Peter M. Ball

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Bonus Post: Tuesday Therapy and Some Additional Thoughts on Rights

You may have noticed that there’s a routine building around these parts. Or not, ’cause really, it’s mostly a routine that exists in my head and it’s only been going for, like, a week. In any case, this is a bonus post. As in, something I didn’t intend to write, but I’m going to anyway. I’ve offered some advice about Writing and Tracking Your Rights over on LL Hannetts blog as part of her Tuesday Therapy series. I am, for someone who once made a career of dispensing writing advice in the tertiary sector, remarkably squeamish about the process. I either want to impart everything or nothing, since the wrong piece of advice delivered at the wrong time can be fatal to a developing creative process. I still suffer crippling moments of doubt induced by something I read in Samuel Delany’s About Writing four years ago. It’s not bad advice – it’s remarkably good – but I heard it at the wrong time and

PeterMBall 15/05/2012

Works in Progress

Project Du Jour: Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1

I’m kinda psyched about my current writing project, but I think it needs a far sexier working title than the one it’s got right now. There’s something about the Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1, that doesn’t feel like an adequate representation of the book. It’s been a long while since I charted the progress of a creative project on the blog, and I’ll admit that I was a little gun-shy about talking this one up. For starters, the project is largely being done simply to prove to myself that it can be done, that I can actually put together sixty-thousand words of coherent narrative in first draft form over five weeks of writing. Once upon a time the only question would have been the coherent narrative part of the equation, but me and writing haven’t gotten along for the better part of the last eighteen months. Life kept offering me excuses and I kept taking them, and slowly it

PeterMBall 14/05/2012

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

6 Eclectic Thoughts

1. MY SECRET SHAME I’m going to share a secret: I actually like the taste of instant coffee. There are days when I prefer it to the real thing, especially since ordering the real thing can be a hit-and-miss affair that results in me drinking a horrible concoction created from burnt coffee grounds, urine, and the spiteful hate of people who kick puppies. Instant coffee is never great, but at the same time, it’s never really a disappointment either. It embraces the law of averages and settles for a long, slow arc of mediocrity and met expectations. This is not to say that I’m indiscriminate. There are some brands of instant than are better than others, and I’ll shy away from the worst offenders who seem to have taken the burnt-coffee-ground-urine-and-puppy-kicking-spite combination as their own particular flavour of choice. So yeah, me and instant coffee, we’re tight. In fact, I’m enjoying a cup right now as I type this, and it’s pretty

PeterMBall 11/05/2012

Smart Advice from Smart People

You must be prepared to work always without applause…

You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights, and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you you read them, so many times have you re-read them. By the time the book comes out you will have started something else and it is all behind you and you do not want to hear about it. But you do, you read it in covers and you see all the places that now you can do nothing about. All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure, and general drying up of natural juices. Not a

PeterMBall 07/05/2012

Gaming

12 Things

We’re mid-way through a long weekend here in Oz. This still catches me off-guard, since I’ve spent the majority of my adult life not really paying attention to long weekends, but the acquisition of a dayjob changes your relationship to such things. And so we’ve hit Sunday and I’m mooching around the new house, grooving to a mix of the Hilltop Hoods and the Beastie Boys (RIP, MCA), just kinda…randomly getting things together. And so, in that spirit, a random grab-bag of twelve things I felt like mentioning. 1. MOVING IS, LIKE, 90% DONE So my flatmate bought a new home and we moved into it. Most of the last two weeks has been spent getting stuff there, unpacking it, figuring out where it will live for the foreseeable future, and generally waiting for the internet to be turned on. You know, moving stuff. There’s a part of me that wants to just kick back and say “yup, we’re done

PeterMBall 06/05/2012

Journal

Readings and Moving and Mexican Food

I’m home from a very pleasant night out at Avid Reader Bookshop in West End, which was followed by an equally pleasant dinner with some friends at a Mexican place nearby. Somewhere between all that I did a short reading from Horn, listened to readings from Angela Slatter and Rob Cook (who I hadn’t met before, but was a very nice bloke), and listened to a reading/Q&A with Margo Lanagan (which, really, was the entire point of the evening). It’s an evening made doubly-cool by the fact that I didn’t move boxes of books over to the new place, which is something we’ve been doing an awful lot of this week. It’s one of those inevitable facts of moving – I have a lot of books, the flatmate has a lot of books, and it generally makes much easier if you don’t try and move them all at once. Fortunately I’m almost done with books. Tomorrow, I figure, will be the

PeterMBall 26/04/2012

News & Upcoming Events

Cool News from the Day Job

So yesterday we made a small announcement at my dayjob. It went a little something like this: Source: GenreCon News Blog The Australian Writer’s Marketplace is pleased to announce the launch of the first annual GenreCon, a convention for professional and aspiring writers of romance, mystery, science fiction, crime, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and more. One part party, one part professional development: GenreCon is the place to be if you’re an aspiring or established writer with a penchant for the types of fiction that get relegated to their own corner of the bookstore. Featuring international guests Joe Abercrombie (Author, The First Law Trilogy, Best Served Cold, The Heroes), Sarah Wendell (co-founder, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books), and Ginger Clark (Literary Agent, Curtis Brown), with more guests being announced in the coming weeks. GenreCon is the place to be if you want to: Educate yourself about the publishing industry Learn what it takes to become a successful genre author Network with other writers who are passionate about genre fiction Meet editors, agents, publishers, and

PeterMBall 18/04/2012

Journal

on the train…

Taking photographs of my shoe. How’s your day been?

PeterMBall 12/04/2012

Journal

2:23 AM

There are many things I like about my current day-job. Many, many things. I like the people I work with, I like earning money for doing things that are interesting and challenging, and I like the fact that there’s discounts at the cafe downstairs so I can stay relatively caffeinated throughout the day. This is just an illustrative handful of things I like, but you get the picture: my appreciation of this job covers a lot of terrain. That said, I really miss staying up late. I miss spending time in the world after 2:30 in the morning when everything is quiet and I start to get that tired-but-not-quite-tired-enough feeling which results in quiet pondering and pages of scribbled notes. I miss the freedom of mainlining a whole season of a TV show I’ve discovered on DVD in one fell swoop, confident that I’ll have the time to catch up on sleep. I miss reading in bed. I miss catching my US

PeterMBall 11/04/2012

Journal

Back in Brisbane, Back Online

It’s a quiet, slightly gloomy Easter Monday and I’ve spent the better of my afternoon lurking in my bedroom with a copy of William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavour and The Jane Austen Argument’s Somewhere Under the Radio on repeat. I’ve been meaning to write a catch-up kind of post ever since I went to Rockhampton a few weeks back, but I didn’t and somehow the fact that I kept accumulating things to blog about only meant that the gap kept winding on. Bullocks to that, though, so I figured I’d peel myself off the bed and give you the highlights. Firstly, I went to Rockhampton and it rained a great deal. This resulted in about ten hours of fun at the Rockhampton airport, watching them cancel and reschedule flights, until finally my 1:30 PM flight out finally happened at 2:00 AM instead. It made for a long day, although I did get to duck out of the airport and see the

PeterMBall 09/04/2012

Journal

Rockhampton

I quite like Rockhampton, at least the parts of it I’ve seen. Its an old port city with wide streets (so wagons can turn around in them), a real sense of place that cities like Brisbane are still struggling with, and some truly glorious old buildings. Like their cultural center, the Walter Reid, for example: Every time I find myself in Rockhampton I find myself wishing it hosted a big steampunk festival of some kind, SD its really the kind of city that makes me want to put on a top hat and ride a Zeppelin.

PeterMBall 21/03/2012