Category: Journal
Journal

Hello!

So, apparently I lied yesterday – I am back today. I didn’t mean to lie, or expect to be here, but after a day at the final Year of the Novel course at the Queensland Writer’s Cetnre there was a part of brain that clicked over and said wait, yes, I am meant to be writing, perhaps it’s time to reclaim that bit of my life again. And so I have critted work, and pondered problems with the novel-in-progress, and chatted with the awesome Angela Slatterabout when we can kick off write-club again and which day we can use so we can get some continuity going (we’ve traditionally used Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, all of which have become untennable due to semi-regular scheduling conflicts). It’s been chaotic fortnight around these parts – it kicked off with the news of my dad’s heart attack on the 24th of October that saw me spend much of the week on the Gold Coast,

PeterMBall 06/11/2010
Journal

Hello my neglected blog, how are you? I’m still away, doing a mixture of taking-care-of-family type things and wtf-when-did-I-get-a-day-job type things. I wear a tie to work. It’s very strange. I’ll be back soon. Not today, and not tomorrow, but soon. Until then, I’m just going to point out that I’m listening to Guns and Roses this afternoon, and it’s all Jason Fischer’s fault. Yours, Peter

PeterMBall 05/11/2010
Journal

Updated

I’m temporarily back in Brisbane this morning, prepping for a job interview after lunch. My dad goes in for a double-bypass tomorrow morning, so I suspect I’ll be driving back down to the Gold Coast tonight. I’ve not been this familiar with the Gold Coast highway in years. He’s met with all sorts of specialists in the last few days, and the ultra-sound of his heart has shown that while the current episode wasn’t a heart attack, there’s been a minor attack at some point in the past. The current plan, barring acts of employment, is to come back to Brisbane on Monday night once we’ve got a firm idea of what’s going on post-surgery. In the mean time, should you miss me, might I suggest heading over to Shimmer where they’ve posted the reading I did of my story from issue 12, The Mike and Carly Story, Without the Gossip.

PeterMBall 27/10/2010
Journal

Bad News

I’m going to be scarce this week. Yesterday my father went to hospital with what we’re not technically calling a heart attack (he has blocked arteries, but the “heart episode” didn’t result in damage to the heart muscle), and we’re currently waiting to find out when the bypass surgery is going to happen. Presumably it’ll be some time this week, after the blood thinners they gave him when he was first admitted have started to wear off. All in all, none of this news is as bad as it could have been – my dad has been extraordinarily lucky given the circumstances, and open heart surgery has been around long enough that the bigger concern than “they’re cutting him open and messing with his ticker” is “how is all this going to interact with his Parkinson’s medication.” It helps that my sister is a radiographer with experience working with cardiac-style cases, so we have a fairly accurate barometer of how

PeterMBall 25/10/2010
Journal

4 Things

1) This morning I introduced a friend to the glory that is Hark, A Vagrant, which is kind of like XKCD for literature and history nerds instead of math-geeks. I mention this purely because I just assume everyone reads these things, but every now and then I’ll be all “the hippos will always be hungry; they will never be satisfied” and people will be all “WTF Peter? That makes no sense.” 2) A fairly neat review of Twelfth Planet Press’s Sprawl anthology, which was released at Worldcon and contains new short stories by me and Angela Slatter and LL Hannett and many other awesome folks. In an odd moment of synchronicity, my contributor copy arrived in the mail yesterday too. Should you want your own copy, you can go order one on the TPP website. 3) I suspect being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers would be mildly uncomfortable. And no, you do not context for that. 4) I find myself, post-worldcon, staring at

PeterMBall 06/10/2010
Journal

Coffee, Meaning, and Getting What You Get

I woke up this morning with a desire to blog, only to discover that the back end of my website is down for some kind of regular maintenance, and this presents problems because I’ve grown so used to using it that the thought of posting straight to livejournal seems redundant. So instead I write this elsewhere and assume it’ll go online sooner or later. It’s 8:36 in the morning. It’s raining. I’m barefoot and wearing my oversized winter writing coat and listening to old Cure songs. There’s a list of five things I want to accomplish today sitting beside the keyboard. The first thing on the list is the production of words for Claw. The second thing on the list is the revision of words for Black Candy. If you read yesterday’s post, you may be seeing a theme. Right now I’m missing coffee. Not the caffeine or the taste of it, just the comforting way it used to fit

