Category: Works in Progress
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Two

Here is my morning routine on days that I am heading to the day-job: the alarm goes off at 7:00 AM. I check my email and social media on my phone, go through my morning ablutions, shower, and breakfast. Ordinarily I’m front of a writing computer by 8:00 AM, which gives me an hour of writing time before I have to jump in the car and drive to the State Library of Queensland where the QWC offices are housed. I like this routine. Kicking the day off with writing – particularly if that’s not what I’m going to be doing for the majority of my day – is good for my psyche. Today is not a day-job day, so that routine goes out the window. Its 7:46 AM when I sat down to start writing this and I am not yet out of bed. The odds of me being at the non-internet computer by 8:00 AM are pretty slim. Partially

PeterMBall 02/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day One

So I’m setting out to write the third novella in the Miriam Aster trilogy this month. It’s been one of those projects that’s been sitting on my to-do list for far too long, and I’d largely blocked out the month of May in order to get it done when I sat down to plan out my year of writing. As my writing projects go, this one is fairly significant: approximately 30,000 words of narrative while dealing with two novellas worth of back-story and a whole heap of reader expectations that need to be met. This is at odds with my natural impulses when writing fiction – 8,000 words tends to be my comfort zone, and the only time I’ve ever revisited a setting is when I wrote Bleed as the sequel to Horn back in 2009. So I figured I’d try live-blogging the writing process, both to keep myself honest and ’cause I spend so much time writing about process

PeterMBall 01/05/2013
Works in Progress

Projects Du Jour

It’s been a while since I talked about up-coming projects on the blog. Partially this is because there weren’t many upcoming projects over the last two years. Partially this is because I’ve become more reclusive in my old age, unwilling to throw things out there until they’re more-or-less done. I write slow, you see, and occasionally it struck me as faintly absurd that I’d mention writing a short story and it’d be another two years before I finished it. Longer, in the case of some projects, since we do not talk about the novel (or, for that matter, the third Aster novella, or at least one story that people occasionally ask me about that I still haven’t got ’round to finishing). It’s not that these things go away – I still have all of them in my active projects folder. I’m just, you know, slow. Today, at write club, I did some work on a story I started in 2007.

PeterMBall 04/03/2013
Works in Progress

Coming Up

From what I’m hearing, my story for Eclipse Online is going to go live in February some time. I’ll post a link here when that happens, but right now I’m just looking at that sentence and thinking, yeah, motherfuckers, I can still do this. I can still write stories that get published. My interior monologue has a particular foul mouth. I’m usually all man of steel about my stories when in public. They get written, they get sent out, they get published and I get paid. In my ideal world that’s the way things happen and I’m already chasing the next thing by the time you’re reading. It’s easy to be like that once the story is out there, when it’s going to be read whether you like it or not. It’s the waiting before the story comes out that gets to me. The moments when you know a publication date is coming and you can pretend there’s still the

PeterMBall 30/01/2013
Works in Progress

Process Notes

ONE I am, slowly but surely, learning how to write again. TWO 2012 was the year I set myself the task of learning to write while working a day-job. It took me the better part of the year to figure that out, but I got there. Get up early, write a handful of words, let all the big goals and word-counts I used to set myself when writing was a more significant part of my yearly income disappear into the background. In 2012 I wasn’t a writer, I was just a guy who wrote. I reset all my expectations and rebuilt up my process from scratch. I didn’t push myself to build a career, I just focused on getting something done. It’s the first time I’d done that since I was…shit, twenty? Maybe twenty-one? I don’t regret it, not being a writer for a stretch. 2012 was a pretty fucking awesome year and the novelty of regular paycheque that was more than

PeterMBall 16/01/2013
Works in Progress

I’m Far To Easily Amused By The Phrase “ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL”

So my friend Nic, who scribbles a bit but doesn’t have a website, snuck a final question in on the end of the dancing monkey series: What do you do with an idea or story that just runs out of steam far too early? (Say many thousands of words short of what it needs) Well, much as I’d like to say I’ve experienced this one, I’m generally an up-against-the-word-limits-can-I-have-a-few-thousand-more-please-gov’ner kind of writer. I spend half my structural redrafts trying to cut things out of my manuscripts, so should a story come in several thousand words under my approach I’d probably sing hallelujahs and weep with goddamn joy. Writing shorter is one of my goals, not a problem. Assuming for the sake of argument (and blog post) that I did suddenly run into such a problem – say for whatever unlikely reason an editor really needed a 10k gap in an anthology filled and my pinch-hitting story only came in at

