Category: Journal
Journal

Bad Ideas and Cat Fights

Last night, because Jason Fischer is a bad influence, I wrote out the notes for a Blaxploitation-esque story set in the 70’s version of the Miriam Aster universe. I then put it away because I realised there’s absolutely no way of writing it without being horribly offensive or utterly driven by pastiche. Such are the dangers of not having any deadlines looming, major or minor. Fortunately there are days when I stop myself before doing stupid things and today seems to be one of them. The notes go deep into the “write this when you can afford to get punched in the face” file, at least until Jason lives up to his threat to kidnap me and go all Kathy Bates until I write the damn thing (if anyone hears about Jason acquiring a pet pig, please let me know). In other news, there are twenty-four days remaining before I am free of cats. Or, more specifically, the cat, since there

PeterMBall 09/07/2010
Journal

Things that Happened While I Was Otherwise Distracted

I’ve been distracted of late – either by trying to get the latest version of Cold Cases ready or hole-in-my-head drama depending of the day –  and I somehow managed to miss a whole heap of stuff happening around the traps. 1) The latest edition of the Terra Incognita Podcast is up, featuring me reading my story Black Dog: A Biography that came out in the Interfictions II anthology last year. Unlike most of the previous podcasts of my work this one actually involved me recording the reading myself, an experience that forced me to realise exactly how inarticulate I am in the verbal form (seriously; apparently I drop the consonants out of words and rely on vowel sounds and inflections to get things right, and we do not speak of how many times I had to restart things in order to avoid this). 2) Angela Slatter’s Brisneyland by Night is the feature story over at the Twelth Planet Podcast at the moment, which

PeterMBall 22/06/2010
Journal

Chaos and Rejection

It’s entirely possible that I’ll spontaneously combust at some point today. Somehow it’s become an intersection of deadlines, doctor’s appointments, social engagements and other madness that all needs to be done *now*. Naturally, I have a plan for getting everything done. Just as naturally, it’s all going to hell the moment I hit the doctor’s surgery. While I totally dig my local surgery, they’re often overbooked and the waiting times are haphazard. On the plus side, I seem to have moved past the nightmares where the stitches in my head split open and I bleed over my bed. Now the only thing waking me up is the stitches hurting when it gets really cold around 4 in the morning. In other news: the yearly rejection count hit 7 today, but this is counterbalanced by having the first new story sent out in a long, long while.

PeterMBall 14/06/2010
Journal

Sleep

I went to bed around 9:30 last night and got up around 9:30 this morning. Partially this was a response to getting up around 5 in the morning to take my sister to the airport*, partially its a response to my inability to sleep for longer than an hour at a time since I had the cyst cut out. Near as I can tell, the twelve hours I spent in bed equated to about seven hours of fitful sleep. The rest was all tossing and turning and getting out of bed to make sure that my nightmare I’d just had about the stitches pulling open and starting to bleed really were just nightmares. Obviously, I am not a good patient. Me and bleeding have never been a good combination. And I really, really want to wash my hair. Now I have to go and make up for lost writing time. There is stuff that needs doing, and I’ve been slack

PeterMBall 13/06/2010
Journal

So my day’s been fun…

How was yours? This post is dedicated to my parents, who immediately asked whether they were going to see such a less than flattering portrait go up on the blog.

PeterMBall 10/06/2010
Journal

Doing my best not to swear in this post

I keep trying to be online this week, but the world moves against me. It has ever since Monday, when my internet provider decided I’d had enough of a good thing five minutes from the end of the latest Doctor Who on I-Tunes. Since then my internet access seems to have been choked to the point where I long for the glory days of dial-up where webpages could load in ten minutes on a good day. It’s gotten to the point that I have no idea whether this post will actually post – I’m writing it, hitting the publish button, and walking away for three or four hours. There’s even odds the connection will have itmed out before this paragraph was loaded onto the webpage. Needless to say, this presents problems with e-mail (it takes an hour for gmail to load, longer to actually get into a specific e-mail message). If you’re waiting on something, I’ll get back to you whenever

