Category: Journal
Journal

BILDUNGSROMAN

ONE I was twenty-one when I first realised that writing wasn’t going to be easy. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I was fresh out of my undergraduate, fresh out of home, and about to dive back into an honours year at University. I remember sitting on the balcony of my shitty share-house flat in the wee hours of the morning, nursing a cup of coffee and paging through one of the cheap, shitty poetry anthologies I’d picked up in a second hand book store. This is back when I lived on the Gold Coast, where even the best second hand book stores are fairly starved for poetry. At the time I still figured I’d grow up to be a poet, and I already knew there was no chance of making a living at that. So I drank my coffee and read poetry and thought about what I was going to do with my life, looking at

PeterMBall 14/03/2012
Journal

Today Was a Good Day

It’s a warm and humid night Brisbane. It feels like I’ve somehow found myself in a bowl of lukewarm soup, albeit the kind that has a hot and spicy aftertaste that digs in beneath the skin. Summer is almost over, but it’s slow to relinquish its grip. I’ve got the Jane Austen Argument on repeat because they’ve become a kind of soundtrack to the story I’m writing. I’m mostly making do with the songs from their various singles, although I suspect I’ll pre-order their album before the evening is done. I played the hell out of Bad Wine and Lemon Cake and Here in Melbourne on my MP3 player last year, and if the songs on the album are even half as good as what the group has released thus far, it’s going to be pretty spectacular. And slowly, very slowly, I’m producing new work.  

PeterMBall 27/02/2012
Journal

Why do you get a random photo of bookshelves, you ask?

So I finally got around to uploading the WordPress app onto my android, allowing me to update the blog remotely using my dodgy smartphone keyboard and a  3g connection. Somehow I doubt this will be massively life changing, although it does seem to be a faster way of uploading photos to the site. Not good photos,  mind, nor photos of anything interesting for the moment, but its an option that may come in handy eventually.

PeterMBall 14/02/2012
Journal

Undergoing Maintenance

So there’s a bunch of things on the website that I’ve been meaning to fix for ages and last night I finally got around to it, which inevitably led to the decision that maybe it’s time to gussy the place up a bit given that I’ve been using the same theme and layout for three years now. It’s something of a work in progress, since there’s plenty of changes I’ll be making when I get the time, but for the moment it feels a bit cleaner and the links on the front page work and my parents can finally stop saying “You’ve only got Horn on your website. When are you going to put up a link to Bleed? You should really do that.” Well, now it’s done. I have a vague feeling that I should go and clean my room. # And my spell-checker is trying to tell me that gussy isn’t a word, but this is one of those situations

PeterMBall 29/01/2012
Journal

Saturday Gloom and Notebooks

So I seem to have lost the ability to just sit down and blog at the moment, because the long stretches of silence means everything seems far to trivial when I finally sit down to start posting things. I want to, say, pop in and blog about the fact that I’ve just spent the day with my inner goth turned up to eleven, listening to songs I haven’t listened to in years while rereading the big ol’ copy of The Annotated Sandman, Vol 1, that I picked up on Friday night, which means it’s now coming up on nine o’clock in the evening and I’m surprisingly maudlin and in a bitter-sweet kind of mood that would totally result in me dying my hair black if there was black hair dye in the house. Fortunately, there isn’t, so I’ll continue on as a vaguely normal person on the morrow, but you know how it goes. I’ve had a day catching up with a

PeterMBall 28/01/2012
Journal

The Umbrella Does Nothing

I spend a lot of time walking across this bridge these days: Twice a day, four days a week, in fact. It’s on the path between the train station and work, and avoiding it means traversing a somewhat less pleasant bridge that qualifies as the long way around, so its really a no-brainer to take the Kurilpa Bridge even before I made my startling discovery that the bridge had secret, magical, powers of plot development. In seven of the last eight mornings where I’ve walked across the bridge, I’ve reached the other end with a new scene in my head, typically one that will fix a story I’ve been working on for a while, or advance a novel I plan on writing in a way I’m not really expecting. It’s magical and kind of awesome and usually results in my tapping frantic notes into my phone at the far end so I can email them home when I actually have writing time.

