Category: Journal
Journal

The Day After Valentine’s Day

I’ve just seen the first review of Electric Velocipde 21/22, courtesy of Lois Tilton at Locus online, and it says very nice things about Memories of Chalice and recommends it to readers. I’m going to steal a bit from the end, since the beginning mostly sets up what the story’s about: While the narrator speaks of dollars, rock stars and penthouses, the setting seems more to be some timeless European castle in a valley isolated from the mundane world, where wealthy gnomes guard vast fortunes in their vaults beneath the mountains. This author is one I always look forward to; his offerings are fine and well-crafted. And really, there are worse ways to begin the day than reading that, aren’t there? You can read the entire review for EV 21/22 and a few other fine magazines over at the Locus website. # Yesterday I stopped off to buy some groceries on the way home from work and the guy manning

PeterMBall 15/02/2011
Journal

Credit Where Credit’s Due

On Friday night, after a panel at the QWC’s One Book, Many Brisbanes program, I got the opportunity to go hang out with Cat Sparks, Trent Jamieson, and the elusive Ben Payne. There was beer and chatter and hot chips with tomato sauce. The true value of this experience probably doesn’t sink in unless you know Cat and Trent and Ben, but fortunately for me I do, so I got to be there (although, given I had to drive home, I elected to drink coke. This seems to keep happening when I find myself in pubs; somehow I seem to have lost the ability to get my drink on). Should you not know Cat and Trent, the short version goes something like this: one is the author of Death Most Definite and Managing Death and more quality short stories than you can poke a stick at, while the other possesses a resume similarly stacked with quality short stories and recently

PeterMBall 14/02/2011
Journal

Sunday Morning

When I was about twenty I lived in a motel, and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever rented in my life. If you’ve read Bleed, you’re already kinda familiar with it, ’cause it served as the basis for Palm Tree Row and abandoned motel where Aster finds the corpse. If you read the second installment of Flotsam when it comes out, the motel pops up again, albeit in a more inhabited form.  It’s one of those touchstone places in terms of my fiction, a secret I’m still trying to unravel. The motel had these green fluorescent lights running along the first floor patios that turned on automatically at sunset and stayed on until midnight, which meant my second floor bedroom was lit up with an alien-abduction glow that was accompanied by the unearthly buzz that close comes from close proximity to bad lighting. One of my neighbours was a six-four American hip-hop fan with tourette’s who used to come home at

PeterMBall 13/02/2011
Journal

Fists of Steel: Write Club Edition

Tonight there was write club, which is usually good news for the wordcount. I managed to bang out the first six hundred words of the next Flotsam story (faster than expected), but fell a couple of hundred words short of my goal to finally crack 5,000 words on the great-lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft. I also tinkered with the Black Candy draft for the first time since starting the gauntlet, working out how it’s going to fit into the daily routine. And because I cannot help myself, I even added a hundred or so words to a short story that I’m resolutely not-writing and will continue not-writing until it magically becomes written. I absconded from proceedings slightly early because day-job demands rising early and I now turn into a miserable bastard if I’m not in bed by 11 o’clock. I was already a miserable grump this evening because I got the news that the owners of my flat are planning sell in the

PeterMBall 08/02/2011
Journal

CMS

Every couple of years I seem to end up in a job where someone wants me to write web-content for their small business. I’m not particularly sure why I end up with these jobs – I’ve never been particularly good at SEO and the accompanying headaches that come with writing for the web for money – but somehow it keeps happening despite my best intentions and heartfelt promise that it will never happen again. When I went into the interview for my current job they mentioned they might want me to do a little work on their website, and I brought up the question of which content management system they were using. This brought a blank look from the interviewer, but after a little explanation we eventually got the answer: “we don’t know; we paid a company to produce the website.” At this, I nodded and tried to hide the shriek of despair that threatened to escape at those words.

PeterMBall 28/01/2011
Journal

Apathy versus Anger

Today I spent my free time at work engaging in what is quickly becoming my favorite procrastination activity: daydreaming about ways I can quit my job to write and making lists about the things I need to do in order to make that happen. On one hand this makes for a nice change – this time last last year I was unemployed and dreaming of ways to pay rent – but after three months in the new day job things have evolved to the point where it’s a hindrance rather than a help. You see, somewhere along the line I ceased being the office assistant and became the unofficial web-guy for the company. My day’s went from data-entry to content production and putting together a plan for the company to revise the website and engage with social media. I’m far from an expert on this kind of stuff – I got the job by virtue of being the sole person

