Category: Journal

Started with a new antidepressant over the weekend, on account of the original meds giving me uncontrolled teeth chattering for about five days straight as one of its side effects. This is irritating, because I’d more-or-less got to the point where the original meds weren’t making me restless and unable to focus, and now…well. Starting over. A new round of antidepressants means a new round of side-effects, which seems to include insomnia, a tendency towards listlessness, and some truly horrific dry-mouth. All of which is still better than having your jaw vibrate at high speed for 120 hours straight. And, presumably, better than whatever horror-show was going on in my head two weeks ago. It’s Monday. I want to be writing things. Doing so is frustratingly slow at the moment, full of moments where I have to step away from the computer. I have tried going with the notebooks, which usually helps in these situations, but even then my concentration tends to

Eleven days ago, when first I posted about being sad, my parents called and asked whether I needed to see a doctor. No, I said. I’m fine. I’m just sad. My mum pointed out that she’d feel a whole lot better if I went to a doctor. No, I’m really fine. It will pass, and I will cope, I said. Then I removed my parents from the Facebook list I used to talk about stuff I’d only mention around close friends, so they wouldn’t worry when I posted there about the occasional crying jag or frustration with the world. I figured that was easier. Things did not pass. I did not start coping better. # Yesterday, I burst into tears at work when our office manager tried to have a conversation about taking leave and managing my stress levels. I’d been trying to point out that work was just one of many things stressing me out, and I just…couldn’t. By nine-thirty in the morning, I

Awake at 6 AM, sitting at the computer. Getting ready to write something, to put new content on the blog. One of those routines in my life that I’ve been ignoring for weeks now, but it’s time to get back to it. My body seems to have decided that 4 AM is the optimal time to wake up, so I may as well embrace that and use it to my advantage. The last six weeks broke me, but that happens. I am breakable. Everyone is breakable, when life finds the right cracks and works upon them, and I have plenty of cracks that I’ve been ignoring for years. And so this week is all about the small victories. Did I write a blog post today? Did I open the document for my work in progress? Have I eaten real food, instead of microwaving something and calling it done? Incremental improvement, rather than running at top speed.   Picking up the pieces of who I

I spent three or four solid hours of yesterday sitting on the couch, feeling sad. And I spent those same three or four solid hours cruising the internet for distraction: blogs; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram. Picking up books, reading a page, and putting them down again. Opening Netflix and scrolling through the options, before deeming them all unsuitable for the task of leeching the sadness away. I am sad. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to say this without really using the words. I am melancholy, for example, or maudlin. I am mainlining Smiths songs and weeping into my hands. The joy of being a writer is that there is always a fancier way of saying things, edging towards the things you’re feeling without saying it outright. Ways of feeling without really feeling, admitting without saying a damn thing out loud. Deploying irony as protective colouration. But the truth is, I am sad. I know this because

Four days of a sore throat and runny nose. Four nights without using my CPAP machine to regulate my sleep apnea, which means I wake every day with a head full of cotton wool, exhaustion, and nascent craziness waiting to be given form. I slough around the house, coughing up phlegm. I sleep in fifteen minute bursts, before my own biology revolts and wakes me up to start consciously sucking down air again. I do not trust myself to react to anything, because all my reactions are basically insane: extreme; ill-formed; straight from the exhausted, primal Id. I cannot be trusted to engage with other people. I can barely be trusted with the written word. I was planning on starting a new project in June – a short, straight-rush project contained by thirty days, just to see if I could manage it. This is going to make things interesting.  

I have a new phone. Unfamiliar. It makes different tones to the old phone, has a range of different features. None of the notifications sound the same. Some of the notifications I had disabled have now come to life again, as the apps are downloaded, which means my attention is constantly pulled towards the device as it chirps and chimes and tings. The on-screen keyboard is different. Smaller. Harder to use. And the autocorrect still hasn’t learned my ways, so the messages I send out are frequently…weird. Riddled with typos and uncapitalised usage of the letter i as a single word. I cannot communicate in the ways I am used too, as reliably as I used too, and it is frustrating as hell. But the old phone had definitely seen better days, and it was time to make the upgrade. And for every old, familiar habit that has been frustrating, there are a whole bunch of outdated apps and habits that

