Category: Works in Progress
Works in Progress

Four Words All Creative Practitioners Should Live By

RESPECT YOUR GODDAMN AUDIENCE. Okay, here’s your warning. I’m going to rant my fucking pants off in this one, ’cause I’m mightly passionate and this post has been sparked by something that really pissed me off. If you’d prefer to skip the rage, feel free. Go read something else. I won’t be offended. Just remember those four words, ’cause everything else is just a cautionary tale explaining why they’re important. Respect your goddamn audience. There’s plenty of reasons to follow this advice, but here’s the big one: if you don’t, there’s pretty good odds I’m going to hunt you down and carve out your fucking spleen with an ice-cream scoop. Especially if I’m part of that audience, and you’ve contrived things so I don’t have the option of leaving when it becomes obvious that your fucking lack of respect is wasting my goddamn time. This one irritates me enough that it probably should have been a conversation with the spokesbear entry, if

PeterMBall 15/06/2012
Works in Progress

The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables

So about halfway through 2011 I got an email from Robin Laws which said, in essence, I’m doing this anthology of modern fables for Stone Skin Press; might you be interested in contributing? I was. In fact, my first response, which didn’t actually get put into my emailed reply, was oh, fucking, yeah I’m interested. You’re Robin-freakin’-Laws. That kind of enthusiasm is unseemly in an professional email, and I do try to contain my inner fanboy when talking to editors. The actual email probably said something like I’d love to be involved. Here’s the premise for my story. You know. Sedate. Professional. Only twice have I written for editors or been published in markets that my gamer-friends have recognised. The first time that happened, it was when I was published in Weird Tales. This is the second. In this instance, my enthusiasm probably seems somewhat mysterious to any writer-types who aren’t involved in gaming, so the short introduction to Robin is this:

PeterMBall 13/06/2012
Works in Progress

NaNoWriMo? We Laugh at NaNoWriMo…

For the second time since starting the new bloggery regime, I’m writing a post in real time. This time, at least, I did it on purpose. As I write this I’m bunkered down in the QWC office with a team of twenty other writers, all of them ferociously typing away in an attempt to write 30,000 words in the space of two and a half days. We call this madness the Rabbit Hole – the third that the QWC has run – and this time around it’s being run in several locations around Australia. This my second bite of the cherry for the Rabbit Hole. The first time around I was a newly hired employee of the QWC who signed up ’cause it seemed like a good way to generate some work. I showed up and worked exclusively on Fritz the Laptop, who routinely objected to such tasks as “playing music” and “running word” and generally “working for longer than

PeterMBall 01/06/2012
Works in Progress

A Bit About Briar Day and the Years Best Australian Fantasy and Horror

The  final line-up of the second volume of The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror got announced this week. It contains 32 fantastic stories and poems first published in 2011, from New Zealand’s and Australia’s fantasy and horror writers. I’m somewhat late to the party, so I’m not going to re-post the list here, but there’s plenty of details at the link above and pre-orders are all pre-ordery over at the IndieBooksOnline site. I am going to talk a little about the story of mine they selected for inclusion, though. Trying to pick the stories that people will like is generally a mugs game. I’ve produced stories that I thought were okay that have captured people’s attention. I’ve produced stories I thought were great that…well, kinda fizzled. And then there was Briar Day, which first saw the light of day in Ben Payne’s Moonlight Tuber magazine. Briar Day was always a bit of an odd beast. It’s a story where a character tells

PeterMBall 30/05/2012
Works in Progress

Project Du Jour: Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1

I’m kinda psyched about my current writing project, but I think it needs a far sexier working title than the one it’s got right now. There’s something about the Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1, that doesn’t feel like an adequate representation of the book. It’s been a long while since I charted the progress of a creative project on the blog, and I’ll admit that I was a little gun-shy about talking this one up. For starters, the project is largely being done simply to prove to myself that it can be done, that I can actually put together sixty-thousand words of coherent narrative in first draft form over five weeks of writing. Once upon a time the only question would have been the coherent narrative part of the equation, but me and writing haven’t gotten along for the better part of the last eighteen months. Life kept offering me excuses and I kept taking them, and slowly it

