Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Things I would do if I were planning on becoming an indie publisher…

The title of this post is actually a little disingenuous: I already self-published back in 2005, when I first started self-publishing ebooks for roleplaying games, and I kept at it until 2007 or so when, for various reasons related to edition wars and the level of misogyny among gamers, writing fiction started to look more appealing. The interesting thing about the RPG field is that it went through it’s teething problems with ebooks a little earlier than the rest of the world, which means I frequently find myself frustrated when I get involved in conversations about indie publishing ’cause there’s a certain level of been-there-done-that-made-all-the-stupid-mistakes-already. I’d been around epublishing for a while before that, though, so I’m naturally interested in the ebook/indie publisher explosion that’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s only gotten worse since I started working for a forward-thinking writers centre with an electronic publishing think-tank attached to it. It also means that common phrases like I’m going to experiment with ebooks drive me

PeterMBall 10/10/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

5 Short Story Recommendations in 1,012 Words or Less

Over the last few weeks I’ve occasionally thrown a short-story link up on twitter, in that way that you do when you remember there are *fucking awesome short stories* out there and you want to share them with other people. Twitter is a horrible medium for recommending short fiction though – it has the kind of immediacy that makes it easy for people to go follow the link, but it lacks the real space to provide any kind of context beyond saying *awesome story here*. So I wrote a blog post. And threw in some stories I haven’t linked to on twitter so people who follow me there still have something to go read on this fine Monday. All of the stories are free to read online at the time of writing, so links are provided. And so, in no particular order, I give you… 5 SHORT STORY RECOMMENDATIONS IN 1,012 WORDS OR LESS 1) MARY MARGARET ROAD-GRADER by Howard

PeterMBall 08/10/2012
Gaming

13 Things Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions of Mutants and Masterminds

So Monday night we played the 30th session of Shock and Awesome, my formerly semi-regular and now pretty-much-weekly Mutants and Masterminds campaign. It represents about a year and a half of gaming, give or take, although I expect the 60th session will come around much faster than the 30th did. The session saw our intrepid teen heroes caught inside a demonically-possessed virtual reality game alongside a bunch of school-mates. Eventful things happened: one hero kissed her long-term crush after months of pining and putting her foot in her mouth every time they talked; the other heroes girlfriend turned evil (again) when a dormant personality emerged alongside her massive dangerous electro-magnetic abilities. They fought a bunch of demons, too, but the relationships were the interesting things. We’re now on a three-week hiatus while one of the players heads of the UK, but when we return we’ll pick up where we left off, trying to convince the evil girlfriend she really should turn

PeterMBall 05/10/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Unfinished Stories are Toxic Waste

I’ve had a writing-advice heavy run of posts of late, largely ’cause people asked writing-advice type questions, so I figure I’m going to hitch this one to the end of the sequence ’cause it’s thematically appropriate. No-one actually asked about this, but I’ve been rocking the writing-before-work thing and this bit comes from personal observation. All the usual caveats about using a sample-size of one and your writing process being different from my writing process apply. Alright, here we go. There is, in writing circles, some advice that goes along the lines of this: JUST FINISH YOUR DAMN STORY, MAN This is one of the hardest damn things to do when you start out as a writer. Usually this is ’cause you’re not that good and you spend an awful lot of time flailing and flailing and flailing at the page, producing things you know aren’t good (’cause, let’s be honest, you wouldn’t be doing this writing thing if you

PeterMBall 03/10/2012
Works in Progress

I’m Far To Easily Amused By The Phrase “ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL”

So my friend Nic, who scribbles a bit but doesn’t have a website, snuck a final question in on the end of the dancing monkey series: What do you do with an idea or story that just runs out of steam far too early? (Say many thousands of words short of what it needs) Well, much as I’d like to say I’ve experienced this one, I’m generally an up-against-the-word-limits-can-I-have-a-few-thousand-more-please-gov’ner kind of writer. I spend half my structural redrafts trying to cut things out of my manuscripts, so should a story come in several thousand words under my approach I’d probably sing hallelujahs and weep with goddamn joy. Writing shorter is one of my goals, not a problem. Assuming for the sake of argument (and blog post) that I did suddenly run into such a problem – say for whatever unlikely reason an editor really needed a 10k gap in an anthology filled and my pinch-hitting story only came in at

PeterMBall 01/10/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

Crank up the organ grinder and gather around the popcorn, ’cause we’re almost at the end of the dancing monkey series. For our second-last entry, John Farrell asked: I have awful problems constructing a plot. How do you do that? Apparently you folks don’t want to go with the easy questions, huh? This is not a topic where I’m known to be *concise*, so I’m going to set myself a word-budget on this one and send you off into the wide world with some reading homework, ’cause really, plot is big. Here we go: EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS 1. PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST – FIGHT! Most plots hang off a pretty simple dynamic designed drive a story forward. It goes something like this: your protagonist wants something really badly; your antagonist denies your protagonist the thing they really want; delicious, awesome conflict ensues. Take Lord of the Rings as an example – Frodo wants to live

