Search Results for “write club” – Page 8

Journal

Leaving, on a Jet Plane

It’s been about twenty years since I went on holidays with the rest of my family, but it seems we’ll be breaking that streak on Tuesday when all four of us gather and fly down to Adelaide to spend five days at the Fringe Festival. We fly back Sunday night. And on Monday, I turn thirty-six. It wasn’t until tonight, looking at a calendar and planning my work week after I get home, that I realised that last bit. Birthdays are weird. I expect, this year, I’ll be reducing my celebrations down to the absolute minimum: sleeping in, re-reading Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, getting on with things. I mean, what little celebratory energy I usually have is going to be burned out by five days of awesomeness as the Fringe, and any reserves are going to be needed to get me through the week that follows at the day-job. In theory, the coming week is a holiday. I want to

PeterMBall 10/03/2013

News & Upcoming Events

Top Five of 2012

So I was checking out some of the site stats last night – something I rarely do here on my personal site – and spent some quality time looking at the data. Since I’m off at write-club today, trying to catch up after a slow weekend of writing, I’m going to take advantage of the data and the changing-of-the-year feel to showcase the most visited posts here on Petermball.com in 2012. Number One: 13 Things Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions of Mutants and Masterminds Number Two: Why I Have Problems With the Big Bang Theory I have to admit, the order of these two surprises me. I know a lot of people found their way here when I posted about my M&M campaign for the first time, largely courtesy of the link showing up on a bunch of gaming message boards. It represented probably the single-biggest spike in traffic I’ve ever had, and under any normal circumstances, I probably

PeterMBall 07/01/2013

Big Thoughts

Pledging My Allegiance to the Fake Geek Army

There are days when I feel insufficiently geek. Don’t get me wrong – I do plenty of things that are geeky as hell – I play, on average, 1.5 face-to-face RPG sessions a week, have a semi-regular influx of graphic novels appearing in my mailbox, and the staff at my local Fantasy, SF, and Crime bookstore know me on sight. I can just about make it through an entire week of wearing shirts with pictures of C’Thulhu on them without having to do laundry. When I run out of Lovecraft inspired T’s, I’ll move on to my collection of web-comic shirts without missing a beat. That should keep me going for a month or so before it’s time to hit the washing machine. Two of my favourite TV shows are Justice League: Unlimited and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. I just dropped a whole buttload of cash on the reprints of Larry Hama’s classic GI JOE series from Marvel in the

PeterMBall 19/11/2012

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

Back in Brisbane, Back Online

It’s a quiet, slightly gloomy Easter Monday and I’ve spent the better of my afternoon lurking in my bedroom with a copy of William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavour and The Jane Austen Argument’s Somewhere Under the Radio on repeat. I’ve been meaning to write a catch-up kind of post ever since I went to Rockhampton a few weeks back, but I didn’t and somehow the fact that I kept accumulating things to blog about only meant that the gap kept winding on. Bullocks to that, though, so I figured I’d peel myself off the bed and give you the highlights. Firstly, I went to Rockhampton and it rained a great deal. This resulted in about ten hours of fun at the Rockhampton airport, watching them cancel and reschedule flights, until finally my 1:30 PM flight out finally happened at 2:00 AM instead. It made for a long day, although I did get to duck out of the airport and see the

PeterMBall 09/04/2012

Works in Progress

I went to Pulp Fiction (Brisbane’s Finest Specialty Crime & SF bookstore) and bought new books earlier this week and I’ve managed to forget that until six minutes ago, when I rummaged through my bag and unearthed copies of Charlie Huston’s Sleepless and the Zombies Vs Unicorns anthology and the latest Gail Carriger novel and…well, it was the kind of shopping trip that involved mass consumption, so it’s rather nice to forget about the books and unearth them once more. And there is, as always, a paper bag. And I have, as always, used the paper bag as a hat; there is no wastepaper baset in the study, so wearing the paper-bag-hat ensures the bag gets thrown out next time I’m walking past a bin. But yes, I forgot I bought books. It’s been that kind of week. On Monday I went up to Rockhampton for the day job, meeting with people and seeing places that are part of the project

PeterMBall 23/07/2011

Works in Progress

Billboards, Peaches, & WIP Excerpts

This morning I once again started the day with music and dancing, although I substituted PJ Harvey for Peaches The Teaches of Peaches album, which is a slightly different mood to start the day with and one that’s much more likely to irritate your neighbors. Yesterday I had a phone call from my father which started along the lines of “yes, well, I can see how PJ Harvey would wake you up in the morning.” Apparently he googles bands when I mention them on my blog, just to get some idea of what I’m listening too. So, for my dad and anyone else following my music taste online, I’m going to recommend *not* googling Peaches while at work. I mean, you can if you want, but I’m taking no responsibility when you find yourself singing Fuck the Pain Away beneath your breath while other people are in earshot. Should you not wish to take my warning, I recommend Youtube. The clip

