Journal

Where I post about the things that happened in my life. Sometimes they’re diary entries, sometimes works of non-fiction, sometime just random photographs.

All The Things That Excite Me This Week

PETERMBALL Journal

This is going to be a lazy week on the writing front.

For one thing, today is my last day in Melbourne. I have caught up with friends and played a good number of board games and guest-starred as Ronan the Accuser in Patrick O’Duffy’s Annihilation campaign, which means I’m still running on the endorphin high of rolling a shitload of d12s and wielding the Universal Weapon in defence of the cosmos.

Later today, there will be a flight home. A few hours sleep. Then: a return to the day job..

perf5.500x8.500.inddFor another thing, The Flotsam Omnibus gets released in two days. Pre-orders for the ebook version are already live, if you’re the kind of personality who absolutely cannot wait. You can pay for that bad-boy now and it will be automatically delivered to the reading device of your choice on release.

Fuck people who complain about the lack of jet packs and flying cars. The future is doing just fine, for my money.

But my week gets kind of wonky when I have a new book out. I get…interested. Hungry for data. And so I will be obsessively googling my name in see if people are buying it and how they like the extra stories and where it falls on the Amazon rankings and, shit, just generally just feeding the neediest, ugliest part of my writer ego.

I will also be updating the publications page on the site, since it’s at least a year out of date.

This…embarrasses me.

Also, causes me to fall to my knees, rip my shirt, and scream out “AP-NEE-AAAAAAAAA!” like I’m Shatner emoting in Wrath of Kahn.

For another thing, JESSICA JONES HITS NETFLIX ON FRIDAY.

I am so fucking there to binge-watch that shit. I mean: superheroes; noir influences; Luke Cage on screen; Krysten-fucking-Ritter and David-fucking-Tennant and Carrie Anne Moss. Every other thing Marvel has ever done could be utter shite and I would still be 100% down to binge-watch this series the moment it hit the air.

Add in the fact that Daredevil was a goddamn exquisite piece of television and I am counting the days until the 20th. I may even do a Daredevil re-watch just to tide me over.

These things will distract me from writing. They will make me lazy and indolent and willing to accept two hundred words as a good days writing.

But they will not stop me.

You hear that, week to come?

BRING IT ON.

I’m Reserving the Right to Reverse This Decision

PETERMBALL Journal

It’s NaNoWriMo season and the internet is awash with writing advice, much of it focused on the early stages of getting words down and belting out a first draft. At the same time, I holed up in my apartment with the lights off, illuminated by the glow of NXT playing on the WWE network, quietly trying to shake the very mild panic attack that inevitably follows every conference I’ve ever attended.

It would seem a stupid time to start considering returning to regular blogging, with a focus on the craft and business of writing, and yet I find myself doing so. It’s been five months since I swore off using the blog for such purposes, but I’m surprised how often those old blog posts about writing have come in useful since then.

GenreCon was the most recent example – the news filtered through that I was going to need an opening night speech on short notice, and once I knew the topic I wanted to talk about, it was surprisingly useful to be able to dig up an old blog post and find the key take-away that could be adapted to a new purpose.

I did something similar a few months back, when someone asked me to do a presentation about writing. There were three or four posts I’d written that addressed the topic, so it was easy to pick ’em up and adapt them as needed. I’ve lost track of the number of times, at work, that having already thought about a topic was useful.

For all that I felt like I was banging on about things I didn’t know enough about, it wasn’t like I stopped doing it. It just happened in different locations and, occasionally, the prep work got a little more arduous.

And since I’d already fallen into the habit of posting here regularly, in the lead-up to the con, so I figure I may just follow that particular instinct for a while. Or, at least, find a happy medium between thinking out loud and rambling on about life.

Which is good news, I suppose, if you were the kind of person who enjoyed showing up here for the bits where I wrote about writing. Less good, I suppose, if you were more of a fan of the long silences punctuated by the occasional flurry of activity.

 

 

A Curious Thing

PETERMBALL Journal , ,

Ducked around to my PO Box earlier today and discovered that my contributor copies of Gods, Memes, and Monsters had arrived. And lo, it is a handsome book, once you see it in the flesh:

Gods Memes and Monsters

That’s not the curious bit.

This is: I have a bit of a ritual with contributor copies these days, which has developed over the last few years. Basically, they come in, and I make myself a nice cup of tea to calm the nerves before cracking the book open and taking a close look at my story, figuring out how much of it I actually remember writing.

The answer, thanks to the exhaustion associated with undiagnosed apnea and the desperate attempts to hit deadlines, is invariably less than I’d like. For Gods, Memes, and Monsters, it was virtually nothing. I could basically remember the idea I pitched and the things that inspired me to tackle that particular topic, and that was about it.  Reading the story was kinda like reading something else wrote, if it weren’t for the bits I could recognise as things I tend to do in fiction and the existence of first drafts on my hard drive (yes, I checked)

This is…not surprising. My submission got written and submitted right around the time I was purchasing a house and the falling asleep at the keyboard habit was becoming a regular thing. At the time, I was pretty sure I was coping with that okay, but the past few weeks at work have seen some issues crop up suggesting that I was basically sleepwalking through my life throughout 2014. There is lots of moments when people ask “did you do this thing?” or worse, “what were you thinking when you did this thing?”, and my answer is usually “what, what in hell are we talking about?”

But this is the first time it’s cropped up in relation to writing.

Which is a pity. ‘Cause I quite liked the story in this anthology. I imagine it would have been a lot of fun to write, and there are lines that I really wish I could have remembered coming up with, because the part of me that used to write poetry still gets very smug when I come up with a phrase or image that I’m very fond of.

It feels like some other Peter wrote it, which means I don’t get to be quite as smug as I’d like.

That said, that other Peter doesn’t get the contributors copy or the money, so I’m probably coming out ahead.