PeterMBall 28/09/2012
Gaming

Gaming is not Writing

Once again, I dance like a monkey for your amusement. This time around my friend Al asked via facebook: Why should writers never write RPG campaigns as stories, why on earth did you do just that, why isn’t it finished yet? Okay, we’re going to kick this one off with a list o’ reasons, some of which people are likely to disagree with. 1) EDITORS DON’T LIKE IT Let’s kick this off with the obvious – the best reason to avoid writing up RPG campaigns as stories is the fact that places that give you money for writing aren’t a big fan of things that are based on RPG campaigns. This warning from Strange Horizon’s List of Stories They See Too Often isn’t exactly uncommon, where they pretty much tell you to avoid anything where: Story is based in whole or part on a D&D game or world. a.       A party of D&D characters (usually including a fighter, a magic-user, and a

PeterMBall 26/09/2012
Works in Progress

I Do Believe in Syntax

And lo, it is Monday, and we continue the dancing monkey series wherein people ask me questions and I blog long, rambling answers in response. Once more into the breach and all that. Today, Peter Kerby offered up the following: Just to stir the pot; English is living language and all living things evolve, so how much licence should be tolerated when it comes to grammar and spelling, or does it depend on the intended audience. Verily, I am the wrong person to ask this sort of question, ’cause my response is invariably something along the lines of “so long as you can be understood, rock the fucking Kasbah, lolz, peace out, peeps.” Except, you know, not in so many words, and potentially in ways that make me sound less like an idiot and more like I have some understanding of what da kidz are speaking like with their crazy slang these days. I mean, hipsters, man, who gets them? (Hipsters

PeterMBall 24/09/2012
Works in Progress

The Only Person I Have to Live With Is Me, So That’s Who I’m Going To Care About

So as part of the Dancing Monkey series, Chris Slee asked What have you always wanted to write but haven’t because a) it would never sell and b) it would be socially unacceptable? Okay, let me see if I can formulate an answer to this that doesn’t involve gleeful, if slightly diabolical, laughter. My track record is actually pretty good when it comes to finding a concept that seems utterly unsellable and still finding a way to make money out of it. I mean, let us look at the list of stories I thought were utterly unsalable that then went on to actually make me a fair chunk of change: Unicorns and underage pornography? Sold. Thinly veiled erotica about John Flamsteed saving the world by shagging aliens? Sold Werewolf stories with a meandering, non-werewolf plot? Sold. A convoluted story-within-a-story about a tragedy where nothing much happens? Sold, and reprinted in a year’s best to boot. I mean, Jesus, a story

PeterMBall 21/09/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Blogging

So I’m going to be polishing off the rest of the Dancing Monkey topics over the next week or so, ’cause I have partially completed costs about most of them and ’cause people asked for interesting topics that I actually enjoy blogging. With that in mind, I’m hitting up the next topic on the list, which came from the inimitable Steve D. What about a locum or an apprentice? On that topic, you could blog about what being a professional blogger is like, as a job, and where it leads, and who should consider it. Let’s set aside the first part of the question, since I’m assuming it was largely a suggestion based on the impetus of the Dancing Monkey posts – wanting to keep the blog active while I was travelling. In hindsight I can look at this and say, well, yes, that would have been a smart idea, but on the whole I rather like the idea of

PeterMBall 19/09/2012
Journal

In Which I Discover That I Owe Kapowe An Apology

This past weekend I sat my arse on the coach and read comic books. When I was done with that, I watched some wrestling DVDs. And brother, let me tell, you it was a weekend of glorious brilliance the like I haven’t experienced lately. After two straight months where, more often than not, you’d find me on a plane or hanging out at a writers festival or otherwise engaged in day-job related hijinx, the realisation that I had not a goddamn thing that needed to be done was freeing. I mean, the travel, it defeated me. For years I’ve been talking with my friend Kevin about the debilitating effects of work travel, not quite getting his dislike of it, ’cause on the rare instances I’ve had to travel for work it’s either been a) rare, or b) not that far. I now feel like I need to buy Kevin several beers of apology ’cause I totally get it now. Even

PeterMBall 17/09/2012
News & Upcoming Events

Five Things

Hola! It’s the Brisbane Writers Festival this weekend – the final festival on the packed schedule of festivals and travel that have kept me away from the blog – which means it’s a little over a fortnight before I resume regular postings. In the meantime, I’m going to interrupt this period of non-posting with a handful of announcements that may interest you. ONE I’ve got a non-fiction piece in the latest Apex Magazine that distills writing advice from the rants of professional wrestler Al Snow. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Apex editor Lynne M. Thomas came across a blog post I did on the topic a few months ago and asked me to expand it into a full-fledged article. Being the type who is fond of getting paid to write things and the type who likes watching shoot interviews with pro-wrestlers, I immediately agreed and went into research mode. Now I just need to find someone who’ll pay me to write

PeterMBall 07/09/2012