PeterMBall 20/01/2011
Journal

After the Rain/After the Flood

So the buzz on twitter is that the After the Floods e-Anthology has raised over $1200 for the Queensland Flood Appeal, to which I can only say you fucking rock, fans of Australian SF. The special editions title becomes even more poignant now, when the floods are over and the clean-up begins, than it was when we were watching the water rise. I spent much of my day playing courier for the Day Job, delivering orders that’d been held up by the water, and I got to see a fair chunk of Brisbane while I was driving around. Some of the city has held up remarkably well. Some has not. I got home from work and read that there’s a major arterial road that’s potentially ready to slide into the river, which is something that seems oddly surreal. I’ve got friends who are only just making it home after leaving their houses. My sister has absconded to the Gold Coast for

PeterMBall 14/01/2011
Journal

Flood, Part 2

News is that the floods have peaked, and peaked at a slightly lower level than expected, which is one of those bright sides that only remains a bright side until you turn on the television and look at the large swathes of Brisbane underwater. I went for a poke around my suburb this morning, just a little after sunrise. My street seems to have fared pretty well – we’ve had a couple of very small patches of water covering the road and there’s various detours, police barricades and other stuff keeping people from driving through them. Since I’m within the area that they’re blocking off, it’s a safe bet I won’t be driving anywhere today, but all in all it didn’t seem so bad. Then I found this, about 5 minutes walk from my house. To put the above in perspective – that big reflective thing that looks like a river used to be a main road. The trees just

PeterMBall 13/01/2011
Journal

Flood

Brisbane is bracing itself for the worst flooding the citiy’s seen in over a century, and it appears the worst of it will hit around 4 AM tomorrow morning. While I live in one of the affected suburbs, it kinda looks like I may be up high enough to avoid the worst of the waters. Roads may be cut off, but I should stay safe and dry (and if not, well, I’m ready to run for higher ground and there’s plenty of it around). I went to go take some photographs of the local creek (which, until yesterday, I always thought of as a particularly ambitiuos bit of drainage system rather than an established body of water), but was promplty stymied by water covering part of the road about 300 m from my house. Since I wasn’t in the mood to wade, and the local traffic makes dashing onto the road itself rather stupid, I’ll instead send you over to

PeterMBall 12/01/2011
Journal

Things I Would Be Blogging About, Were I Blogging this December

1) The rejuvenating power of The Birthday Party’s Release the Bats when you’re tired, pissed off, and generally unwilling to engage with things. 2) How unfeasibly cool it is that Angela Slatter had her books mentioned on Ellen Datlow’s list of book recommendations for XMas. 3) The somewhat tricky process of making the first installment of Flotsam, my series due for the Edge of Propinquity next year, work the way I want it to work. 4) Getting the chance to interview Dan Abnett for a friend’s podcast, only to have the technology fail us at a crucial moment and steal away the audio. 5) Plans for the blog in the new year, many of which have already been discarded as unworkable because, yo, I am weary of plans. After being lured back to the working world by the promise of paying rent and eating meals that consist of more than potatoes and Soylent Green, I’m finding the ideas of plans

PeterMBall 20/12/2010
Journal

The Festive Season

Someone wise and adroit once said that it’s better to not blog than to blog poorly, and after reviewing my to-do list for the rest of the year I’ve decided to take heed of that advice. The Spokesbear and I are going to take a partial sabbatical from the internet over December while I get some stuff done. I’ll be on e-mail and checking facebook and doing all the stuff online that I’m required to do for work, but there’s going to be no blogging taking place until the 1st of January. Links to cool stuff (such as the best of the year list over at Last Short Story) will take place over on twitter. See you all in 2011, and may the holiday season treat you well.

PeterMBall 01/12/2010
Journal

Swancon 36

A few months ago I decided to do the sensible thing by my financial situation and give up any plans of going to Swancon 36 (aka Australia’s nat-con). It was the right decision back that – I was unemployed and broke and heavily in debt, and although there were all sorts of good reasons to go to Perth (Peeps! Ellen Datlow!) the money just wasn’t there. Admitting that fracking hurt too, ’cause occasionally I’d talk to Alisa over at Twelfth Planet Pressabout using Swancon as a rough launch date for Claw, and I do so love being around when a new book goes out into the world. Several things have changed since then. For starters there’s no chance that Claw will be out by Swancon, largely because the recent mess of dayjob and parents having heart surgery meant I just wasn’t able to meet the original deadline*. On the other hand, Swancon still has a chance to catch up with

PeterMBall 21/11/2010