Search Results for “sleep” – Page 13

News & Upcoming Events

Gone Fishin’

SO HERE’S THE THING I’m still getting the hang of this writing, blogging, and working thing. And I still haven’t quite gotten to the point where it’s sustainable when I’m writing, blogging, working, and recovering from illness. I’m still getting knocked around by the throat infection, feeling exhausted, doing that thing where I fall asleep at the keyboard from time to time. It’s frustrating as hell. Which is why, this week, I’m instituting rule zero: writing comes first. I’m going to let the blog fall silent for seven days while I do some focused work on getting my current novella draft up and running. I am, officially, gone fishing writing until next Monday. See you all then.

PeterMBall 18/08/2014

Big Thoughts

Embrace Complexity

So…shit, I dunno. The world just makes no sense to me these days. I’m still recovering from the throat infection, which isn’t helping much; I sleep more than I mean to and struggle to maintain my energy levels. This means I fret a bit about the work I’m not doing, and spend far more time than I should on the internet. Which means I’m there when people start responding to the deaths of Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall. Which means I’m watching a major publisher and a major bookseller engage in a public relations war using writers and books as their kickball. Which means I’m watching what happens in Ferguson, Missouri, and what’s happening in the Middle East, and I find that there’s so many things happening locally that terrify me. Which means I’m online when my government starts engaging in yet more stupidity, claiming poor people don’t drive cars, and blithely continues to destroy the few elements of Australian culture

PeterMBall 14/08/2014

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Six Things Writers Can Learn from Highlander (1986)

Highlander is a terrible movie. I wanted to get that out of the way early, because it’s the films sequel that famously earns the franchise the vast majority of its grief. People remember the second Highlander film as this massively disappointing experience, an incoherent mess compared to its predecessor, and truthfully it is all those things, but to lay all the blame on the various sequels of the film is a little unfair. You see, the first Highlander is godawful as well. Actually painful to watch, when you force yourself to sit down and pay attention to everything, rather than just tuning in for the bits you remember fondly. This truly surprised me when we re-watched the film as part of the Trashy Tuesday movie series. Like most gents of a geeky persuasion, both my flatmate and I had seen the film when we were teenagers and remembered it being all kinds of awesome. There were sword fights. There was Queen.

PeterMBall 12/08/2014

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Networking Tips for Reclusive, Introverted Writer-Types

Thou shalt network, people used to tell me. Connections are how you get ahead in any business. And me, I’d ignore them. Hell, I was all fuck that shit. Networking brought to mind visions of trading business cards and ruthlessly finding people to help you getting ahead that seemed…well, exceedingly eighties. Right up there with giant shoulder-pads and Duran-Duran. I didn’t see a place for it in the arts, and it sure as hell as wasn’t playing to my strengths as an introverted chap who dislikes meeting new people. Then I met my friend Angela Slatter, who is one of those networking dynamos who quietly sets about connecting the world together. She hooked me up with my first publisher, Twelfth Planet Press, after I told her about the weird-ass unicorn novella I’d written that I figured no-one would ever publish. She introduced me to a bunch of other writers, passed on opportunities I otherwise wouldn’t have heard about, and generally taught me

PeterMBall 16/07/2014

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Five (Well, Six, Actually) Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Wing Commander (1999)

Our work offices are located in the State Library of Queensland, which means I’ll occasionally walk past signs for upcoming library events on my way into work. Last week, one of those signs advertised the library’s classic movie screening of the German submarine classic Das Boot and I was…well, mildly interested. Unfortunately, the screening was during work hours and I missed it, so I went home and made do with the next best thing – Das Boot in space, AKA the cinematic adaptation of the Wing Commander computer games. Fans of the game hate this film. Like, passionately hate this film. My former flatmate, who reveled in the shittiest of films during our #TrashyTuesdayMovie run, chose not to sit through Wing Commander when it was scheduled. My friends who love the games claim that it fails as an adaptation on multiple levels, but I can’t really speak to that. I never actually played the games, so I was forced to take the film on

PeterMBall 15/07/2014

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The First Rule of Write Club is Talk About Write Club; The Second Rule is Talk About The Things You Learned At Write Club

Five years ago, more or less, I was having coffee with my friend Angela Slatter and listening to her complain about the slow progress she was making on her latest draft. Shoot, I said, there’s an easy fix for that. At Clarion Kelly Link mentioned she and Holly Black get together in a coffee shop once a week, then yell at each other write until they run out of words. We could just do something similar and it’d get your work kick-started right quick. And since Angela allowed that this idea may have merit, we started meeting up once a week to talk about writing, eat ridiculous amounts of junk food, and write up a storm. Thus began Write Club, possibly the smartest idea I ever ripped off from another, far more successful writer and applied to my own life. Write Club’s evolved a bit over the years. We eat less junk-food these days. We meet up during the daylight hours,

PeterMBall 09/07/2014

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Five Books (And One Blog) That Got Me Into Romance

