Status: Apr 14 2020

PETERMBALL Status

LOCATION: Windsor, Brisbane, Australia.

RIGHT NOW I’M FEELING

  • Pent up and restless, generating ideas faster than my writing process can keep up.
  • About 55% of optimal.
  • Satisfied that I’ve had more good writing days than bad over the last week.

CURRENT INBOX: 11 (plus 3 outstanding emails I need to send)

WORKING ON

  • Hacking together a Now page system I can actually maintain.
  • Writing a Black Sails, Black Magic novelette
  • Drafting a serial about bunny head gunmen to run on the blog through the Pandemic lockdown.
  • Editing Crusade (Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thriller #3)
  • Recruiting established writers for a line of non-fiction chapbooks about writing
  • Establishing online homes for Brian Jar Press as an entity seperate to Peter M. Ball
  • Multiple sets of contracts that need to be finalised.
  • Developing a new mindset around blogging and online engagement, designed to recapture some of the shit that’s gone missing since social media became the dominant appraoch.

THINKING ABOUT

  • Structuring a prose-based publishing company around comic book publishing models.
  • A vignette-based writing project that might go on social media.
  • A future series about a post-Atomic Age city, after all the science heroes like Doc Savage have crested and rusted away.
  • How to pull apart the tools of self-publishing to utilise it in more interesting ways.
  • How to plug terrifying holes in my budgets as a result of Covid-19.

ON HAITUS

  • Disposable Bodies, a novella being drafted for my thesis (resuming work on May 1)
  • A supplementary Keith Murphy series about life on the Gold Coast while awaiting Ragnarok (too close to the current age)

READING

LISTENING TO

WATCHING

  • DEATH NOTE (2006)

CHANCE THAT I WILL DEPLOY ORBITAL LASERS TO DESTROY YOU ALL IN THE COMING WEEK?

  • 34.45%

STATUS OF THE ADMIRAL

Research Links 20200413

PETERMBALL Works in Progress ,

Years ago, when I first discovered Tumblr, I’d intended to use it as a public dumping ground for research links and images I might want to use later.

Resurrecting the idea here, since virtually nobody comes to blogs anymore, but the folks that do probably share my obsession with seeing how ideas manifest some five to ten years after a writer first discovers them.

Gravstar unleash a new bluetooth speaker design which looks like a battle-scarred war robot from an episode of Doctor Who you haven’t got around to watching yet. Watch the accompanying video for a full sense of their commitment to the motif, and ponder what these choies say about human ideas of authenticity and aesthetics.

As sports stadiums prepare for the resumption of play amid lockdowns, some of them are replacing the crowd experience with robotic stand-ins. Some of them are being given fan’s faces in Belarus. Freaking me out, because I’ve been writing scenes like this for an upcoming project about MMA in space.

Every SF writer who reads this is probably making Mythos jokes right now. Flagged because I need to steal the line “Fungi are basically the digestive track of the plant” for something.

Think about the amount of difficulty into getting an SF-concept like self-driving cars to work, and please shut the fuck up about not having a jetpack already. The future is trickier than anyone thought, but also more amazing.

One lesson from searching for a house to buy: concrete doesn’t age well unless it’s tended for. Much as I adore the design of this, it feels like the “before” picture of a very grungy dystopia.

For all your “I want to go work in a silver-age-of-sci-fi spaceport” needs. Flagging this because it seems likely I’ll want to revisit it for a project I’ve got planned for the second half of the year.

A 53,000 square foot office building in Italy that has minimal technical needs due to the placement of chimneys that handle the lighting, heat, and airflow issues usually relegated to electrical systems. Incredibly beautiful design. Go check it out.

Then ponder why this doesn’t feel anywhere near as sexy as a bluetooth speaker designed like a beat-up war robot.

Tell Me Of Your Favourite Blog Reads

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

It’s been about five years since I last did a serious scouring of my RSS feeds, which means a lot of the regular incoming information is largely focused on topics that were of interest to me from 2010 to 2015. Things have changed since then, and the signal to noise ratio is becoming a little more unacceptable, so it’s time to start culling feeds and adding new stuff.

Kathleen Jennings dropped by earlier this week and noted that she’s in the process of setting up a new RSS reader, after years of working without one, so I figured I’d create a space where folks who may be doing the same can talk up the feeds that are meaningful to them.

One of mine remains Inhabitat, a blog about using design to create a better world, which is a glorious mine of story ideas and setting details.

A newer site I’m adding in is SF writer Trent Jamieson’s new online space, where a recent redesign has seen a short burst of online blogging in which Trent writes about recent obsessions and process in his considered and meditative style.

And I’m still on the search for a good architecture blog, after a lot of the places I follow went dormant over the last few years. Which sucks, because I’ve missed glorious things like Oki Sato’s glorious staircase-driven house design .