PeterMBall 03/06/2010
Journal

My to-do list

At some point today I’m planning on making cupcakes, which means I have to clean the mixing bowl, which means I have to eat the salad currently sitting in the mixing bowl as it occupies a shelf of my fridge. And I frickin’ hate salad. There is no reasonable excuse for lettuce. At some point today I’m going to continue going through the Cold Cases draft, engaging in all the chapter-by-chapter tinkering that needs to be done before I hand the manuscript over. I am still unsure of this book, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I am unsure of everything I write that’s longer than 1000 words. At some point today I’m going to vacuum the seemingly endless carpet of shed hair that covers the floor of my house. On the plus side, that’s not going to be a problem for the next few months. There is some pretty simple math that gets done when your lazy, your

PeterMBall 31/05/2010
Journal

In Which Deadlines Make My Life Very Tiny

It’s one PM on a Monday. The rejection count has risen by one (6 for the year). I’m spawning new projects at a rate of knots instead of toying at the tangled web of problems that is the novella I’m meant to be finishing. I took this morning off to listen to Jeff Buckley’s Grace and watch the latest episode of Doctor Who. All in all, rather standard for the last-week-of-a-deadline rush. I’ve noticed that deadlines make my life very small and non-bloggable. I’m leaving the house today – just heading out to pick up groceries and check my PO Box – and I’m unfeasibly excited about the prospect of seeing other people for the first time in about ten days (I try to avoid this kind of non-contact, but last week was a mess of social engagements that got cancelled for various reasons and I didn’t have the energy to scrounge up replacements at the last minute). There will

PeterMBall 24/05/2010
Journal

Mmm, new book smell

I don’t normally buy remaindered books, what with the fact that they’re financially dead for the authors who wrote them and I’m in favour of authors getting paid, but today I made an exception based on the grounds of being very broke and finding a trio of Hard Case Crime books at a very low price while shopping for groceries. The part of me that feels bad about buying remaindered books wages a quiet war with the part of me that thinks picking up pulpy, hard-boiled paperbacks in a supermarket is one of those experiences I thought lost forever. It confused the hell out of the woman on check-outs too; she had to be convinced they were store product, rather than library books I was carrying around while picking up bread and milk.

PeterMBall 29/04/2010
Journal

People Must Die For This

Over the weekend I spotted a billboard that delivered some very bad news: Hey, Hey It’s Saturday is coming back. Online research reveals they’ve been given a run of twenty episode based on the strength of last year’s revival shows, and that they’ll be aired on Wednesday nights in an act of true cognitive dissonance. Darryl Summers is still going to be at the helm, although there’s no news as to which female co-host he’s planning on denigrating this time around. I’ve only got three words in response to this: What. The. Fuck? I’m not entirely sure there’s a good way to explain the lurking evil of Hey, Hey It’s Saturday to non-Australians, but suffice to say that it’s got a fine history of being hosted by a malignant, misogynist gnome who simply refuses to die no matter how many fucking gaffs he makes over the course of his career. It’s a show that routinely built its humor out of the

PeterMBall 29/03/2010
Journal

A frustrated Spokesbear is dangerous

I’m drinking my second cup of coffee of the morning, revelling in the fact that I’ve been awake for nearly three hours now and I don’t yet feel the need to take a nap. Huzzah for reaching the end of the medication, although the celebrations are tempered by the fact that I head into the dentist for stage two of my root canal this afternoon. I know nothing about the art of dentistry, but the implication after my last visit was essentially “if the infection’s still there, we’ll have to remove the tooth instead.” I’m okay with removing the tooth, to be honest, as long as it doesn’t come with another round on medication. Experience says I have a predilection towards sloth that shouldn’t be encouraged and I have phobias about returning to the slacker mindset that dominated my early twenties. Or, to return to my new years resolution: don’t fuck it up, dumb-ass. I’ll take a week of jaw pain

PeterMBall 24/03/2010
Journal

Seven Thoughts for a Tuesday

1) On the grand list of bad narrative decisions that cause me to dislike things I should have loved the decision to have the first half of Veronica Mars, Season 3, to use extreme feminists as one of the key antagonists is right at the top. The first time I watched the series it was a moment of pure WTF and it seriously hasn’t made any more sense on subsequent viewings. 2) Someone has created inhalable coffee as a consumer product. The jet packs and self-driving cars are surely on their way. 3) Part of my beef with the decision mentioned in number one? The writers of Veronica Mars have a seemingly magical ability to create empathy with the antagonists. *Every single arsehole* in the show – from the self-involved Sheriff Lamb to killer Aaron Eckles to frat-boy Dick Casablancas – has a redeeming moment or two in amidst their grating evil. There was depth to them. The “evil feminist”

PeterMBall 23/03/2010