Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I am watching the second season of Once Upon A Time and admiring the way they set up their antagonists. Regina the “Evil” Queen. Rumplestiltskin, the Dark One. The vengeful Captain Hook. The kind of glorious, cartoonish evil that you admire to a certain extent because they’re clever, they’re gleeful about the things they’re doing, and you see enough backstory to empathise and understand why they’re doing bad things.  I am watching the second season of Once Upon a Time and I am all about Regina and Rumples, in particular. Why every t-show is not casting Robert Carlyle as their villain. How carefully built the character of Regina has been, and how incredible Lana Parilla is delivering complex emotions in a lighthearted and often cheesy way. I am watching the second season of Once Upon A Time and I get have feelings when the bad guys are hurting. I care about the things they care about, and live in hope that

THE BLACKHOUSE is the first novel in Peter May’s Lewis trilogy, police procedurals set on the Isle of Lewis out in the Scottish Hebrides. It’s a novel about the isolation, the traditions that built out of that isolation, and the history of a protagonist who goes home, reluctantly, in order to investigate a crime. I bought it after seeing May at the Adelaide Writers Festival a few years back, then hearing people rave about his books over and over. I spent the entire read with a notecard beside me, jotting down page numbers where he deployed techniques I could lift for my own projects. Then it became a process of jotting down page numbers purely because May delivered a great description, deploying language with a precision that a lot of writers never manage. The Isle of Lewis may be a real place–the kind you can visit and touch and walk through–but for the vast majority of readers it needs to

Today I spent a lot of time walking around the city, alternating between finding quiet places to write and popping into bookstores and art galleries to check out the notebooks they had on sale. I spent longer than intended in the Brisbane gallery because I had to check my bag before I could go to their bookstore, so I figured I may as well take a look around. I spent some quality time staring at Judy Watson’s Sacred Ground, Beating Heart, which is one of those art-works that’s done a disservice when you look at reproductions because it looses some of the texture and depth that makes it intriguing when seem up-close (stare at it long enough, and it’s almost like staring into the night sky – it’s got the same kind of depths). Another chunk of time was spent in front of Sydney Long’s Spirit of the Plains, which is basically the illustration for some kind of Australian magic realist

Yesterday, I wrote 979 words on Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser. Finished up right about the point where my beloved fell asleep after suffering an epic bout of insomnia, so I wrote up today’s edition of Notes from the Brain Jar, watched Dream Dangerously, the documentary about Neil Gaiman’s last signing tour, and thought very hard about processes and writer goals for an hour or two so I didn’t disturb her. Notes were made. Pens and notebooks were deployed. It was, for perhaps the first time, I worked until the battery on the Macbook Air ran out. I’ve never outworked the MacBook before, outside of the occasional day where I’ve forgotten to charge it overnight. It’s battery power has been remarkable, compared to other laptops I’ve owned and battered into submission. Today feels remarkably accomplished, even thought not all that battery power was expended on the act of writing. It’s interesting to work on this particular story, because I’m finally doing something with

I never really jelled with Star Trek. The SF of my childhood was always Star Wars and Buck Rodgers and Baker-era Dr Who, which eschewed the exploration narrative neatly captured in Trek’s boldly go approach to narrative. They were narratives that seemed faster-paced, so Trek always seemed slow, and I lived in places where SF fans were rare, so I never found a community to get me over the initial reluctance to dive in to Trek. When you start off with a reluctance to engage with Star Trek, it’s hard to get over it because Star Trek is omnipresent. In the same way that Tolkien’s fingerprints are prominently smudged over all forms of fantasy, Star Trek is the runaway cultural phenomenon that identifies SF in television land. For decades, “more like Trek” was regarded as a strength in a TV show, even when it wasn’t dramatically appropriate. If you made your show more like Trek, the SF fans would show up.