PeterMBall 14/05/2012
Gaming

12 Things

We’re mid-way through a long weekend here in Oz. This still catches me off-guard, since I’ve spent the majority of my adult life not really paying attention to long weekends, but the acquisition of a dayjob changes your relationship to such things. And so we’ve hit Sunday and I’m mooching around the new house, grooving to a mix of the Hilltop Hoods and the Beastie Boys (RIP, MCA), just kinda…randomly getting things together. And so, in that spirit, a random grab-bag of twelve things I felt like mentioning. 1. MOVING IS, LIKE, 90% DONE So my flatmate bought a new home and we moved into it. Most of the last two weeks has been spent getting stuff there, unpacking it, figuring out where it will live for the foreseeable future, and generally waiting for the internet to be turned on. You know, moving stuff. There’s a part of me that wants to just kick back and say “yup, we’re done

PeterMBall 06/05/2012
Journal

BILDUNGSROMAN

ONE I was twenty-one when I first realised that writing wasn’t going to be easy. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I was fresh out of my undergraduate, fresh out of home, and about to dive back into an honours year at University. I remember sitting on the balcony of my shitty share-house flat in the wee hours of the morning, nursing a cup of coffee and paging through one of the cheap, shitty poetry anthologies I’d picked up in a second hand book store. This is back when I lived on the Gold Coast, where even the best second hand book stores are fairly starved for poetry. At the time I still figured I’d grow up to be a poet, and I already knew there was no chance of making a living at that. So I drank my coffee and read poetry and thought about what I was going to do with my life, looking at

PeterMBall 14/03/2012
Works in Progress

Not Prophetic

Writing in a bathtub is far more uncomfortable than you’d think.

PeterMBall 23/02/2012
Works in Progress

A short post

Last night I dreamt that I took three months off my dayjob and wrote things. I don’t remember what they were, but I remember the writing. Most of it took place in a bathtub. All in all, it was a good dream. In reality, I’ve spent the day trying to commit acts of short story and, for the most part, failing. I’ve been meaning to write this story for a long time, near on two years, largely ’cause this scene gets stuck in my head: We were seated in a McDonalds, occupying a pair of hard plastic seats with a two-person table between us and the window overlooking the playground on my left. There were kids in the playground wearing soccer uniforms, these black and gold jerseys with numbers on the back, and their shrieks rattled the glass as they darted back and forth. It was a Saturday morning, eleven-forty-three AM. I was eating a cheeseburger. We were meant to

PeterMBall 22/02/2012
Works in Progress

Horn Spotting

So back in 2010 I get an email from Alisa over at Twelfth Planet  sent me an email that said, in effect, there’s some people making a TV show that’d like to use a couple of TPP books as background props.  Apparently there are contracts that needed to be signed when this kind of thing happens, which is one of those things about making television that I never really thought about, and I was being given a heads up that the permission had been granted and there was some kind of TV show which may or may not use Horn and a bunch of other Australian small press books in the background. This was two days after my dad’s heart attack, so I mostly nodded and made sure there was nothing I needed to be doing and went back to fretting and coping with the fact that my dad was due for open heart surgery in a few days time.

PeterMBall 16/02/2012
Works in Progress

Write Club

We held the second write club of the year today, and I’ve discovered the seemingly terrifying power that comes with combining a walk across the magic, story-inducing Kurilpa bridge in the morning with a two-hour block of writing alongside Angela Slatter at the State Library. And the net result is a day where I’ve produced 3,500 new words I’m more or less happy with, most of which make up the first chapter of a new Aster novella. About two thirds of this was done at write club, which is now partially time-limited due to the fact that we’re borrowing space from the State Library, and the rest has been done after I got home later in the day and had a nap. Turns out I rather like this writing thing. I think I’ll do more of it once this blog is done. I’ve been pretty stringent about not applying deadlines to my year, either externally-imposed or self-imposed, but I think

PeterMBall 08/02/2012
Works in Progress

Just a tired and random kind of evening, posted a day late

You’ll have to forgive me if this is a touch vague today, but I didn’t really sleep last night. Not in a bad way, just one of those instances where you starting a show on DVD and figure you may as well finish things while the momentum is there. There may have been beer involved, and a particularly frustrated end to the day on Friday. It largely means that all I’m good for today is drinking coffee, listening to Misfits songs, and making idle kind of notes for stories I’ll work on tomorrow. It’s a good way to cap off a very good week. It’s an out-of-order way of going about it, but one of the best bits was the release of this years Locus Recommended Reading List which included Dying Young in the novelette category and Memories of Chalice among the recommended short stories. I’m particularly happy about the latter, to be honest, since I spent years circling around that particular story

PeterMBall 04/02/2012