Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Downgrading Instead Of Replacing

Me, three weeks ago: “Time to replace my phone. The battery isn’t quite enough to get through a busy day without charging, and everything’s running slow.” I resented the expense, and the time required to switch everything over, but it felt like a necessary upgrade. Then I went through and cleaned off apps I didn’t want to transfer to a new phone. It cleared off half the screen. I followed it up by going minimalist on other apps as well. I went through them, one by one, and queried whether I was getting any value out of having them on my phone. The results were surprising: No more mail app (I don’t answer emails on the phone, only read and ignore them); No more IMDB (I only ever look things up on my couch, and the computer is right there); No more YouTube (often used for streaming music during the day, and easily replaced by less distracting alternatives) No more

PeterMBall 23/09/2021
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Two Components of a Big Return

There are projects that feel like you’ve captured lightning in a bottle, and they’re only partially fueled by talent. The biggest story in professional wrestling right now is the return of CM Punk. A man who walks down to the ring to talk, and gets a standing ovation from ten thousand fans that lasts through a commercial break. It’s the kind of buzz that wrestling hasn’t got since it’s dwindling heyday in the late nineties, when two major companies fought for supremacy, and household names like Steve Austin and The Rock were consolidating their status as superstars. Part of the reason fans are coming unglued: this return wasn’t meant to happen. Seven years ago Punk left the biggest game in town—the WWE—after mismanagement and ignored health warnings left him burnt out on the business. He was at the top of his game, but he wasn’t happy as a wrestler anymore, and especially unhappy with the way WWE treated him, frequently

PeterMBall 22/09/2021
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

The Most Useful Format Isn’t Always Familiar

What does a recipe look like? If you looked one up in the old pen-and-paper days, there’s a familiar layout: ingredient lists; procedural instructions; a photograph to make your mouth water. These days, on the internet, the recipe has all those things… and a long, digressive story up top that contextualises how and why the author is writing about and cooking this particular meal. To the aspiring chefs at the Culinary Institute of America, a recipe is a three-column format. One lays out the timeline for the entire meal, logging what needs to be done when; the second column lists everything they need to produce, and the equipment needed to cook and serve it; the third column breaks down the ingredients needed for each recipe on their docket. (Example 1; Example 2) It’s the first column that makes the difference, logging everything from prepping ingredients to turning the oven on to gathering equipment for every stage. There’s no space here

PeterMBall 21/09/2021
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Two Questions For The Start Of A Writing Project

Two questions worth asking at the start of every writing project, from tweet to blog post to short story to novel. Question One: What is the most useful or interesting idea I can put into the world today? Question Two: Am I picking the right fight with this piece? “But Peter,” I hear you argue, “I’m not trying to pick a fight with my writing. I’m trying to write escapist, genre-friendly fiction that’s not trying to challenge anyone and producing blog posts and social media with the goal of selling my books.” That’s fine. You’ve still picked a fight. The history of escapist and genre-friendly fiction has a long history of works filled with misogyny, classism, and racism, and the decision to follow those tropes without interrogation or question is a choice that reinforces those cultural assumptions. Some readers will follow you on that journey, or enjoy your work despite elements they find uncomfortable. Increasingly, folks will call you out

PeterMBall 19/09/2021
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Morning Person

I never intended to become a morning person, but health issues pushed me into it. Evenings were a time of exhaustion, diminishing resolve, and brain fog, and so the first four hours after waking became the time of day when I brought my best self to a project. For the first year, I fought against that. Loathed the early starts, focused on all the pop science write-ups about the research into larks and night owls, embraced the snooze button and the long sleep in. I was nostalgic for the kind of writer—the kind of person—I’d been before evenings became a nightmare. I convinced myself the problems with evenings were a temporary aberration, soon to be conquered. One day, I my creativity would fire up around 10 PM and I’d spend the next eight hours writing into the wee hours. One day, I would set my routine to the rhythms of a night owl and all the work would get done.

PeterMBall 18/09/2021
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Narrative Assumptions in the Binge-Watch Era

Avengers: Endgame is a thoroughly unsatisfying movie as a stand-alone piece of cinema, but full of heart-in-your-throat payoffs if you’ve invested in the 22 Marvel movies released over the eleven years prior to its release.   The Witcher on Netflix never really grabbed me on an episode-by-episode level, but it became remarkable when I we finished the season and pulled all the disparate narrative strands and timelines together.   Trying to engage with either of these works as a stand-alone is to read against the grain. The creators are playing by a fresh set of narrative expectations, once that started with home-video and repeated viewings. They’re film and TV of the binge-watch era, with narrative payoffs no longer confined to a singular arc or instalment. Their ambition is far-reaching and long-term.   And now, with Spiderman: No Way Home in 2021, the ambitions are more audacious. Marvel lays claim to two prior iterations of the character, bringing in actors and

