Journal

I spent part of yesterday researching cocktails, for the fantasy element of Fairy Dust, with Whisky Chaser, hinges upon a particular character who makes a particular drink. In my head that drink has been an Old Fashioned, for I have a fondness for them and it’s a nice allusion for the problem that drives one of the characters, but the Old Fashioned is not an exciting cocktail. It involves no shakers or bartending shenanigans, just the combining of ingredients that ultimately become something delicious.

So I spent an hour googling cocktail recipes, looking for something with more pizzaz. Came up with nothing, and stuck with the old fashioned for the moment. So I started figuring out where my affection for the Old Fashioned actually came from, and I think it can be traced to my friend Allan over at Type 40 (purveyors of fine pop culture artefacts and props) who drank them when I visited Melbourne at some point, and then I felt that pang you get when you have’t spoken to friends for far too long.

I also spent some quality time coveting his Call of Cthulhu investigator’s notepads, but those are outside the budget at the moment. Which, of course, sent me off pondering the problems of finances at the moment (I’m on scholarship; my partner is between jobs), and whether it was time to start considering a Patreon given the limitations on finding part-time work when you’re studying while a university is paying your bills.

All of which was a petty clear sign that I was stuck on this particular bit of the story, which involved lots of people talking to one another and explaining things that needed explaining, so I’ll need to go back and look at the earlier scenes to figure out why I feel the need to lay so much pipe in the present scene.

I wrote another 945 words yesterday, bringing the draft to 2,845 words. It’s starting to look story-shaped at this point, the individual sections leaning up against one-another and reinforcing the whole. Beats that aren’t pulling their weight become a little more obvious now, while those that are a little too strong cause the story to list in an unexpected direction. We are entering the phase where a story can collapse under its own weight, but mostly I expect it to creak dangerously while I look for the bits that are wrong and patch them up.

There’s an interesting post over on Lifehacker about the cost of electricity in Australia and why it’s unlikely to fall any time soon. I’m linking to it because how electricity is priced tends to one of those mysterious things that people blame political parties for, without truly understanding how it works, and it’s useful to occasionally get people thinking about such things.

Then again, my dream political party is the one who runs on a campaign of we’ll tax you so hard it fucking hurts, but we’ll spend it on public services and state-of-the-art infrastructure for the public good. I am destined to be disappointed every election, even if someone actually runs on such a platform.

Also, I am reminded that I really should be checking in on The Conversation (where the original post was sourced) much more often than I am. For example, this article about the characteristics shared by “happy city” Instagram pics regardless of which city is being photographed makes for an interesting resource when pondering the design features of various fictional settings. I’m going to try adding it to my RSS feed for a week, get a feel for how much daily content needs to be processed.

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Yesterday I wrote 921 words on a short story, Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser. I walked 10,000 steps for the first time in weeks, ate some delicious cauliflower tacos with pineapple salsa my beloved made for dinner. I admired my beloved’s stompy, dinosaur-foot slippers as I am wont to do every day or so when it is cold enough that she wears them. We watched the first two episodes of Jane the Virgin’s fourth season before I took myself away from screens and did some reading before going to sleep.

A post shared by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jul 2, 2018 at 1:43am PDT

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One of the things I’m reading at the moment is Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop. It’s an interesting book to pick up right after doing a stack of marking, because is does exactly what writing instructors (including me) will usually warn people against, spending several pages engaged in prolonged exposition about protagonist and their situation and the world around them. It’s a goddamn beautiful bit of writing that breaks all sorts of “rules,” largely because Carter is so goddamn good that she can exposit for 20 pages and make it enthralling and beautiful.

I have thoughts about why this works, but they’re not fully developed yet. They may go into the newsletter, this week or next, if I can get them relatively cohesive.

It’s a bright, sunny Monday where I woke up early and got to work on writing projects first thing, getting a bunch of stuff done before I sit down to write this blog post. It’s cool enough that I notice when I walk around without socks on, but not so cold that I regret this decision within an hour of waking up.

Over the weekend I realised that the last three weeks have been rough on my mental health. This shouldn’t be surprising – end-of-semester marking is one of those gigs is custom-built to trigger all my anxieties: high stakes, tight deadlines, and you only get one shot to put together feedback that will help, and you want it to be clear because there’s no chance to explain or expand on things the way you do when critiquing stories for friends.

All of this comes together to create a very muddied vision of what “doing a good job” looks like, and my anxiety feeds on uncertainty like a tick, growing fat as it burrows deeper and deeper into the dark parts of my subconscious. I finalised everything last Tuesday, but it took me the rest of the week to start pulling myself out of the slump. There were too many things left unattended too during the marking period, too many things that needed to be dealt with before my brain returned to a space where work was possible.

I read a bunch. I watched some wrestling. I sat at my desk for the first time in weeks. I realised that my email had become a nightmare while I marked, with over a hundred messages still waiting for a response, and my RSS feeds needed tending because there were about 400 unread posts accumulated there. We do not speak of the unchecked notifications on social media.

On the email front, I got my first round of queries about the next GenreCon. These happen every year about this time, and usually amount to “when is the next one? What can you tell us?”

The answer, this year, is “virtually nothing,” for my contract ended after the last con. Your best bet is querying Queensland Writers Centre via admin@qldwriters.org.au or calling on 07 3842 9922.

Meanwhile, some interesting things that popped up as I processed feeds and inboxes:

• This comic about 11 Signs You Are Not Getting Enough Sleep is kinda glorious.
• Kathleen Jennings has a lot of (very pretty) work-in-progress images from the development of the cover to Gillian Polack’s new book.
• Via Inabitat (aka my favourite source of SF settings) – this arched bamboo roof made by a Vietnamese architecture firm is fantastic and went straight into the “locations to use in fiction one day” file.
• Terry Crews remains awesome.
• Fed up with all-male “greatest comic villains” lists, the Mary Sue puts together a list of the greatest female DC villains.
• Via Jane Friedman’s Blog, a post that explores a sentiment I write a lot when marking: Rule No. 1 for flashbacks: until and unless you’ve invested us in a scene, don’t flash back (or away) from it.
• Seth Goddin on the existence of markets, not “the market,” is worth thinking about in a writing context.

My goals today: get some writing done; get this blog post written and posted; go for a walk; read something. Remember that I’m getting back into the swing of things. Wake up to an alarm and get back to the daily routine, which fell by the wayside when my partner stopped leaving for work at 7:30 . Focus on small advances on projects, instead of trying to rebuild entire projects in one day.

It’s less exciting than showing up here and crushing large word counts, but it’ll be more effective in the long run.