Search Results for: write club – Page 5
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Days 10 to 13

So I didn’t get online a lot between Friday and Sunday, for a whole variety of reasons, so this is going to be a pretty truncated entry that covers the last four days. Strap yourselves in. Day 10 Things I did today: woke up on the Gold Coast and had breakfast with my parents; drove to Brisbane and worked for a few hours in the QWC office; had lunch with co-workers; came home and went through a couple of options for the Tooth and Claw Whispers reading on Saturday; do some prep work for the next Year of the Author Platform course I’m teaching in a few weeks; watched NXT with the Flatmate. Things I didn’t do today: write anything on the novella. Total Daily Writing Time: 0 Daily Word Count Total: 0 Day 11 Session 11.1 (11:43 PM – 12:28 AM) Word Count: 600  Mostly revision on the first chapter.  Trying to streamline things a bit. Total Daily Writing Time: 45 minutes Daily

PeterMBall 13/05/2013
Works in Progress

Projects Du Jour

It’s been a while since I talked about up-coming projects on the blog. Partially this is because there weren’t many upcoming projects over the last two years. Partially this is because I’ve become more reclusive in my old age, unwilling to throw things out there until they’re more-or-less done. I write slow, you see, and occasionally it struck me as faintly absurd that I’d mention writing a short story and it’d be another two years before I finished it. Longer, in the case of some projects, since we do not talk about the novel (or, for that matter, the third Aster novella, or at least one story that people occasionally ask me about that I still haven’t got ’round to finishing). It’s not that these things go away – I still have all of them in my active projects folder. I’m just, you know, slow. Today, at write club, I did some work on a story I started in 2007.

PeterMBall 04/03/2013
News & Upcoming Events

New Fiction: “On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V–”

So, news: my latest story, On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V–, is now free to read on Eclipse Online with a particularly lovely Kathleen Jennings illustration accompanying it (I’m not saying I submitted to Eclipse just ’cause they had Kathleen illustrating all the stories, but it didn’t hurt. Kathleen is kinda awesome). So I’m psyched. I mean, I’m really psyched. It’s been a long while since I had a story out there people could read without buying a book. Or, for that matter, a story out there at all. I’m going to be spending the rest of the day being all writing things FTW!, but for now I’ll just offer up this free taste-test of what’s on the far side of the link: 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

PeterMBall 25/02/2013
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
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something). I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met

PeterMBall 07/12/2011
Journal

Three Things

WRITING RACE I’m going to be the guest racer at tonight’s Australian Writer’s Marketplace Writing Race, an online gathering where a bunch of writers…well, write. *Waves hello to any AWM Writing Races that drop past* I last guested at one of these back in 2009, just after Horn was released, and it proved to be a lot of fun. Kind of like Write Club, only online and with people who aren’t the inimitable Angela Slatter. If you’re a writer at a loose end this evening, why don’t you strap on your writing pants, fire up your keyboard, and come join us on the AWMforums around 8 o’clock. THE DALEK GAME I know I’ve said this before, but if you’re not following Kathleen Jenning’s Dalek Game illustration, you really are missing out on one of the most charming series of illustrations on the internet. I recommend Daleks Can Jump Puddles, the flappereque Roxie Dalek, The Dalek in the Rye, and…and…and…look, just go

PeterMBall 13/09/2011
Works in Progress

Unity Walk Redux

My sister’s posted a short blog about the reason she’s doing the Unity Walk for Parkinson’s Australia. It goes a little something like this: My Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003, although in hindsight, he had probably been suffering some of the symptoms for about fifteen years before that. Since the diagnosis came through, Dad has accepted this condition that life has chosen for him. He’s never once asked ‘Why me?’, I’ve never heard him complain, he accepts the physical limitations imposed on him, and while he doesn’t often ask for help, he does accept it gratefully when offered. Parkinson’s Queensland have been an enormous help to Dad, and Mum, who is inevitably his primary carer. They were there to offer advice on what medical staff in hospital needed to know when Dad had his heart operation last year. They provide visits to centres to show what little devices around the home are going to make life just