Once, many moons ago, it was pointed out to be that my objections to the romance genre were largely the result of lingering, passive sexism and a considerable snobby streak. I’m okay with being a snob, but the sexism thing bothered me. Self, I said, you cannot dismiss the entire genre just because it’s not targeted at white, male, middle-class readers. For one thing, you are not a fan of the patriarchy. For another thing, you get pissed off when people use the same thing to denigrate SF. Go ye and find yourself some romance books you like, or at least read enough that you’re informed about the genre and not operating under some appalling double-standard. That was about ten years ago, more or less. These days…well, I still wouldn’t claim I’ve got a grasp on the genre, for the realms of romance are vast and wild, but I am a convert. I read a bunch of romance. Occasionally I’ll

PeterMBall 02/07/2014

Journal

Exile, Frost, and the Return of the C’Thulhu Peeps

So, the three things I’ve got planned for my weekend. LINE-EDITING EXILE The final round of Exile proofs edits landed in my inbox this morning, confirming that I’ve more-or-less managed to patch the big ol’ story holes that were in the first submission but left in a bunch of numpty-headed mistakes that need to be fixed. I’ve got about a week to turn these around, but I suspect it’ll take less time than that ’cause of the holy-shit, this is almost done factor. Which may make this the first deadline I’ve actually hit in the process of getting Exile together since Jenn at AI contacted me back in February of 2013, asking if I’d be interested in turning Flotsam into a novella series. I suddenly find myself thinking of a Neil Gaiman quote from his Make Good Art commencement address: “You get work however you get work, but keep people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is

PeterMBall 30/05/2014

The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga

Originally Published in Dreaming Again (HarperCollins, 2008) She enters my name as Tobias Truman. I watch her ink the delicate curve of the capitals, the ostrich-feather quill dancing as she writes. My name is entered below Mr. Drummond’s, his below the Captain; two of the three marked with the swooping X that denotes status as paying guest, a true patron of the house rather than tagalong visitor. The Madam ends with a final flourish that leaves the quill poised above a well of ink. Her needle-sharp eyes study me, peering through the thick veil of her lashes. I fidget beneath her gaze until she smiles and turns towards the Captain with a raised eyebrow. ‘And the boy?’ The Captain spins on his unsteady legs, stares at me through the haze of rum and ruin that accompanies him whenever we put ashore. He considers the question for a few moments, mocking finger to his pursed lips, the barest hint of a

PeterMBall 27/05/2014

On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V—

Originally Published: Eclipse Online, 2013 Our tiny hotel room is boiling, even now, but heat doesn’t bother Patrick and he sleeps, shirtless, with the thin sheet coiled round him like a loving serpent. It’s a trick for him, nodding off. He cultivates a talent for sleep, adores the act of dozing off like it’s a second lover. He says it keeps him young, and perhaps it does, for people are always surprised to learn Patrick’s real age. I’ve started smoking again, since it no longer matters. Patrick copes with things through slumber, while I survey the world, my exhalations accompanied by the splash of river meeting dock. The river is the life-blood of V—, they tell you that in all the flyers. My free hand teases the fraying hem of the Mickey Mouse t-shirt we picked up in Anaheim back in the days when Patrick wasn’t quite so fussy about which magic kingdom he got to visit. My fight-induced insomnia

PeterMBall 13/01/2014

Works in Progress

Bring me my coffee and my mighty atomic steed

Allow me to sum up my day in a single image: Me and coffee, we’re going to get real close today. Real, real close. I’ve hit the downhill slope on the latest writing project. Six thousand words to go, all of which is last act stuff where I’m tying off loose ends and resolving bits of conflict. In some ways, this is the easy stuff. I don’t have to make up anything new, I just have to follow the clues littered through the draft and write the things that logically fit into the story. On the other hand, it leaves me with this nagging feeling that I’ve got a job that’s almost finished, but not quite done. I’m not good with that feeling. As soon as I have one of those open loops, mentally speaking, my subconscious will spend some quality time finding some others when I should be sleeping and my old friend insomnia comes galloping over the hill

PeterMBall 13/01/2014

Smart Advice from Smart People

Your Audience: Building versus Earning

2013 was a hell of a year. I did a lot of stuff. A lot of that stuff was huge: I ran GenreCon; I produced eight or nine full-day workshops over the course of the year; I went to so many cons that I could spend 2014 sleeping and still not pay back my sleep debt; I went to motherfucking Vienna and rode the Wiener Riesenrad, which is one of the few tourist attractions anywhere in the world that holds some appeal to me (largely thanks to its prominence in The Third Man and Before Sunrise). I discovered that riding the Wiener Riesenrad is a fucking terrible idea if you’re afraid of heights. One of the smartest things I heard last year came via Chuck Wendig, who did an interview at the Get Read online conference where he talked about author platform and maintaining a career as a writer. I meant to post about it back then, when I first heard it,

PeterMBall 01/01/2014

Search Results for: sleep – Page 13