Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part Two

The second thing that can’t be learned about writing by listening to Al Snow rant: People don’t have a physical relationship with pro-wrestling. This is fricking brilliant, and it’s something every SF writer should memorize immediately. If you look at most forms of athletic competition there’s usually a correlation between the most popular sports and the sports we play as kids. Every Australian male kicks a football around, for example, and gets forced to play cricket as part of their school curriculum. We’re forced to run, at the very least, at school sports days. Depending on your school, you may be forced to swim. When we watch people competing at a professional level, we have muscle memory and experience that tells us how hard these things are and allows us to appreciate the achievements of professional athletes. We know just how good they are, because we know our own limits. Professional wrestling doesn’t have that. How many of us can legitimately claim to

PeterMBall 11/06/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part One

Unless you’re a wrestling fan, you’ve probably never heard of Al Snow. He was a wrestler, and a damn good one, and he’s spent years behind the scenes training new wrestlers and talking about wrestling and generally holding forth on the state of the industry. Basically, Al Snow is a smart wrestler whose fond of a good rant, and as a fan of wrestling in general I’m okay with paying twenty bucks for an entire DVD full of his rantings. Some of his rants about wrestling contain remarkably good advice about writing. For starters, Al Snow never lets you loose sight of the fact that wrestling is a business. It may be fake – it’s always been fake – but the wrestlers job is to get in there and put on a match that allows fans to suspend their disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s real. This is no different to fiction, at all, and it’s one of

PeterMBall 08/06/2012
Big Thoughts

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

I recently answered a bunch of questions for the 2012 Australian Spec Fic Snapshot project, a semi-regular interview series that surveys the Australian SF scene and presents the interviews in a week-long flurry. I don’t know if my particular snapshot will be online by the time this post goes up, but it’s coming and in one of my answers I mention the rise in feminist discourse taking place within SF over the last few years and how happy I am to see that happening despite the fact that my engagement with feminism is haphazard at best. And I’ve been thinking about that phrase, a lot, since I sent off my snapshot response. My initial intention with that phrase was to acknowledge that I’m basically white, male, university educated, and middle class. I am white male privileged incarnate and get to play life on the lowest possible difficulty setting, and even as someone who tries to be aware of that, even as someone

PeterMBall 06/06/2012
News & Upcoming Events

Where to Find Me in Melbourne This Coming Weekend

So on Wednesday morning I’m going to be running away to Melbourne for a week. It’s nothing personal against Brisbane – I quite like the place, really – but Melbourne has this habit of kidnapping many of my favourite people in the world and forcing them to, like, live there in the land of good coffee and weather that occasionally acknowledges there are four seasons rather than switching from “hot” to “cold” at some randomly appointed times in the middle of Autumn and Spring. Since a couple of those people are crazy enough to say things like “come stay with us, any time,” I’m taking them at their word and spending a few days inhabiting their spare room. And then, on Friday, I’ll be heading off to Continuum for a weekend of writer-nerdery and beer. All of which is really just a set-up for the obligatory “these are the panels I’ll be on at Continuum” post, in case there’s anyone

PeterMBall 04/06/2012
Works in Progress

NaNoWriMo? We Laugh at NaNoWriMo…

For the second time since starting the new bloggery regime, I’m writing a post in real time. This time, at least, I did it on purpose. As I write this I’m bunkered down in the QWC office with a team of twenty other writers, all of them ferociously typing away in an attempt to write 30,000 words in the space of two and a half days. We call this madness the Rabbit Hole – the third that the QWC has run – and this time around it’s being run in several locations around Australia. This my second bite of the cherry for the Rabbit Hole. The first time around I was a newly hired employee of the QWC who signed up ’cause it seemed like a good way to generate some work. I showed up and worked exclusively on Fritz the Laptop, who routinely objected to such tasks as “playing music” and “running word” and generally “working for longer than

PeterMBall 01/06/2012
Works in Progress

A Bit About Briar Day and the Years Best Australian Fantasy and Horror

The  final line-up of the second volume of The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror got announced this week. It contains 32 fantastic stories and poems first published in 2011, from New Zealand’s and Australia’s fantasy and horror writers. I’m somewhat late to the party, so I’m not going to re-post the list here, but there’s plenty of details at the link above and pre-orders are all pre-ordery over at the IndieBooksOnline site. I am going to talk a little about the story of mine they selected for inclusion, though. Trying to pick the stories that people will like is generally a mugs game. I’ve produced stories that I thought were okay that have captured people’s attention. I’ve produced stories I thought were great that…well, kinda fizzled. And then there was Briar Day, which first saw the light of day in Ben Payne’s Moonlight Tuber magazine. Briar Day was always a bit of an odd beast. It’s a story where a character tells