PeterMBall 25/08/2011
Works in Progress

On the Appeal of Easy Targets

So I’ve set myself some modest goals this week: 500 words a day of writing; three blog posts*; at least one day where I limit myself to two coffees**; buy one Christmas present so I don’t get stuck shopping during the evil December shopping crush. Thus far, I’ve failed horribly at all three, although I can at least make progress the first of my list by clicking publish. This is the curse of modest goals – it’s too easy to let them slide, figuring there will always be a moment later where you can get things done, but for the moment they’re a necessary evil because the immodest goals were just too damn intimidating for me. Monday was a rough day for writing; Tuesday was much improved, largely courtesy of a 3k night at write club, but today I’ve been letting the side down again, focusing more on planning than writing new words. Still time to rectify that before bed,

PeterMBall 17/11/2010
Works in Progress

Words, words, words (With bonus Angela Slatter Interview)

Before I begin, let me direct you to this: Marshal Payne’s Super-Sekrit Clubhouse has a new interview with my Write Club peep Angela Slatter, which should give you a pretty good insight into why I usually use words like “awesome” and “inimitable” when discussing both her and her writing. Angela remains one of those folks who fuses talent, hardworking dilligance and bucket-loads of smarts in her approach to writing (although she’ll refute the latter with Simpson’s referenes, giving half a chance). She speaks wisdom and her writing is good – so go read about her now, while she’s still an ’emerging writer’, and then  you can join me in the nodding and looking smug when people start talking about how this awesome new ’emerged’ writer in the years to come. And if you don’t, well, I’ll mock you -with a very mocking mock – because that’s the kind of guy I am. Okay, back to the entry. Or, to put it

PeterMBall 06/11/2009
Works in Progress

16 Days

On Friday night, during the Write Club recently documented over on Angela Slatter’s website, I finished the first draft of Cold Cases. Afterwards, I looked at the messy first draft state that’s so familiar after years of first draft, and immediately started fretting. There were sixteen days until the deadline. My usual rewriting process, particularly for something this long, winds out over the course of a year or more. I do a little rewriting, let it sit for a while, then do a little more. I tinker with scenes, do little bits here and there. I show it to a critique group, get some feedback, then show the revision to a different writer-buddy or two in order to see if it works yet.  I sort through what other people think works, what I think works, and I fine-tune. I can’t replicate that process in sixteen days, especially with a work that’s sitting at 24,000 words. So I spent most of

PeterMBall 02/11/2009
Works in Progress

The follies of the past week

1) I signed up for NaNoWriMo There’s plenty of folks among my circle of friends who do this every year, but for me it’ll be the first attempt at the nano-madness in seven or eight eight years. I primarily signed up because I miss the rigor of the public daily wordcount and it’ll be nice to have somewhere to put one without boring the hell out of everyone reading the blog. Should you be interested in watching me change the totals on a wordcount meter I can be found under the name PeterMBall on the nano site. I also promise there will be minimal wordcount updating on this here blog. Honest. 2) I started writing short stories again And it’s been a while, I tell you. I took a break from short fiction around the middle of the year with the goal of getting a novel drafted. After that I took a break in order to focus on getting the draft of Claw done.

PeterMBall 21/10/2009
Status

Status: 8 Mar 2023

The latest short story collection from Brain Jar Press, Tansy Rayner Roberts’ Gorgons Deserve Nice Things, went on sale yesterday and the response has been phenomenal. Gorgons is our most pre-ordered book in two years, and while we shipped the bulk of those over a month ago, there’s also been a steady stream of first day sales to keep things bubbling along. By the standards of small press publishing—or, at least, my little corner of it—it’s on the road to being our smash hit for 2023. Here’s the blurb, for the curious: Right, then. Now that I’ve done my bit to pay the bills and keep the cat in kibble… ON THE DOCKET Shipping books will be a big part of my day, obviously, but I’ve also got the soft launch of the next Brain Jar Press book and a bunch of other titles to push forward. At some point, I definitely need ot sit down and work on this

PeterMBall 08/03/2023

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