PeterMBall 01/10/2012
Works in Progress

I Do Believe in Syntax

And lo, it is Monday, and we continue the dancing monkey series wherein people ask me questions and I blog long, rambling answers in response. Once more into the breach and all that. Today, Peter Kerby offered up the following: Just to stir the pot; English is living language and all living things evolve, so how much licence should be tolerated when it comes to grammar and spelling, or does it depend on the intended audience. Verily, I am the wrong person to ask this sort of question, ’cause my response is invariably something along the lines of “so long as you can be understood, rock the fucking Kasbah, lolz, peace out, peeps.” Except, you know, not in so many words, and potentially in ways that make me sound less like an idiot and more like I have some understanding of what da kidz are speaking like with their crazy slang these days. I mean, hipsters, man, who gets them? (Hipsters

PeterMBall 24/09/2012
Works in Progress

The Only Person I Have to Live With Is Me, So That’s Who I’m Going To Care About

So as part of the Dancing Monkey series, Chris Slee asked What have you always wanted to write but haven’t because a) it would never sell and b) it would be socially unacceptable? Okay, let me see if I can formulate an answer to this that doesn’t involve gleeful, if slightly diabolical, laughter. My track record is actually pretty good when it comes to finding a concept that seems utterly unsellable and still finding a way to make money out of it. I mean, let us look at the list of stories I thought were utterly unsalable that then went on to actually make me a fair chunk of change: Unicorns and underage pornography? Sold. Thinly veiled erotica about John Flamsteed saving the world by shagging aliens? Sold Werewolf stories with a meandering, non-werewolf plot? Sold. A convoluted story-within-a-story about a tragedy where nothing much happens? Sold, and reprinted in a year’s best to boot. I mean, Jesus, a story

PeterMBall 21/09/2012
Works in Progress

Writing Notes, Saturday, August 4th

So Tuesday of last week I fired up my WiP, Wanton, and put in the dreaded numbering system I used when a story unexpectedly mutates into a novella. I didn’t want to do it – I was desperately trying to keep Wanton to novelette length – but after you hit 4,402 words of a story and you’ve only sketched out two-thirds of the first act, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re not going to be writing something that can be wrapped up in 10,000 words or less. The damn thing has chapters now, which usually means I need to back off and do some cursory planning so I have an overall structure. If you want to know what my internal monologue was like for most of Tuesday, it went something like this: Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. When I was done with that I actually started an internal debate about whether I should shelve Wanton for

PeterMBall 06/08/2012
Works in Progress

Process Notes

There is nothing more dangerous to a blog than a writer who has rediscovered writing, for all they want to do is run around going “look, look, check it out, I produce actual words,” and tell you about in exhaustive detail. I constantly have to resist the urge to be an over-excited writer-puppy and move on this week, purely because I’m still on a word-high from doing shit. I try to burn it off by slapping on some Goldfrapp and shimmying my ass around the office, but the word-high is still there. And, in truth, I don’t really want it to go away. I mean, cards on the table time, my real goal has always been to be a prolific writer rather than a good writer. Good’s something to aspire to, sure, but given the choice between writing one perfect story a year or eight stories that would be good enough to be published and enjoyed, I’d totally take the

PeterMBall 03/08/2012
Works in Progress

Writing Notes, Saturday, July 29

It’s 11:59 AM on a Sunday morning. I have coffee, a computer, and I’ve successfully written my 500+ words for the day by firing up Shifty Silas, my laptop, immediately after waking up. Admittedly, this wasn’t that long ago. Sunday has become the designated day of sleeping-the-fuck-in, which is especially important now that my week is filled with early mornings. Sunday is also the seven day mark for the new writing routine, so I’m taking this as an opportunity to review the results. I started the new writing routine because I’d promised my writing group that I’d submit something by August 6th. At the time that probably seemed a long way away, but I actually cruised through the draft zero of the story during the week and put together a readable first draft during write-club yesterday. The result, Truths and Consequences (working title), sits at about 2,800 lightly revised and edited words in the current draft. I had about 270

PeterMBall 30/07/2012
Journal

The Internet versus Crushing Attacks of Shame

Here’s the thing about my weekend: it involved an extraordinary number of real-time conversations with people who live in far-flung corners of the world. Between gaming last night and meeting with my writing group on Saturday morning, I actually spent more time having conversations with people via Skype and Google Hangouts than I did having conversations with my flatmate in real life. The last few months have been kinda bad for these kinds of conversations. One of the curses of online conversations is that they’re far easier to avoid or reschedule, allowing other things to make more immediate claims on your time. The last time we gamed on a Sunday night was back in May, before I ran off to go to cons, Rabbit-Holes, and basically lost three weeks of my life to a throat infection. The last virtual meet-up with my writer-peeps was even earlier. March, we think. Possibly even April. I really shouldn’t go that long. One of

PeterMBall 23/07/2012