Search Results for: write club – Page 9
Works in Progress

Fists of Steel: The snooze button edition.

– Gauntlet, an update: distractions, distractions, distractions. One Flotsam story is down, which means there’s three to go ‘fore the Gauntlet is done. I lost much of the afternoon catching up on things that needed doing (deadlines, proofs, contracts)  – The weekend was long and only about 30% pleasant. I’m running short on sleep and planning on turning in early tonight. Hopefully today’s writing-induced adrenaline spike won’t keep me awake. I may take the laptop to bed and try to nail down 300 words of the lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft. – Tomorrow there is write-club and going through more proofs. February is odly busy on the writing-and-getting-stuff-out front.

PeterMBall 07/02/2011
Works in Progress

Day Planner

Today I am: a) writing b) making plans c) washing up d) buggering off early to play DnD Last night there was write-club, whereupon I wrote about fifteen hundred words on my next Flotsam story, then sat up into the wee hours forcing myself to write 250 words on the novel project for 2011 (which is currently called Tarnished Silver Swords, but once existed under the working title of the weird lovecrafty-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo-novel; neither of these is workable as a final title). I thank Trent Jamieson for the reminder to do the latter, courtesy of his recent blogpost aboutgetting stuff done despite being a procrastinating slacker (which is not to say that Trent is a procrastinating slacker, just that I am and his advice came at the right point to remedy that). There has been too much not-writing in my life this January. I have another five days to rectify that.

PeterMBall 26/01/2011
Journal

Hello!

So, apparently I lied yesterday – I am back today. I didn’t mean to lie, or expect to be here, but after a day at the final Year of the Novel course at the Queensland Writer’s Cetnre there was a part of brain that clicked over and said wait, yes, I am meant to be writing, perhaps it’s time to reclaim that bit of my life again. And so I have critted work, and pondered problems with the novel-in-progress, and chatted with the awesome Angela Slatterabout when we can kick off write-club again and which day we can use so we can get some continuity going (we’ve traditionally used Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, all of which have become untennable due to semi-regular scheduling conflicts). It’s been chaotic fortnight around these parts – it kicked off with the news of my dad’s heart attack on the 24th of October that saw me spend much of the week on the Gold Coast,

PeterMBall 06/11/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Six Thoughts Upon Reading The Maltese Falcon

I started reading The Maltese Falcon yesterday, which is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read forever without getting around to it. I lay the blame entirely on the film, which is awesome and fulfilling in a way that the other big hardboiled-to-noir adaptation* never really manages, and thus makes it easier to excuse the act of reading in favour of another round of Bogart playing Sam Spade. In any case, after starting to read I had some thoughts. Six of them, to be exact: 1) The more I read hardboiled fiction the more I’m aware of the way it infiltrates our culture, seeping in through other media when we’re not looking. It’s a genre that lends itself to the intertextual, to endless moments of “so that’s where that came from” as you go back and find primary sources. I knew the tropes of noir film long before I came across it’s classic stories, largely because I’d inherited

PeterMBall 04/10/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

5 Books

If you were to ask me for book recomendations right now – and yes, I know you aren’t, but lets just say you were – you’d probably get a list that runs something like this: The Thin Man, Dashiel Hammett: Screw The Maltese Falcon – if you’re only going to read one hardboiled detective story by Hammett then you really should start with this one. I picked it up on the back of watching Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist when it was mentioned that the title characters in the film were based on the relationship between Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles in the film version of this book, and it’s not hard to see why they were taken with the couple. Nick and Nora Charles are fricken’ awesome – their banter, their affection for one another, their goddamn chemistry as a literary couple – and it’s refreshing to see a hardboiled investigator who is actually happy much of the time.

PeterMBall 14/09/2010
Works in Progress

3 Days ’til Worldcon

And last night there was Write-club with the inimitable Angela Slatter and Ben Francisco, whereupon many words were written and we ate our body-weight in sugar. I was also mocked (albeit politely and deservedly) for my insane approach to rewriting, for I have real trouble letting go of a scene when I know that *something is dire and wrong*. Victory was mine, however, for after five weeks of hammering my head against the brick wall I finally found the problem with the opening chapters of Black Candy. It’s involved much deleting and rewriting, but I suspect that this will be the final rewrite I do before launching into the (much easier to write) middle of the book. In other news, I suspect updates will be scarce for the next two weeks (’cause, like, Worldcon, yo!). See everyone on the other side and all.