PeterMBall 16/09/2021
News & Upcoming Events

Brain Jar News: Little Labyrinth Pre-Orders

WE’RE BACK, BABY! Brain Jar Press has been quiet for a few months now, courtesy of some ill-timed computer issues back in May that turned into ill-timed internet issues in June (publishing is weird – the problems of May don’t manifest until August, at the earliest). But now? Guess what? We’re BACK with a new book from SEAN FRICKEN’ WILLIAMS that you can go PRE-ORDER! Here’s the pitch: Matter transporters, dead worlds, and ghostly encounters. Parallel worlds, time-travel, and dangers that lurk in the shadows.  Little Labyrinths brings together 17 vignettes and microfictions from one of Australia’s premier authors of science fiction and fantasy. Collected together for the first time, these brief tales and startling asides cover territory that is playful, experimental, and infused with speculative wonder. Once dubbed Australia’s Lord of Genre Fiction, Williams’ work will remind you of the strange, exciting, and mysterious pleasures that come from losing yourself in the smallest stories. The really interesting thing about editing

PeterMBall 14/09/2021
Works in Progress

The Gulf Between Conception and Execution

Back in my teenage years, as a young comic book fan, I copied a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and stuck it on my wall. I wasn’t a kid given to this kind of behaviour, but this fragment where Gaiman’s protagonist, Dream, describes the creation of the first Corinthian spoke to me even then: Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person, whom you slowly perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from black metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection. But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still… A dark mirror… That was always the intention… But the gulf between conception and execution is wide and many things can happen along the way. Sandman #57, Neil Gaiman My admiration for this passage came in two parts. The first, unsurprisingly, lay

PeterMBall 04/09/2021
Status

Status: Friday, 3 September, 2021

LOCATION: Windsor, Brisbane, Australia. THE QUICK-AND-DIRTY NEWS Just launched the print editions of Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet. Preparing to launch pre-orders for a chapbook collection of microfiction from Sean Williams — stay tuned for details next week CURRENT INBOX: 38 (Gah!) WORKING ON Finishing Median Survival Time, a science fiction novella produced for my PhD thesis. Two chapters left to go on the current draft, and it’s an emotional project to finish. It was first derailed by my father’s death in March 2019, and there hasn’t been much “normal” time to get back on track since then. Final page proofs of the Exile print release, scheduled for the end of this month. Working the title development process for a series of fairy tale retellings Brian Jar Press will be releasing in 2022. Covers exist in rough form and rough layouts are progressing, which means I’m up to writing the cover synopsis for each. Catching up on

PeterMBall 03/09/2021
News & Upcoming Events

Now Shipping: Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet

Brain Jar Press is now shipping print editions of my short story collection, Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet. The book contains twelve science fiction stories, including my sci-fi dragon western Dying Young and the Aurealis Award winning cyberpunk fairytale Clockwork, Patchwork, and Raven. It also features two stories, 52 Pick-Up and and Inside An Egg, Inside A Duck, that are original to the collection. Customers who pre-ordered already have their books. Copies have been showing up on Twitter. This wonder arrived this afternoon. Thank you @BrainJarPress snd @Petermball pic.twitter.com/Q08xzSgEJj — Trent Jamieson (@trentonomicon) August 25, 2021 Some books are events — launched and celebrated, pushed hard to find their readership — but increasingly I fall back on the default of making books available. The launch is a product of an older sales environment, where you needed all the attention on a book right now, before the sales window closed and a mass of new releases swept

PeterMBall 02/09/2021
Journal

Reasons to be a luddite

Right, a quick one. I set myself three books to read this week, then promptly read two of them in the space of twenty-four hours. So I added another two books and promptly read one of those in the space of a few hours. I started August by doing a Patreon post about the relative dearth of reading as I hit the mid-year, but it seems I’m trying to solve that in a single weekend. Then there was an upset stomach and the discovery of Episodes, a 2011 sitcom featuring Tamsin Grieg and Matt LeBlanc, which makes a great job of utilizing the strength of both actors. And yet, oddly weird, because it feels like it should be a BBC comedy, but it’s…not. … I spent the start of Brisbane’s lockdown rescheduling a small stack of meetings. Now I’ve spent the end of lockdown rescheduling a small stack of meetings, because my stomach was iffy enough that sitting for an

PeterMBall 09/08/2021
Journal

A Saturday Spent Reading (with a little TV)

It’s been an odd kind of Saturday. I woke up at 5:30 — a terrifyingly regular occurance these days — and stumbled out to spend a few hours reading on the couch. The cat decided to hang out with me, so I spent a few hours devouring books at a terrifying rate of knots. The last book on the pile was Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, all about the role the myelin sheaths forming over nerves play in the acquisition and refinement of skills, and the factors that contribute to certain schools, towns, or movements spawning an astonishing number of world-class talents, whether it’s in the field of art, sport, or science. Fascinating, fascinating book that’s going to have me thinking incredibly hard about my practice, and about the logistics of writing careers. Many old, well-worn bits of writing advice — write every day! If you want to write, you must read! — can be contemplated in a new light

PeterMBall 07/08/2021