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PeterMBall

Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.

Eighteen Things I Ended Up Thinking While Working On My Current WIP Today

  1. This would all be easier if it was done already.
  2. This will probably be okay, but it’s not really the best I could do, is it? I should pull everything down and start over, from scratch. I swear I could do better if I just started everything over from scratch.
  3. Life would have been much easier if I’d just said, way back at the beginning, that the setting for these novels was The Gold Coast, 2007, instead of pretending they were some mystical Ur-City that exists in every hardboiled novel.
  4. Because of Raymond Chandler, all hardboiled novels are set in San Fransisco or Los Angeles. Even the ones that are’t. 
  5. It’s hardboiled, not noir. Stop calling it noir. Noir is a colour. It only applies to film.
  6. I’d really like a hotdog. With mustard. A good hotdog would be nice right now.
  7. If you’re writing a series about a character who has returned from the dead twice, you’re kinda in a jam every time you write a plot that has nothing to do with the character returning from the dead. It’s one of those details that’s too big to ignore.
  8. Seriously, motherfucker, would it have hurt you to plan ahead with this?
  9. I don’t care if it’s a good hotdog, really.
  10. Oh, I like this bit. 
  11. That character isn’t bad either.
  12. You know, that baby shark song is incredibly heteronormative?
  13. I’ll fix that bit when I sit down and edit. Yes, even though I don’t really edit. I’m pretending that I do, so I can get on with things and build this up to the point where a rewrite will actually fix things.
  14. Do not start signing the fucking baby shark song. 
  15. The weird thing about Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series is the way it transforms anxiety into a superpower. Everything about the way those books are written suggests the character is hyper-vigilant and disconnected from humanity, but he never actually suffers the negative effects of those two things. They’re like bizarre mental health pornography.
  16. I do not need to write the story that just came to mind.
  17. No, really. Do not write that story. You’ve already got a story that needs to be finished. Sit the fuck down and finish it.
  18. Or, you know, go get a hotdog.

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