Category: Journal
Journal

And now we are thirty-seven…

As has become traditional, I’m posting the once-a-year Birthday selfie, because no birthday is complete until my parents ring me and complain about the things I put up on the internet. Except I’ve been doing this for seven years now, so I may have broken them of the habit. We’ll see. And with that, my birthday celebrations are done for the year. Most of today will be spent at work, doing worky things, and starting the price negotiation process on an apartment I’m trying to buy so I can move and unpack all my books. I forgot to mention it a few weeks back, but my story, The Seventeen Executions of Signore Don Vashta, is live over at the Daily Science Fiction website. You can go read it for free and stuff, if you’re so inclined.

PeterMBall 18/03/2014
Journal

Restlessness

I’m trying to buy an apartment this year. I’m not terribly good at it. I can find places I quite like in locations I’d enjoy living, but the response I get when consulting with expert is basically the equivalent of a warning siren and the robot from Lost in Space flailing its arms in a panic. When I find places that are really quite solid investments, well made and reasonably priced, I look at their location and the streets that surround them and realise, should I live in this place alone, my future will involve unacceptable levels of boredom and self-loathing. There have been suggestions, in Australian media of late, that we’re far too hard on suburbia. Perhaps this is true. I grew up in the suburbs. I live in Brisbane, which is mostly a sprawling suburban expanse that goes on forever and ever, amen. I’m not good at that. I like the idea that there are people around, people

PeterMBall 30/01/2014
Journal

2014 is Going to Hurt

I saw my flatmate in the kitchen this morning. For many people, this isn’t really notable. They probably see their flatmates every morning. For me, it’s a rarity. My flatmate gets up early. Seriously early. He’s usually on his way to work by the time I roll out of bed at 7:30 AM and start thinking about having a shower. Usually, if we cross paths in the morning, it’s ’cause I’m catching a flight scheduled to leave before rush hour. So he wasn’t entirely out of line when he looked at me, making coffee, around 7 in the morning, and asked: “who are you and what have you done with Peter?” “This is nothing,” I said. “I’ve been up since 5:30.” It’s a work day. It’s a writing day. It’s the year of the novellapocalypse. When these things meet, I have to get up early. # 2014 is going to hurt. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but in the

PeterMBall 06/01/2014
Journal

Top Ten Posts on Man vs. Bear in 2013

Last year, when accurate visitor data was still a shiny new concept around these parts, I went and looked at the posts that had achieved the most visitors over 2012. It proved to be an interesting exercise, so this year I’m expanding it to look at the top ten. In order of visits, the most popular parts of the archive were: 1. Why I Have Problems with the Big Bang Theory 2. 13 Things Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions of Mutants and Masterminds 3. Why Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ Can Be Dangerous to New Writers 4. What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Two 5. What Writers Oughtt to Know About Die Hard, Part One 6. Seven Notes on a Lover’s Discourse While Halfway Through the Book 7. Sri Lankan Love Cake FTW 8. 10 Thoughts on Shame and Writing 9. Running a Villain Audit 10. GenreCon 2013: The Aftermath It’s interesting to note that

PeterMBall 02/01/2014
Journal

Help Wanted: Writing and Travelling

This time next week, I’ll be on flight to England, wending my way towards the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton. There’s a lot of Australian folks doing that at the moment. I’d wonder how Brighton is going to cope, if it weren’t for the fact that England seems to be overrun by Australians as a matter of course, so they’re probably used to it. Right now, I’m on a lunch break, trailing the not-quite-a-computer set-up that I’m planning to use as a trasnportable word-processor/blogging platform while I’m overseas. That consists of the Samsung Galaxy 2 tab I acquired earlier this year, plus a battery-operated Ligitech bluetooth keyboard that works way, way better than the peice of crap I gold sold when I first picked up the tab (the lag on the first keyboard was bad, and I tend to type really fast). The Logitech is working out pretty well. It doesn’t quite cope with my typing speed, but it catches