PeterMBall 03/10/2010
Journal

Musings

Today is wet and dreary and therefore full of awesome. I’m always far fonder of the world when it’s overcast and dreary than I am during the sunny days, especially now that it’s spring and the demolition-force humidity and heat of Summer are just on the horizon. I am steadily ignoring the fact that there are multiple breeds of football dominating the airwaves at the moment and pretending the rest of the world has gone away for a while. It’s always easier to write on such days, although I’ll admit that I miss the comfort of having another cup of coffee and watching the world through my office window. Soon I will head off and make myself some soup. Until then I will sit and think about Claw, which is proving to be unruly and hard-to-tame due to my insistence on a) not repeating the opening tropes that were used in Horn and Claw; and b) my desire to make use

PeterMBall 02/10/2010
Journal

Cutting back on coffee, redux

So it’s been a week since I started cutting back on caffeine, replacing my 9+ cups of coffee a day with a single cup in the morning and the occasional cup of tea in the afternoon. It’s made for a trying week, especially since it came with a side-order of mandatory workshopping and a slew of ongoing problems with my internet access*, so I haven’t yet gotten around to answering all the various people who keep asking “why, for the love of god, why?” whenever I mentioned this on various social media. The short-answer goes something like this: I recently availed myself to the counselling service the Australian social-security system offers to the long-term unemployed, during which we spoke of many things. The Fear was among them, as was my frustration at my inability to put a consistent writing routine together due to increasing anxiety about bills, rent, insomnia, the inability to find consistent employment, and assorted other issues I generally don’t

PeterMBall 27/09/2010
Journal

Withdrawal

Please let it be known that I’ve been good this week. I mean, there was no writing worth speaking of, but I made it through the various things required of me without blowing people up with my INVISIBLE MIND LASERS, even though parts of the week were frustrating enough that I only endured the passage of time by pretending I truly did have said mind lasers and slipped into a mental debate about the ethics of using them to eliminate pesky annoyances. The next time I’m locked in the room with disciples of positive thinking for three days, there will be no internal debate. I’m just going to channel my inner Ming the Merciless and destroy the goddamn world. This may be an overreaction, but I’m like that, really. Hyperbole and overreaction are my default state, and the next time I won’t be polite when I point out that it takes 21 days to form a habit shit is fucking

PeterMBall 24/09/2010
Journal

4 Days ’til Worldcon

And man, doesn’t that feel like an ominous thing to type in the title of the post. I’m in a vaguely half-asleep state this morning, largely because I started reading Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue just before going to bed last night and it’s one of those books where the temptation to read just one more chapter is terribly, terribly strong.  Were I a less lazy blogger there would be a whole post here about yesterday’s adventure to Pulp Fiction, whereupon my plan to buy just one or two books quickly fell apart. Fortunately, I am a lazy blogger today. That’s what Sunday’s a for. Today there is writing. And write-club. And bugging the inimitable Ben Francisco about co-writing a YA novel, ’cause there are some writerly shenanigans that work better when they’re shared with other people.

PeterMBall 29/08/2010
Journal

7 Days ’til Worldcon

Man, I’ve been all over the place for the last week. Good stuff happened and bad stuff happened and my emotional state bounced around like one of those 20-cent rubber crazy balls you used buy from the machines out the front of the grocery store, but there was rarely a moment where stuff happened all on its own and demanded no real engagement on my part. Fortunately the last three or four days have trended towards the good rather than the bad, but I suspect any seven day period that starts with your parents ringing from the other side of the world and saying “we were almost killed in a car crash” is going to struggle to come out ahead on points. Still, among the cool stuff: – Doing edits and contracts for my short story, L’esprit de L’escalier, which will be coming up at Apex Magazine in the future. Astute readers may put two-and-two together and realise this was

PeterMBall 26/08/2010
Journal

12 Days ’til Worldcon

Or as we in Australia like to call it – the day we head out and vote. I did my civic duty a few hours back, so now I’m waiting things it in tentative fear about the possible result. Elections are always a time of fear for me. I’m a fairly moderate lefty whose spent most of my adult life enduring the seemingly endless reign of the Howard Years when the country routinely decided they preferred a very different ideology at work running the country. And I’ll be honest here – in most of those years I could at least respect the country’s choice on some level. One of the things that always struck about Howard was that he was the kind of idealist that people seem to think of as the exclusive domain of the left; he just idealised a very conservative viewpoint. Even when I railed against him for being an evil fucking bastard, there was at least the

PeterMBall 21/08/2010