Search Results for “sleep” – Page 3

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Morning Person

I never intended to become a morning person, but health issues pushed me into it. Evenings were a time of exhaustion, diminishing resolve, and brain fog, and so the first four hours after waking became the time of day when I brought my best self to a project. For the first year, I fought against that. Loathed the early starts, focused on all the pop science write-ups about the research into larks and night owls, embraced the snooze button and the long sleep in. I was nostalgic for the kind of writer—the kind of person—I’d been before evenings became a nightmare. I convinced myself the problems with evenings were a temporary aberration, soon to be conquered. One day, I my creativity would fire up around 10 PM and I’d spend the next eight hours writing into the wee hours. One day, I would set my routine to the rhythms of a night owl and all the work would get done.

PeterMBall 18/09/2021

Works in Progress

The Gulf Between Conception and Execution

Back in my teenage years, as a young comic book fan, I copied a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and stuck it on my wall. I wasn’t a kid given to this kind of behaviour, but this fragment where Gaiman’s protagonist, Dream, describes the creation of the first Corinthian spoke to me even then: Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person, whom you slowly perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from black metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection. But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still… A dark mirror… That was always the intention… But the gulf between conception and execution is wide and many things can happen along the way. Sandman #57, Neil Gaiman My admiration for this passage came in two parts. The first, unsurprisingly, lay

PeterMBall 04/09/2021

Exile

Excellent noir yarn with well interwoven demonic and supernatural aspects.

Alan Baxter, GoodReads.com

All the grit and growl of the golden age detectives let loose upon the monsters and magics that keep us fascinated (and occasionally afraid) as we curl up on the couch at night. Ball is masterful in his use of tension, with a knack for keeping readers glued to the screen or page.”

Kylie Thompson, HushHushBiz

Read the first four chapters here

PeterMBall 02/09/2021

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Readers Ought To Know About What Writers Ought To Know About Die Hard

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series What Writers Ought To Know About...

Every December, around this time, my blog goes a little crazy as folks discover the What Writers Out To Know About Die Hard series of posts and start asking particularly sensible questions like, “wait, we’re only halfway through, were’s the rest of the series?” and “so you’re going to finish writing this, right?” And much as I always nod and promise I’ll get back to it one day, the odds of it making it to the top of my to-do list have always been low for a couple of complex reasons, most of which I fell into the habit of not talking about in public. So, with that in mind, here’s the current state of play: I wrote these back in 2013/2014, when I wasn’t in the best of physical or emotional health. They were powered by a clinging-on-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth energy that fueled all my writing at the time, trying to bang things out before my sleep condition left me falling

PeterMBall 17/12/2020

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Ugly Cover, Great Book: go read The Captured Ghosts Interview with Warren Ellis

The great irony of Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews is this: it’s an interviewer with a comics writer who thinks very carefully about the design and packaging of the written product, and yet it’s released with an incredibly ugly , half-arsed cover that’s seemingly designed to discourage purchasing. Which is a pity, because the contents of the book offer some fascinating insights into Ellis’ mindset, work processes, and usage of the internet, circa 2010/2011. We live in an age where access to interviews with creators are at an all-time peak right now, what with the plethora of websites, podcasts, and livestreams devoted to archiving creative insights. What marks The Captured Ghosts Interviews as something special is it’s origins: these are the full transcripts of the interviews Meaney and Thurman did while making a documentary about Ellis and his work, which means you’re getting all the messy asides and digressions rather than the best sound-bytes. It also means they have

PeterMBall 06/04/2020

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Today I'm feeling 20%

In the early days of my newsletter I posted a link to Maggie Steifvater’s journaling approach, designed to manage uneven energy levels after she contracted a long-term illness that kept her from writing. The original post is gone now—along with the rest of Steifvater’s Tumblr—but the lesson from it has lived with me on-and-off in four bullet journals now. The basic theory is this: before you plan the day, imagine the idealised version of you that’s operating at 100%. The perfect, focused, utterly ready to do all the things version of yourself. Then check in with how you’re feeling right now, and rate your current state as a percentage of that ideal. Or, to put it another way, acknowledge your limits and work with the energy you’ve got, not the energy you wish you had. It’s really easy to resent work when things are off-kilter with your health, whether its physical or mental. Resentment quickly leads to procrastination, which only