PeterMBall 22/01/2012
Journal

The Writer in a Silly Hat

I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last few weeks. Not that she’s wrong about me posting a picture here, just the time frame: Best. Present. Ever. The hat came about because my sister buggered off to Nepal a few months back, planning on walking to the base camp of Everest, and asked if there was anything I wanted. Usually when my sister goes places I shrug and mumble something non-committal and end up with a motley array of t-shirts when she returns, but Tibet proved to be a special case. “You know what?” I said, “I’d really dig a sherpa hat.” The fact that she found one with its own woolly Mohawk is really

PeterMBall 04/01/2012
Journal

The Perils of Working at a Writers Centre

One of the perils of working in a Writers Centre is the moments of downtime when your colleagues will turn to you and ask, so, what are you writing at the moment? Not a bad thing during the times when you’re actually working on things and eager to talk about it, but right now I’m kinda…not doing anything. Or rather, I’m giving myself a break after a year of deadline after deadline, accompanied by the fact that I’m still in the process of moving out of my old place (there’s a bunch of stuff still waiting to go into storage, and a whole mess of cleaning to do after Christmas is done with). So when asked during the walk to collect lunch for the office today, my response was, well, nothing really.  Mostly what I’m doing at the moment is catching up on things. Specifically, catching up on email, which has been a little…untouched…during the process of packing and moving

PeterMBall 20/12/2011
Gaming

David Bowie and Bing Crosby Singing Christmas Carols

My friend Chris has been running Space: 1889 for our Sunday night gaming crew for about a year now, and it seems to be the first roleplaying game that’s managed to dislodge the mindset of Sunday Night Cthulhu that dogged our weekly sessions after…well, about three straight years of Call of Cthulhu gaming. A few weeks back we kind of bullied persuaded Chris that we should do a Christmas Special, and he somewhat hesitantly agreed despite the fact that he thought we were crazy. So we gathered and we played and there was…well, quite  a lot of Christmas references thrown around. More than you’d expect, given the vast majority of us are bah-humbug types who aren’t all that fond of the Holiday season. I won’t go into the details, since there’s nothing quite so dull as listening to an enthusiastic RPG player waxing lyrical about how awesome their game was, but we all had a blast. I bring it up because the climactic moment

PeterMBall 19/12/2011
Journal

SNUFFLES FOR EVERYBODY

Still packing. Still writing. Still having a rather stressful week at the dayjob, courtesy of unruly technology that insists on not-working even after months of people trying to address the not-working issues. Suspect that I’m going to go into work tomorrow and be told there’s nothing we can do to fix the issue, which promises to be the kind of adventure people have in mind when they curse you to live in interesting times. This despite working late tonight in order to try and rectify things, or at least get the news now so I won’t fret about it for the next thirteen hours. On the plus side, today’s email brought the news of a potential reprint sale that means I may be able to cross yet another goal off my not-so-secret-list-of-writing-goals-I-have-no-control-over-and-therefore-don’t-talk-about – news, as always, once contracts are signed and things are official – and I’ve been quietly filling out the forms that will officially mean I no longer

PeterMBall 08/12/2011
Journal

Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies, The Author Wears a Paper Bag

I’m spending some quality time with the keyboard tonight, chasing the elusive end of the Flotsam story-sequence. I keep scribbling notes in the margins about things I’d like to mention when I eventually do the Flotsam recap, given the somewhat usual space the entire thing occupied in my process, but that’s most just keep the hamster wheel inside my head spinning while it comes up with the bit that comes next. It’s remarkably tempting to just type Rock’s Fall, Everyone Dies, but somehow that doesn’t seem an adequate conclusion for Keith and co (Public Service Announcement: the link in the sentence prior to this leads you to TV Tropes. God knows I just lost 45 minutes tooling around following links. You Have Been Warned). Because I’m packing and they’re around, I find myself working while wearing the dreaded paperbaghat. Basically, I’ve spent much of the evening looking like this: And, as is traditional, I forgot to take the damn thing off when

PeterMBall 06/12/2011
Journal

Haircuts and deadlines

I nipped off to the local shopping centre to have a haircut today. Not that you’d notice to look at me, all things considered, since in my vernacular having a haircut largely translates as choosing to look like an ill-kept hobo rather than arriving there accidentally. Fortunately, today’s hairdresser was one of the few who understood that was the goal of having a haircut, rather than attempting to try and make me look neat and tidy. I long ago came to grips with the fact that my hair doesn’t do neat and tidy unless I’m willing to shave most of it off, but for some reason hairdressers seem to take that as a challenge. # I’m a bit behind on things at the moment. I’m behind at the dayjob, I’m behind on the writing front, and I’m behind on the packing and cleaning plan that will allow me to vacate my flat on the 17th of December with minimal hassles and

PeterMBall 04/12/2011