatter and happier than I left. Now I’m warming up for the pre-work writing shift and a day that’s looking…well, kind of crazy, to be honest. There’s going to be a lot packed into the next three days of day-jobbery, from opening the next iteration of GenreCon through to shepherding a complete redesign of the website I’m managing. More importantly, I shaved this morning. I don’t know what it is without me and Melbourne and not-shaving, but it always seems to happen and it never drives me crazy until I’m halfway home and sporting the kind of bum-fluff

PeterMBall 05/02/2013