PeterMBall 06/02/2020

Stuff

Exile is out tomorrow…here's a taster of what's to come

In the immortal words of the Ramones, there’s less than twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go before Exile hits shelves, and it’s currently got the strongest pre-orders of any book Brain Jar press has released. Ebooks can be pre-ordered via Amazon, and print books can be ordered at all good bookstores. Today, I’m posting the first chapter as a little taste-test, giving you some insight into how hitman on the run Keith Murphy deals with the demons of the Gold Coast once they detect his presence… PARADISE CITY They found me in the Hard Rock. Thursday night, a little after ten. The bar drew a good crowd for a Thursday, all things considered. Lots of girls with inscrutable, backpacker accents clustered around the counter. Plenty more heading to the Beer Garden upstairs, attracted by the cover band’s caterwaul. Blondes, legitimate and peroxide—a Gold Coast epidemic. Swathes of exposed skin, despite the cool nip in the air. Twenty-dollar cocktails named after natural disasters:

PeterMBall 28/01/2020

News & Upcoming Events

Out Wednesday…EXILE: A Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thriller

The ebook files have all been uploaded and the print proofs have been approved, which means the re-release of Exile is on track for Wednesay. I talked about the secret emotions and work that hides behind the word “re-released” in relation to this book over on the twitters. I won’t repeat the entire thing here, but it starts with this tweet and everything is linked in an easy-to-follow thread: The short version, for those who prefer to avoid the twitter-beast, is that the re-release of Exile and its sequels involves revisiting work written just prior to being diagnosed with a sleep disorder, and therefore a chance to do the kind of rewrites and reshaping of the original text that a falling-asleep-at-the-keyboard Peter wasn’t able to do in 2013. For various personal reasons, I want this launch to go really well, so I’m investing a little more attention into it than my new releases normally get. For now, I’ll just mention

PeterMBall 25/01/2020

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Book Math

I picked up a copy of William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2001, a shiny trade paperback find in a second-hand bookstore. The latest in a long line of Gibson books that started with my long-since read-to-death paperback of Burning Chrome that I acquired in high-school after our IT teacher showed us a documentary on cyberpunk. I purchased Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, brand-new in 2005. At the time I was reading Murakami a lot, was just starting to write my own short fiction in earnest, and taught classes in both Murakami and short story writing to university classes. I made a special trip into the city to buy Brandon Sanderson’s Alloy of Law from the inestimable Pulp Fiction Booksellers. I’d never read Sanderson before, but the reviews tempted me with its promise of a traditional European fantasy setting progressed to the point where it effectively contained a Wild West. I made a similar trip to

PeterMBall 06/11/2019

Journal

Placeholder Cat Holds The Fort

Offline today, on account of heading to my Grandmother’s funeral, so I’m posting this picture of the Admiral engaged in one of her weirder sleeping habits. You don’t get to hear the tiny snores that kick in when she falls asleep with her head like this, but trust me, they’re adorable.

PeterMBall 02/10/2019

Journal

27 September 2019

I’m largely offline today, so here’s a glimpse at the planning document for a future Brain Jar series. This is poking at a story idea that sits about halfway through an 8-book run. My grandmother passed away yesterday morning, and today I’m running on too little sleep and a fresh hit of grief in a year that’s already been heavy on grieving. I’m going to be paring back expectations on the writing front for a stretch, trying to winnow down process to the bare minimum of things that need doing right now.

PeterMBall 27/09/2019

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Making Time, Picking Your Focus, and the ‘Fuck You’ Impulse

Earlier this year, I noticed this Tweet on my feed and flagged it as something I wanted to think about more: “Oh, I’d love to write a book but I just don’t have time!” Fuck. You. I wrote my first two novels during my lunch hours in a 9-5 job while also teaching and training kung fu every evening and weekend. You make time. — Alan Baxter (@AlanBaxter) March 10, 2019 I was intrigued by the tweet, for two reasons. On hand it, it’s because Alan is right about this–something that’s bourn out in the suite of writers that offer their own experiences making time to get work done in the early days. It’s a useful read, if you’re interested in being a writer. The kind of advice I’ve been talking about in writing classes for years, among the self-selecting people who show up to learn such things. But I found myself really irritated at the tweet when it first

PeterMBall 11/09/2019

Search Results for: sleep – Page 3