PeterMBall 30/05/2012
Journal

Getting the hell out of hell

Twelve months ago I got a direct message on twitter that said, more or less, send me an email RE the job we discussed. I think it’s the only message I’ve ever received on twitter that made me cry with relief, ’cause it meant there was a chance of getting the hell out of my old job. It wasn’t just that my old day-job was bad – I’d worked bad jobs before. My old day-job actually went past bad and delved into the level of seriously toxic. There were only six people in the office and they were all at war with one another, and the manager had never really figured out why they’d hired me. When I signed my employment agreement there was a big empty space under my job description, and they never actually got around to filling all that empty space in. Occasionally I’d answer phones, or make deliveries to clients. Those were good days. On the

PeterMBall 28/05/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating accross the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated… – Howl, Allen Ginsberg It’s been a long time since I engaged with Howl in its entirety. Those first few lines, sure; if you’re into poetry in any way, there’s pretty good odds you can reel off the first line and half of Howl from memory. They’re among the most well-known in American poetry, and there’s no getting around the fact that they’re a brilliant opener (Although, I have to admit, in my head I

PeterMBall 25/05/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Hanging with the Spokesbear: Undead Press

Spokesbear: Undead Press. Peter: Really? Spokesbear: For reals, yo. Peter: Okay, really?  Spokesbear: Are you objecting to the topic or the patter? Peter: Both, but mostly the latter. Spokesbear: Stop trying to hold me down, dog. Peter: Seriously, what the fuck’s with that? Spokesbear: Just trying it out for size. Peter: Stop it. Really. Spokesbear: Like you never fantasize about walking into a room and saying ‘what up, bitches?’ Peter: I do not. Spokesbear: … Peter: Okay, I do to, but that’s not the point. I never actually break it out in conversation ’cause I know it’s a bad idea. Spokesbear: Hater. Peter: … Spokesbear: Okay, I’ll stop, but you have to talk about the Undead Press thing. Peter: Fine. Spokesbear: Fine. Peter: FINE. Spokesbear: FINE. Peter: … Spokesbear: … Peter: … Spokesbear: … Peter: So, the Undead Press thing? Spokesbear: Yeah? Peter: Really hard for me to talk about without engaging in victim-blaming. Spokesbear: Sure, ’cause you’re an asshole.

PeterMBall 23/05/2012
Big Thoughts

Everything is Artifice

Years ago, when I first started my never-to-be-finished PhD, I had one simple belief: everything is artifice. I suppose it’s a natural enough conclusion to come to when you’re twenty-two years old and reading Lyotard’s theories on the post-modern condition during the bulk of your waking hours, and it certainly seemed to explain an awful lot about the things I didn’t quite understand about the world. That any attempt at authenticity was but a carefully constructed stratagem to create the illusion of authenticity made sense to me. After all, I lived on the Gold Coast. Trying to deal with the concept of authenticity on the Gold Coast is fucking confusing, since the whole damn city embraces artifice as its default state.  You make sense of it as best you can, or you get the get the hell out. These days I’m older and dumber and I have about thirteen years of additional experience to process, and I’m still not entirely sure that my

PeterMBall 21/05/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Hanging with the Spokesbear: Avatar

Spokesbear: You awake? Peter: No. Spokesbear: You sure. Peter: Very. Spokesbear: And you’re paying utterly no attention to what I’m saying, right? Peter: None. Fuck off. Spokesbear: No need to be hostile. I just wanted to make sure you were docile before I told you this. Peter: *sleeps* Spokesbear: James Cameron’s said he’s going to make nothing but Avatar films until he dies. Apparently everything he wants to do, he thinks he can do inside that universe. Peter: *keeps sleeping* Spokesbear: Seriously, dude. James Cameron. Avatar. Peter: I heard you. Spokesbear: But you’re not ranting. Peter: No. Spokesbear: Come on. Peter: No. I’ve made my peace with Avatar, and the fact that there will be an Avatar 2, and that it will likely keep going, ad infinitum, until James Cameron finally passes from this world and into whatever fucked up version of heaven he’s imagining. Spokesbear: But people have been sending you links. They want to see a response. Peter:

PeterMBall 18/05/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

In this post, I swear a lot for no apparent reason

I’m sitting here on a Sunday trying to remember what I was going to blog about. There was plan a while back – perhaps even a written one – but I’m afflicted with a curse that causes me to forget anything remotely plan-like the moment I sit down at a keyboard. Fortunately, I have a back-up plan: 4 Random Things where I place Fuckin’ in the centre of the entry title. 1. DENNIS FUCKIN’ LEHANE One of my favourite book stores is Brisbane’s Pulp Fiction, a speciality-store focused exclusively on Fantasy, SF, and Mystery/Crime fiction. When I first started patronising the store I stuck to the fantasy/SF side of things, revelling in the ability to pick up fiction from small presses and mid-list authors I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to track down. All that changed about…jeez, I don’t know, but a while back…and these days I tend to pick up a few things from the crime side of things. I’m a fan of the

PeterMBall 16/05/2012