Search Results for: sleep – Page 15
Journal

If you need me today, I’ll be (quietly) freaking the fuck out

7:20 on a Thursday morning and I’m set up in the cafe at the State Library, killing time before I head upstairs to go and kick the dayjob into gear. It’s a dreary kind of morning with drizzling rain and grey skies and people clutching at umbrellas, although some people choose to job bare-chested through it all and some people forgot their umbrellas. I know you can’t actually see the rain in the photograph, but trust me, it’s there. A gentlemen who just walked past who is the very definition of dapper. I have no idea who he is, but he’s easily on the far side of fifty and he’s totally rocking his chosen look. I haven’t had much sleep. There’s nothing particular unusual about this. Not having much sleep is something of my natural state, although this time around the sleep debt is entirely intentional. I went to bed after midnight last night, I woke up around 5:00, which

PeterMBall 31/01/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Things on My Shelf: The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

It’s been suggested that there’s an undercurrent of gloom running through my posts of late, which is one of those inevitable things that happens ’round these parts every Summer. I’m pre-programmed for deep seriousness December through February, largely ’cause it’s too damn hot and I spent the better part of a decade being broke during those months on account of doing session work for Universities. Also, they’re my drinking months. I brood when I drink. Still, in deference to the fact that not everyone is as fond of embracing their inner gloomcookie as I am, I figured I’d spent a blog post talking about awesome things. Specifically, this awesome thing, which ranks among the coolest books in my collection: I picked this up at a Melbourne bookstore back in 2008, although I’ll be damned if I can remember which bookstore it was. A friend of mine took me there, and it was back in the days when I’d never really

PeterMBall 02/01/2013
Big Thoughts

The Things I Think About On New Years Day

ONE It’s the first morning of 2013 and in the writing room, writing. Not even writing, really. More dragging myself back into a writing mindset after being not-a-writer for the bulk of last year. There are days – today is one of them – when the fact that I still do this amazes me. I figured I’d kick this year off by telling you a story (it is, after all, what I do). I want to start it with something like once upon a time I met a girl on a bus, but truthfully it’s not the kind of story you’d expect from that kind of opening. The way you starts a story sets up the ending, makes promises that need to be delivered, and I can’t deliver on that one. So instead I’ll start it like this: when I was twenty and still at university, I learned not to tell people that I wanted to be a writer. And

PeterMBall 01/01/2013
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Seven Notes on A Lover’s Discourse While Halfway Through the Book

One Habitual marking of quotes is one of those weird habits you pick up when you hang around universities for too long. I still do it, despite being out of the game for the better part of six years now, which means I frequently end up with shelves full of dog-eared books, notebooks filled with hastily scribbled details, and the occasional stray post-it with a quote scrawled across it with the bibliographic details on the back. Since I don’t really teach classes or write essays anymore, the vast majority of the quotes I mark tend to be because I truly adore the phrasing. There’s a great deal of beauty in theory and criticism, if you look for it. Exquisitely phrased ideas that sucker-punch you the same way a perfectly formed poetic line does, or well-turned phrase in a piece of prose. I’ve been reading Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse for the last two weeks. It started as a bit of

PeterMBall 30/12/2012
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

GenreCon: The Aftermath

By the time you read this it will have been a little over a week since the inaugural AWM GenreCon ended. I’m going to specify this upfront, ’cause a portion of the content has been written before, during, and after the con, fitting into the little slices of time where I have sufficient brainpower to write. Some of these fragments made sense. Some of them did not. Such is the nature of running conventions. Point the First: GENRECON ROCKED I can scarcely believe I’m able to say this, since I spent so long fretting about the various ways that the conference could have gone wrong, but GenreCon proved to be a smashing success. Attendees were happy, guests were happy, my boss was really happy. We got a massive response rate to the pitching program (and a really high proportion of pitchers got asked to submit partials), the program was packed out, and for once I was at a con where

