Journal

Where I post about the things that happened in my life. Sometimes they’re diary entries, sometimes works of non-fiction, sometime just random photographs.

Telling Ghost Stories About Late Capitalism

PETERMBALL Journal

I’m putting the finishing touches on a new Short Fiction Lab release this week, going through the story draft and making last minute tweaks and squinting at the title from different directions to make sure it’s right. The cover for this one is already done, so it will be a pretty quick production process one I’m satisfied with the story text and the author’s note.

The new story is actually a very old one, in some respects. It’s a ghost story, of a sort, involving lonely roads and two people who may not be in love anymore, and what happens when a road trip goes all kinds of wrong. I wrote a very early draft of it back in 2007, but it never seemed to fit together right.

Over the years I’ve pulled it out and tinkered with it dozens of times, taking it in different directions. This version…well, it started by going back to the very first draft I ever wrote and rebuilding it from scratch. Teasing out metaphors I’d only hinted at, bulwarking the central parallel I was drawing between being stuck in a relationship going wrong and being caught between life and death.

The Day After Two Weeks of Sick Days

PETERMBALL Journal ,

Two weeks ago, the last Heartbeat log I put up on Instagram included the line “Realised the sore throat, aching muscles, and disrupted equilibrium may mean I’m getting sick (do not want).”

The next morning, I woke up discovered that I was right on both fronts: I was sick with the flu, and I truly did not want it. Work ground to a halt, the illness getting an assist from a very sick guinea pig that needed more trips to the vet and help eating every couple of hours.

I’m only just getting back to doing work-related things today, forcing my reluctant brain to look at things I’ve been ignoring for a fortnight without shying away because getting on top of things will be hard. It will still be a disrupted work day, because we’ve still got a very sick guinea pig who needs to be hand-fed every few hours, but there’s the possibility of getting stuff done around that.

Sick days are hard when you have a freelancer mindset (and you live without sick leave). While I’ve been physically better for a few days, my brain is still lagging behind in the foothills of anxiety. My subconscious keeps running around in panicked loops: “We’re so far behind. We’ll never catch up. This is why writing is a terrible idea–let’s just pack it all in and go look for a different job.”

My conscious brain is acknowledging that all those things are possible, but unlikely, and that doing nothing will almost certainly result in getting further behind, so it’s probably better to do something even if it’s not everything I want to get done.

The trick, unsurprisingly, is to cleave to the familiar routines that take thinking out of the equation: start a logbook page for the day; write a blog post to get my brain back into a place where it thinks about conveying things to an audience with words; open a notebook and put the pen next to it, even if I don’t think I’ll write.

The conscious brain knows that I’ll fret much less once things are underway, once the work ceases to be an amorphous blog of NOT DONE, AND OH GOD THE DEADLINES and becomes a set of COOL THINGS I GET TO WRITE NOW.

And the only way to get there is to poke at the work until the cool things manifest themselves, and start getting written.

Funeral Day

PETERMBALL Journal

Woke up this morning and put on a collared shirt and tie, good pants and shoes that were not sneakers. I drove to the far side of the city and admired the kangaroos in the gardens, avoided a gathering crowd of people for as long as I possibly could. At ten o’clock, right on schedule, we started my father’s funeral service, and the rest of the day was a blur of mourning and people offering their condolences. First, at the crematorium, and then at the small pub around the corner where we decamped for dad’s wake.

Tomorrow, I go teach classes. Meet with my PhD supervisor, try to write some things, and start the process of getting our flat in order after three or four weeks of neglect.

It feels–rather oddly–like coming back from holidays, that same process of gathering the loose tethers of routines that were ignored while away and trying to weave them back into a familiar life.

It started, this afternoon, with a few hours on the computer: opening files, catching up on the works in progress that ground to a halt three weeks back, and checking my blog reader for interesting things.

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Here are some of the things that made me happy this afternoon

Nora Roberts posted a long write-up about her writing process as a Facebook note earlier this week, and it’s interesting reading for both the way it highlights the work ethic that underpins her productivity and the way she debunks some of the mythology that has built up around her (most notably, the idea that she finishes a book every 45 days). Recommended reading for writers.

Oren Aks, the designer responsible for the look and branding behind the Fyre Festival, does an interview with Fast Company about what it’s like to be behind the branding of one of the most high-profile scams of the last few years (and his dismissal of any suggestion of culpability just makes me more excited for Mike Monterio’s Ruined By Design when it drops in a few weeks).

I’m teaching Georgette Heyer’s Venetia in tomorrow’s tutorial, and it’s been an immense pleasure to quickly dip back into the book and start picking things to talk about on the craft front. One of the things that really leapt out on me this read-through is Heyer’s use of exposition in the opening chapters to lay out a lot of information quickly, and I’m looking forward to talking about the how and why it works to pull us through the story.

Junkee has an interesting thinkpiece about the new era of musical bio-pics and the increased micromanaging bands employ to control their narrative and keep their greatest hits prominent. It’s been prompted by the release of the Motley Crue biopic on Netflix–a film I both enjoyed and wished had been something a little less slick and glossy. The article is worth reading, even if it’s just for the films he recommends within the biopic genre (particularly Todd Hayne’s work on Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not Here).

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And with that, I’m going to start clearing a three-week backlog of email from my account and see what else needs to go on my to-do list.