Angela Slatter’s second novel, Corpselight, is on my table alongside a fresh cup of coffee. I get to read this week, ahead of it’s official launch on July 14, because one of the perks of being writer is befriending other writers who give you advanced copies of their books. If you’re in Brisbane on July 14 at 6:00 PM and interested in good speculative fiction, you should totally be at that launch BTW. There will be books and smart writers talking to smart writers, and a considerable amount of cupcakes. If you’re not in Brisbane on that date, at that time, you should hie yourself off to a bookshop and pick up a copy of Corpselight as soon as humanly possible. ‘Cause it’s a great book, by a great writer, and we need more visions of a supernatural Brisbane out there in the world. A post shared by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jul 4, 2017 at 5:12pm PDT

I’m halfway through Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusader, a book that traces the evolution of Batman and the rise of geek culture. It is, at alternating intervals, fascinating and smart and very, very funny, but it also loops back to a series of conceits and bits that irritate the fuck out of me. Mostly, it comes down to one word: normals. It gets used quite often throughout the text, the distinguishing term that others non-fans in a meaningful way, and it gets used because it’s a thread that runs through fandom in so many ways. It is, at least, nowhere near as bad as the mundanes, but it matters so little to my tooth-grinding dislike of that artificial segregation that it barely helps. It is incredibly easy to define an identity and a subculture based on your dislike of what you’re against. Pointing and saying NOT THAT is considerably clearer than saying, TOTALLY THIS (and yes, I’m totally aware that I’m totally falling back on

In need of distraction, I started reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber aloud to fill the empty spaces in my flat. I’ve adored that book since it was recommended to me back in my early twenties, but I’ve never actually paid attention to the vocal components of the language. Reading aloud, you quickly recognise just how ornate and well-crafted the opening sentence of the titular story really is. Consider, and read aloud if you’re so inclined: I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter There are rhythms to that sentence you don’t even

I started reading the Inhabitat blog eight or nine years ago, maybe. Not long after I’d started writing fiction after a long spell in the trenches of other writing work. I stopped reading back in 2013, because Habitat publishes a lot of content and there simply wasn’t time to read it while working a part-time day-job. That space was taken up by blogs about time management and productivity and how to internet better. I don’t work a part-time day-job anymore, and as as peeps who follow my twitter feed may have noticed, I’ve picked up the Inhabitat habit again. Their brief to sit at the intersections of architecture, design, and the environment is like crack if you’re interested in how the future may look, and they’ll occasionally bust out truly mind-blowing shit like plans these South Korean plans to build skyscrapers inside of Giant Sequoia’s to keep them from falling over. But as impressive as that particular idea is, it’s

My copy of Caitlin Kiernan’s latest short story collection arrived in the mail last week. It’s a beautiful book full of beautiful, terrible stories in the old-school definition of terrible, meaning they are causing or likely to cause terror. The kind of stories that make Kant’s description of the sublime comprehensible, which is more than Kant manages to do when he writes on the subject. There are very few writers who are on my yes-I-will-by-everything-you-release list. Even fewer on the list where I will buy everything in fancy, beautifully produced hardcovers and special editions. Basically, there is one name on that list, and it’s largely because Caitlin Kiernan is the best short-story writer working today, doing things with language and story that most writers can barely dream of doing.  

Over the weekend I dropped three hundred bucks to pick up a Dell Inspiron that was on sale at my local JB HiFi. I’d been edging around the idea of getting a small netbook capable of running OneNote while I’m gaming for a few weeks, and I seriously thought that would be all I used it for – a small computer that weighted less than a hardcover, tucked into my gaming bag alongside the dice and session notes. Not good for writing, I figured. 4 meg of ram. Ten inch screen. Itty bitty keyboard. Who in hell is going to use that for writing work? Then I proceeded to take the damn thing everywhere for three straight days, because it’s about the same weight as packing a hardcover Moleskin into my bag. And the keyboard is surprisingly functional, after the first few attempts at typing on it. And because the Inspiron will actually handle Scrivener better than my desktop, which means