PeterMBall 12/11/2012
Gaming

5 Tips When Returning From a Campaign Hiatus

It’s been five days since we wrapped up GenreCon and, well, I’m yet to bounce back to my normal self. Cons are mentally and physically exhausting, doubly so when you’re running them, and you always have to pay your body back for the sleep debt and three days you spend operating on adrenaline and caffeine. Net result: another short hiatus for my Mutants and Masterminds campaign while I regroup, catch up on sleep, and rediscover the mental capacity for after-work activities that aren’t marathon games of Masters of Orion II on Shifty Silas the laptop. All of which put me in mind of the following topic for this Friday Superhero Gaming Post: 5 TIPS WHEN RETURNING FROM A CAMPAIGN HIATUS 1) START WITH A BANG It’s easy to lose track of things during a hiatus: hot subplots grow a little dusty, character traits get forgotten through lack of use, and long-term plots are harder to follow when you’re not engaging with them regularly.

PeterMBall 09/11/2012
Gaming

Guest Post: Get the MESSAGE with Steve D.

It’s relatively rare that I turn this blog over to someone else to make a guest post, but for the last few months my friend Steve has been putting together a thing called The MESSAGE. Given that he’s tackling one of my personal bugbears – the tendency towards misogyny among gamers – I wanted to amplify his message and asked him if he’d be interested putting together a blog post explaining things. With that, I’m going to hand things over: My name’s Steve. I’m the creator and co-director of the MESSAGE. That’s an acronym that stands for Men Ending Slurs and Sexist Attitudes in the Gaming Environment. We’re a world-wide online-based campaign group dedicated to encouraging, supporting and educating men in order to make all types of gaming more welcoming to women, and other minorities. You can find us at www.gamermessage.com and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Please do – the movement can only work with lots of support.

PeterMBall 07/11/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

5 Short Story Recommendations in 1,012 Words or Less

Over the last few weeks I’ve occasionally thrown a short-story link up on twitter, in that way that you do when you remember there are *fucking awesome short stories* out there and you want to share them with other people. Twitter is a horrible medium for recommending short fiction though – it has the kind of immediacy that makes it easy for people to go follow the link, but it lacks the real space to provide any kind of context beyond saying *awesome story here*. So I wrote a blog post. And threw in some stories I haven’t linked to on twitter so people who follow me there still have something to go read on this fine Monday. All of the stories are free to read online at the time of writing, so links are provided. And so, in no particular order, I give you… 5 SHORT STORY RECOMMENDATIONS IN 1,012 WORDS OR LESS 1) MARY MARGARET ROAD-GRADER by Howard

PeterMBall 08/10/2012
Journal

In Which I Discover That I Owe Kapowe An Apology

This past weekend I sat my arse on the coach and read comic books. When I was done with that, I watched some wrestling DVDs. And brother, let me tell, you it was a weekend of glorious brilliance the like I haven’t experienced lately. After two straight months where, more often than not, you’d find me on a plane or hanging out at a writers festival or otherwise engaged in day-job related hijinx, the realisation that I had not a goddamn thing that needed to be done was freeing. I mean, the travel, it defeated me. For years I’ve been talking with my friend Kevin about the debilitating effects of work travel, not quite getting his dislike of it, ’cause on the rare instances I’ve had to travel for work it’s either been a) rare, or b) not that far. I now feel like I need to buy Kevin several beers of apology ’cause I totally get it now. Even

PeterMBall 17/09/2012
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

Still Sick

So it turns out I’m in the throes of a throat infection. The good news is that it’s unlikely to get worse – I had my tonsils out when I was way younger, and the doctor seemed to think this was a remarkable stroke of good fortune rather than, you know, one of those things that just happens somewhere along the way when you grow up. The bad news is that it’s viral in nature, so all I can really do is suck it up, sleep, and wait until my hacking cough goes away and I stop feeling like arse. In theory that was meant to be yesterday. In practice, I was relatively glad today was my regularly scheduled day off work and I got to spend eighteen of the past twenty-four hours asleep. And since I’ve now written far more about being sick than I originally intended, I distract you with some slight of hand and a youtube clip: See you

PeterMBall 27/06/2012
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

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