Journal

5 Things I Know About Squid

1. Squid are cephalopods of the order Teuthida, which comprises around 300 species. Like all other cephalopods, squid have a distinct head, bilateral symmetry, a mantle, and arms. Squid, like cuttlefish, have eight arms arranged in pairs and two, usually longer, tentacles. Squid are strong swimmers and certain species can ‘fly’ for short distances out of the water. Admittedly, I didn’t know this, but in the age of the internet, it’s remarkably easy to find this stuff out. 2. If you haven’t read Kraken, in which a giant squid is stolen and the end of the world begins, you really should. It currently wages war with The City and the City as my favourite China Meiville novel. 3. I tried cooking with squid once. It didn’t go well. 4. “In her old firm they called her The Squid.” “The Squid?” “The only thing that can kill a shark.” Parker Posey’s run on Boston Legal was far too short. Although that can

PeterMBall 20/08/2012
Journal

Something I’ve Never Written About

1. There’s a page in an old notebook of mine, written way back when I was young and stupid, where I put forward the closest thing I had to a creative philosophy at eighteen: I do not believe in silence. When I was eighteen I wanted to write stories that had weight. I wanted to create something that could be used to bludgeon the world into submission. 2. Things I have written about: bad relationships; unicorns; punk rock; pro-wrestling; shaved heads; the veneer of love; envy; sexual ambiguity; writing; aliens; poetry; indecision; growing up on the Gold Coast; living in Brisbane; my hatred of certain dayjobs. It seems such a limited list, on the surface, but in many respects that list contains everything. 3. Yes, I was a pretentious kid. I’m also a pretentious adult. Pretension is an underrated survival trait in the arts, as is an enormous capacity for self-deception. 4. I remember one of my lecturers gendering writing

PeterMBall 17/08/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

A Few More Ideas About Ideas

You know what’s handy when you pre-write a bunch of blog posts and set them to post while you’re away? Actually remembering to set them to post. Seems I forgot to hit the all-important Publish button in my rush to get ready for the Adelaide trip last week, which means we’re starting the dancing monkey series a little later than expected. If there’s a topic you’d like to throw into the mix, you can still do so by pitching it here.  A Few More Ideas About Ideas A few years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the often-maligned question of where do your ideas come from. I wrote it ’cause I didn’t like the way most writers behaved when they were asked that question, and ’cause I kind of like understanding my process. Plus, as a guy whose occasionally asked to teach people how to write, it’s a useful thing to be able to talk about process

PeterMBall 15/08/2012
Journal

In which I offer to become your dancing monkey, metaphorically speaking

I’m going to be travelling a lot over the next three weeks. Mostly, this travelling takes place on the weekends. The weekends when I usually write my blog posts for the coming week.  I’m sure you can see the conundrum that’s coming along, any moment now, to serve as the point for this blog post. The good news is that it doesn’t actually take all that long to prep posts and set them up while I’m away. What usually takes me the better part of the weekend is figuring out what to blog about (you know, when I’m *not* blathering on about the new writing routine and the joy of getting stuff done). To this end, I’m going to turn to you, the readers of this blog, to help me out a little: Give me topics. Ask me questions. Set me challenges. Basically, fire stuff my way that you think would make for an interesting blog, even if it’s just one

PeterMBall 08/08/2012
Works in Progress

Writing Notes, Saturday, August 4th

So Tuesday of last week I fired up my WiP, Wanton, and put in the dreaded numbering system I used when a story unexpectedly mutates into a novella. I didn’t want to do it – I was desperately trying to keep Wanton to novelette length – but after you hit 4,402 words of a story and you’ve only sketched out two-thirds of the first act, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re not going to be writing something that can be wrapped up in 10,000 words or less. The damn thing has chapters now, which usually means I need to back off and do some cursory planning so I have an overall structure. If you want to know what my internal monologue was like for most of Tuesday, it went something like this: Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. When I was done with that I actually started an internal debate about whether I should shelve Wanton for

PeterMBall 06/08/2012
Works in Progress

Process Notes

There is nothing more dangerous to a blog than a writer who has rediscovered writing, for all they want to do is run around going “look, look, check it out, I produce actual words,” and tell you about in exhaustive detail. I constantly have to resist the urge to be an over-excited writer-puppy and move on this week, purely because I’m still on a word-high from doing shit. I try to burn it off by slapping on some Goldfrapp and shimmying my ass around the office, but the word-high is still there. And, in truth, I don’t really want it to go away. I mean, cards on the table time, my real goal has always been to be a prolific writer rather than a good writer. Good’s something to aspire to, sure, but given the choice between writing one perfect story a year or eight stories that would be good enough to be published and enjoyed, I’d totally take the

