I have been an unproductive sloth since finishing classes on Monday, so there’s little to report but the review of Black Dragon, White Dragon anthology over on The Fix. I give you the excerpt in which its all about me: Peter M. Ball’s “The Dragonkeeper’s Wife” is ostensibly about the dragon, but it is really […]
Yesterday was the last full day I’d get to spend on the thesis for over a week, and by the time I collapsed into my bed in the wee hours of morning I remember feeling upset by how little I’d achieved. Today I feel pretty good about it; frustrated, to be sure, but object enough […]
Just dropping in with the following reports: The official wordcount (aka words actually in draft documents, rather than random notes) just topped 10k. I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually finished a chapter. I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually got a plan […]
I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours in a line-edit quandary: should the word Frisbee be capitalised? Theoretically it probably should – Frisbee is a registered trademark of Wham-O toys – but I’m pretty sure that I’m not actually using Frisbee to refer to an actual Frisbee, instead using it as a common term for what […]
The good thing about trying to hit a deadline and being behind: you start to figure out ways to fix stories and ideas that are broken, potentially unsaleable and not on deadline. Yesterday I took an hour away from the books to write up a plan of what I could do to transform all my second-person-present-tense-vaguely-cyberpunk […]
The difference between a good days work and a bad days work can depend entirely on how close you are to meeting a deadline. Or, in other words, 1500 words of thesis draftage today. A month ago this would have been cause for celebration; today it is met with the soul-crushing knowledge that I haven’t […]
So Chris Lynch has posted a more-or-less up-to-date bibliography of things achieved by our Clarion South class since the 2007 workshop. He’s put this together, along with some thoughts, because the two of us are scheduled to go have a chat with the current crop of Clarion South participants about what it’s like to finish the […]
The problem with writing a thesis is that it’s just no fun to talk about. The novella, on the other hand, creates the kinds of problems that I find interesting . And thus there is nattering on about it on the blog. The nifty thing about getting back to this story is that I’ve had the […]
So today I resumed work on the novella draft that was once laboured with the working title The Girl Who Loathed Cats* but now has the working title Claw** and is probably better known as the follow-up to Horn which pits our protagonist against a talking cat and evil foetii***. This novella is, officially, the […]
It starts with what may well be the most dangerous question in the world right now: “So Peter, what happens after you finish your thesis?” Were I the melodramatic type, or at least the type in the mood for a different kind of melodrama than I’m running on right now, today’s entry would consist entirely of a […]
I’ve done a short guest-post over at Lee Battersby’s blog to kick off a short retrospective about Clarion South 2007. I talk a little bit about what makes clarion great and a lot about the influence one of my classmates had on the first draft of what would eventually become Horn (formerly known around these parts […]
Minimal writing yesterday (50 or so words), but that was intentional. While I’m still behind, I now feel like a rational human being who lives in a nice flat in which things are clean, rather than an angst-written PhD student who lives in a hovel in which dishes pile up in the sink. Some random […]