I am writing a two hour workshop today. I was not meant to be writing it, exactly, but things fell out the way they fell out and now that is my Wednesday and I am frustrated as hell. I have Pulp’s This Is Hardcore on the stereo, ’cause it matches my mood. Cycling back and forth between The Fear and the title track. I wasn’t really a fan of Pulp, before this album came out in 1998, but I listened to this one over and over and over. Horns, piano, anguish. Brilliant. Pulp helps, I think, but I could be wrong. I’ve written this blog post a half-dozen times already, trying to find the angle or the spin that makes it something that I can post. Something that isn’t the equivalent of me showing up here and saying, effectively: today is hard. I am fretting about things. I have The Fear. I don’t want to be writing workshops today. I want to

It may be time to move my writing process off the computer again. I went digital again a few months back, when I was working on a redraft, and I found myself lured back into the rhythm of the keyboard and the quick accumulation of words that can be counted. And then, gradually, as things got busy and allocating my time got more complex, I started to loathe the idea of opening the laptop and the writing faded into the background. On the other hand, I also need to do dishes. And change the sheets on my bed. And wander, blinking, into the sunlight without resenting the fact that I have to go to work. These are not signs of not writing, they are signs of higher-than-usual stress levels. I let the little things go when I have no power to change to big things that need changing. I start questioning long-term plans, and making crazy alternatives. I stop reading

I am doing things on top of my usual work schedule this week. For instance, tomorrow night I am off to Logan Library to do a seminar about some of the myths about getting published. On Wednesday, I will be giving up my weekly write club in the name of working on workshop content for next week. Then, on Thursday, I will be back at QWC talking about Hard and Soft Launches as part of the Business of Books series. Spots are still available, if you’re inclined to come hear me talk about such things. By Friday, I will be disappearing into a bunker and trying very hard not to hate the world. ‘Cause I love doing this stuff, but holy shit-balls there has been a lot of it in recent weeks, there is only so much time I can spend around people before my urge to unleash the winged monkeys of death becomes overwhelming. A photo posted by Peter M Ball

It’s Tuesday, and my RSS is filled with Game of Thrones recaps. Every website seems to have one, even the websites that have previously shown no interest in the show. Even those that have shown no interest in TV. Game of Thrones is everywhere. It’s Tuesday, and the first sign of the election being in full swing is a mailbox full of flyers from the local representative of the god-awful-stupid-fucking-racist-cocks party, who is determined to inform me about the wave of Islamic radicalisation that’s sweeping Australia and how he and his god-awful fuckwit cronies are going to stop it. It’s Tuesday, and I am angry. I am repeating the word motherfucker over and over. I am pacing the length of the apartment. I am brooding over my morning coffee. I am fighting the urge to be angry on the internet, and obviously I am failing. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. It’s Tuesday, and at least there are things to look forward to

Two years ago, I bought an apartment. It was an oddly terrifying prospect then, and it’s an oddly terrifying prospect now. I did not live the kind of life where property ownership was a possibility, and yet here I am. Occasionally I put Once in a Lifetime on the stereo and it feels horribly appropriate. I earn about thirty grand a year, on a good year. I shouldn’t own anything as large as an apartment. I should barely own the number of books that do. So I largely achieved home ownership by doing exactly what our current prime minister suggested when it comes to buying into the property market: I burrowed money from my parents. Technically, they offered the money. And then we fought for about a month over whether that was a viable thing, and how I’d pay it back, and whether I wanted to live the kind of life where I was tied to a particular piece of property,

I haven’t finished a short story in years. It’s a thing I’ll bust out in conversations about writing, even though the evidence of its untruth is out there. I have written stories. Some were published. Many were not. This is probably for the best, since they were mostly fiction written in the grip of the apnea fugue, and it’s hard to really understand what I intended beyond insert words on blank page so I can tick the writing box and pretend nothing is wrong. This is not a good way to write. Especially when you realise there’s a problem, get it treated, and discover that checking the box doesn’t actually mean much. And so, in my head, I stopped writing short fiction, despite the evidence to the contrary. When I did write it, I failed to finish it. The things I finished, by and large, were because people asked me to write things and the terror of letting said people down hurt