PeterMBall 12/05/2011

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

“There’s so much I could’a done if they’d let me”

Today, because I’m in such a cheerful mood, I’m mainlining Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads album. Somewhere in my CD collection I’ve got a copy of his b-sides and rarities triple-disc thingy, which includes a four-part, extended thirty-minute long version of O’Malley’s Bar. That’s going on next, ’cause sometimes, misogyny be damned, you just need a series of songs about killing every mother-fucker in the room in an unrelenting and utterly debauched fashion. This is my alternative to curling up on the floor of my bedroom and having a temper tantrum, ’cause really the closest I’m getting to articulating my mood these days is the ability to randomly shout “Hate! Hate! Hate!” at the top of my lungs. There are very few things in my life that aren’t filling me with loathing at the moment, from my less-interesting dayjob (which puts Fight Club into all kinds of interesting new perspectives for me) to my more interesting dayjob (which I hate, primarily,

PeterMBall 15/04/2011

Journal

Curtains

The curtains in my bedroom do a poor job of keeping the morning out of my face. I’m not going to speak about the week that was, because no-one really needs to see me complain and swear and generally carry on, but suffice it to say that the inability to keep out the morning sun was a source of great distress to me this morning. My first real night of sleep in weeks turned out to be not so full of slumber, and not for any of the good reasons, and I really wanted a sleep in to make up for it. Alas. Alak. The daystar strikes again and I my internal monologue now inserts three swear words between every thought instead of the two curses that were my default throughout the week. I mean, you should see the words I’ve had to edit out of this entry. It would have read like an Erving Walsh novel in its original

PeterMBall 09/04/2011

Journal

‘Tis a busy type of day today, so I’m going to just ramble on about things for the breif period I’ll be home between the first dayjob and the second. Plus there are several workmen helpfully digging up the road out the front of my house, ostensibly to lay down something or other involving pipes large enough to crawl through, which inevitably means my power or my internet or my phone line will go out at some point in the very near future. # On the list of conversations I never expected to have with my father, the one that starts with do you have any Warhammer 40k novels I could borrow? is pretty damn high on the list. I also never expected the answer to be yes, but you can’t borrow them right now, but you can have the short story anthologies if you like. Yet, somehow, we had that conversation yesterday, and my copies of Tales of the Heresy and

PeterMBall 10/03/2011

Works in Progress

A grumpy, crabby kind of blog post

Yesterday… Well, yesterday I did not run away and join the circus, but it was probably one of those days where I would have if I had viable circus-type skills and access to a travelling circus to run away with. I did not turn into the Incredible Hulk and smash things in a frenzy of anger. I did not resign from my dayjob to take up a position that would be more useful to the world at large, such as hunting werewolves or wrangling wild unicorns or, you know, going into politics. But, oh, I was sorely tempted. Especially by the werewolf thing, which, really, goes to show how much I disliked certain aspects of yesterday, because I’m actually quite fond of werewolves. # We actually had a full cohort at write-club last night, which is the first time all four write-clubbers have been in the same place since other people started joining the inimitable Angela Slatter and I on a regular

PeterMBall 09/03/2011

Journal

Grr. Arg. Zzzz.

Last night, because I am classy, I ate a dinner of hot-dog franks and baked beans and melted lite cheese slices with BBQ sauce. Then I wrote and wrote and wrote and accidentally fell asleep at the keyboard, which is one of those things that hasn’t happened to me in about fifteen years, and is even less productive than it sounds ’cause you wake up and discover all the odd things you’ve edited into the story by rolling onto the laptop in your sleep. In a less sane and reasonable world, I would have woken up this morning and gone back to writing, fixing the editing mistakes. Unfortunately I live in a world where the landlord is insistent about things like rent, so I got up and went to work at the dayjob instead. I may have done all of this, up until the going to work part, in my underwear. It’s also entirely possible I did not. I’ll leave

PeterMBall 07/03/2011

Search Results for: write club – Page 8

Leaving, on a Jet Plane

Top Five of 2012

Pledging My Allegiance to the Fake Geek Army

Writing Notes, Saturday, July 29

Back in Brisbane, Back Online

Billboards, Peaches, & WIP Excerpts

“There’s so much I could’a done if they’d let me”

Curtains

A grumpy, crabby kind of blog post

Grr. Arg. Zzzz.

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