PeterMBall 17/10/2013
Journal

Pints

The text message hits after ten PM, but I answer it ’cause I’m still awake and ’cause that’s what I do. It says, pub?, and I’m all, hell yes, but instead I text back about putting on clothes, ’cause I’m in bed, in my pajamas, just futzing around on the internet, and the possibility of hitting the pub at this hour seems more attractive than continuing to write emails I don’t feel like writing anymore. The pub isn’t really a pub at this hour of the evening. They’ve shut down the public bar, the outside areas. Reduced the venue down to the gambling lounge full of pokies, open ’til late for the folks who can’t stay away, but we ignore the rows of brightly coloured machines and make our beeline for the bar, ordering pints and taking them outside so you can smoke and I can sit there, watching the empty car-park that’s only really empty when we show up

PeterMBall 30/07/2013
Journal

Window

There’s this window in my office that looks out over the breezeway, and every day I come in and stare at it and wonder how hard it’d be to break the big panes of glass with an office chair tossed from the vicinity of my desk. I know how this sounds, ’cause I mentioned it once at an office meeting, and people have already given me the look even if they’ve come to understand what’s really behind the impulse. I mean, I don’t want to throw a chair ’cause I’m feeling violent or because I particularly want to engage in a little wholesale destruction, or because I go to work and find myself in a state of uncontrolled rage. I just want to do it ’cause the window is there, and I don’t know for sure if I could break it, and I’d like to know, maybe. To do it for science, as it where, and know what breaking the

PeterMBall 17/07/2013
Journal

Winter

All my friends keep moving to Melbourne and I do not. I find this kinda tiring, ’cause I’m not the kind of guy who makes new friends easily. I make new acquaintances. I’m good at new acquaintances. Making friends is harder. I don’t like to impose on people, especially now we’re in our thirties. I need clear signs that acquaintances would like to take things further. I assume, for the most part, that people have their shit down and don’t want me to show up and mess with it. I don’t bother ’cause I don’t want to be a bother. Besides, making new friends is all kinds of awkward. There are friends who skip Melbourne and just go overseas. I cant even imagine how to migrate like that. It’s not in my DNA to relocate that far. There are days when moving to Melbourne seems all kinds of daunting. I keep saying I’m going to do it, and keep failing

PeterMBall 09/07/2013
Journal

Unicorns, on my Feet

So I showed up for write-club today and these were waiting for me: And now I am home and wearing them and, really, the world should beware, for there is nothing more terrifying than a chap wearing unicorns on his feet (because I am classy, I haven’t yet taken off my socks). They do feel, rather oddly, like you’d expect shoving your feet into a pair of unicorns to feel (by which I mean rather soft and cloud-like in their fluffiness, rather than a gross congealed mass of blood, sinew, and dead flesh) They’re a gift from the inimitable Angela Slatter, and yet another in a recent string of reminders that I have much better friends than I deserve.  

PeterMBall 08/07/2013
Journal

Saturday Morning

It’s Saturday and I have spent the morning in bed, reading books. The great curse of the day-job is that I don’t get to do this often enough. My narratives get consumed through moving images on screens these days, rather than on the page, ’cause television lets me multitask. Or, at least, I don’t feel guilty when I cheat on television narratives by doing other things while they’re on. These are dangerous kinds of Saturday’s to set out and write a blog post. The results are always sprawling and full of weird little tangents and, ultimately, break all kinds of rules about having a point and making it worth the readers time. And frequently, at this point, I discover that I don’t really care. It’s Saturday. It’s cold and quiet and my belly is full of porridge. My head is full of other people’s words, which in turn fills the heart and nourishes the soul. I want to document that,

PeterMBall 29/06/2013
Journal

Hoodie

I have become the kind of man who wears a hoodie without apparent irony. I’d blame it on the cold snap Brisbane seems to be experiencing, but really i just like to pretend I’m a ring-wraith hunting hobbits across the Shire. I think we should all be worried about the implications of this development.

PeterMBall 20/06/2013
Journal

Bookshelves

The internet is full of gloriously sexy photographs of beautiful, artfully messy bookshelves. This is not one of them.

PeterMBall 07/06/2013