PeterMBall 03/08/2012
Journal

Haircut

I would be showing you a picture of my freshly-shorn scalp right now, but for the fact that instagram is being uncooperative. Instead I’ll have to link that shit and leave it up to you to be pro-active if you want to mock my new hair-do. Don’t be shy about that shit either – it’s quite a mockable haircut once you get started. The short version, for those who aren’t inclined to follow the link, is that I recently went from my long-haired grunge-kid do back to the “seriously, just pull out the clippers and shave my damn head” look that seems to bother the hell out of hairdressers when you walk in with hair longer than six inches. It’s a process I go through ever two years or so, whereupon I start growing my hair out again. Mostly I do it because my hair only works in these two states – in-between it’s a mess of kinks and spit-curls

PeterMBall 01/08/2012
Works in Progress

Writing Notes, Saturday, July 29

It’s 11:59 AM on a Sunday morning. I have coffee, a computer, and I’ve successfully written my 500+ words for the day by firing up Shifty Silas, my laptop, immediately after waking up. Admittedly, this wasn’t that long ago. Sunday has become the designated day of sleeping-the-fuck-in, which is especially important now that my week is filled with early mornings. Sunday is also the seven day mark for the new writing routine, so I’m taking this as an opportunity to review the results. I started the new writing routine because I’d promised my writing group that I’d submit something by August 6th. At the time that probably seemed a long way away, but I actually cruised through the draft zero of the story during the week and put together a readable first draft during write-club yesterday. The result, Truths and Consequences (working title), sits at about 2,800 lightly revised and edited words in the current draft. I had about 270

PeterMBall 30/07/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

500 words

So it appears that I finished a story draft this week. It’s not a good story, not yet, but it started the week with a 200 word opening and by Wednesday night I declared the draft zero complete around 2,500 words. It will need some rewriting – that’s what this weekend is for – and it’ll need some fleshing out in order to make the story bits actually resemble a story, but it’s a draft and it’s finished and it’s broken a somewhat long drought. Many droughts, actually, in that I have a) finished a story draft, b) that’s shorter than 7,000 words, and c) actually started the next story more-or-less right away. The pattern I’m aiming for is 500 words a day, every day, and a finished story every two weeks. My instinct is to scoff at that pace, to write it off as easy to accomplish, because my instincts were forged in the days when I taught session

PeterMBall 27/07/2012
Journal

UPS is making me crazy

Has anyone attempted to send something to my post office via UPS in the last couple of months? I got a notification in the mail today saying they couldn’t deliver, and after phone calls we establish that  they now wouldn’t deliver the package because it’d been over a week since they dropped off the notification and it’s gone into some kind of lost property dead zone. “Please get the original sender to contact us with your correct address,” they said. Right. I have no fucking idea who the original sender is, or what they’re trying to send me. The only clue they can give me is the initials MPS. This doesn’t clear things up any. Putting this on the blog because, quite honestly, the mystery is driving me crazy and the alternative is finding my local UPS office and punching someone in the nose.

PeterMBall 25/07/2012
Journal

The Internet versus Crushing Attacks of Shame

Here’s the thing about my weekend: it involved an extraordinary number of real-time conversations with people who live in far-flung corners of the world. Between gaming last night and meeting with my writing group on Saturday morning, I actually spent more time having conversations with people via Skype and Google Hangouts than I did having conversations with my flatmate in real life. The last few months have been kinda bad for these kinds of conversations. One of the curses of online conversations is that they’re far easier to avoid or reschedule, allowing other things to make more immediate claims on your time. The last time we gamed on a Sunday night was back in May, before I ran off to go to cons, Rabbit-Holes, and basically lost three weeks of my life to a throat infection. The last virtual meet-up with my writer-peeps was even earlier. March, we think. Possibly even April. I really shouldn’t go that long. One of

PeterMBall 23/07/2012
Journal

Saturday Morning

I have nothing to say this morning, and yet I feel like talking. It’s early. Early-ish. For certain values of early that mean my flatmate is actually surprised to see me up and about before midday on a midday morning. I’m kicking it in my study, just killing time before some writer-peeps hit Skype for a conference call, and there’s natural sunlight spilling in through the gauzy white curtain on the window and it’s the kind of day that feels very fresh and new and yet, somehow, slightly lived in and comfortable, like the day is just a pair of jeans that have long been broken in. I’m compiling a to-do list for my weekend. There’s going to be some writing. Occasionally I whistle a few bars of the songs that run through my head. For some reason, right now, I’m fixated on the Misfit’s Astro Zombies, which is far more cheerful than any song about zombie exterminating the human race ever should

PeterMBall 21/07/2012