PeterMBall 30/08/2010
Journal

4 Days ’til Worldcon

And man, doesn’t that feel like an ominous thing to type in the title of the post. I’m in a vaguely half-asleep state this morning, largely because I started reading Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue just before going to bed last night and it’s one of those books where the temptation to read just one more chapter is terribly, terribly strong.  Were I a less lazy blogger there would be a whole post here about yesterday’s adventure to Pulp Fiction, whereupon my plan to buy just one or two books quickly fell apart. Fortunately, I am a lazy blogger today. That’s what Sunday’s a for. Today there is writing. And write-club. And bugging the inimitable Ben Francisco about co-writing a YA novel, ’cause there are some writerly shenanigans that work better when they’re shared with other people.

PeterMBall 29/08/2010
Journal

14 Days ‘Til Worldcon

There are fourteen days between me and Worldcon, which means there’s fourteen days before people can get their hands on Bleed. Much as I’m all unsubtle about my desire for you all to give in to your base, capitalist urges and consume for the good of the economy (and, lets be frank, my rent-paying ability) there is still a tiny part of me that isn’t quite ready for people to see Bleed yet. And yet I stay calm. Almost zen-like. Mostly I’m doing this by pretending its not going to happen, so if you see me at worldcon and I’m all surprised that there’s a book out with my name on it, you’ll know why. And now I must go clean the house prior to write-club, and wait for a phonecall from my sister so I can explain the latest not-a-calamity.

PeterMBall 19/08/2010
Works in Progress

State of Play

Last night I braved the outside world and joined Trent Jamieson and Chris Lynch to talk about SF as part of the QUT Informational Professionals Alumni Chapter’s Bookclub, which was an enormous amount of fun given the books we were discussing (the fact that I’m a nerdy bibliophile who rather enjoys chatting about books didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that Trent and Chris are lovely blokes to share a panel with). Today I started tackling May’s to-do list from hell. It’s a long list, and its terrible, and there were at least two things on there with a deadline of “May 31st”. The first of these is done (short story submission, although given the length my stories are when I’m finishing them these days they may not deserve the title short); the second of these is daunting (going through the fourth rewrite of Cold Cases in preparation for May 31st, when I hand it back to TPP). The rest of the list has a little more

PeterMBall 11/05/2010
Works in Progress

Project Update: Cold Cases

There’s usually a point in a project where I stumble over it’s identity. Not a theme or a plot or a character conflict, but a moment where I can suddenly look at the piece and realise why I’m writing. Sometimes it’s easy – Horn got defined as as the book about unicorns for people who hate books about unicorns right from the very beginning, before I even came up with the characters. Most of the time it isn’t, and it takes a good deal of noodling around before I have moment of realisation and everything falls into place. The noodling is actually kind of painful and aimless, because even if I’ve got a plot in mind and the story is travelling okay, it always feels a bit listless without getting to know the reason for the book. Cold Cases spent a really long time without that sense of identity. That thing that makes it a specific book I want to write,

PeterMBall 26/10/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Yep, the internets are full of stuff I’ve been involved with this week…

…so I may as well go with the hat-trick when it comes to blatant acts of self-promotion this week and mention the following: 1) The Coming Dark at the Internet Review of Science Fiction A long-ish article about the apocalypse in its varied form, put together by my write-club peep Angela Slatter and featuring a bunch of talented Aussie writers (plus me, who is pretty lucky to be sounding coherent given that I was drafting responses to these questions during Gen Con Oz a few weeks back. Not to self – don’t agree to deadlines that coincide with conventions you’re working at). Spec-fic writers tend towards the strange, the weird, the unpleasant—that’s their writing, not their personalities. We’ve had the apocalypse penciled in for a while now, so how are some of us going about documenting the coming dark? How is our changing, frayed environment affecting the writing of authors on our side of the literary divide? A small chunk (really

PeterMBall 09/10/2009
Works in Progress

Some Awesomeness, Some Writing Advice, Some Help Needed, and Some Horn Spotting

1) Two Reasons Angela Slatter is awesome The latest Clarkwesworld magazine has an interview with eight Emerging SF authors, including the insightful and rather startlingly talented Angela Slatter. She says some smart stuff, as do the rest of the interviewees, and it’s well worth a read. If, however, you like you’re writing advice in a more direct and focused form, I really suggest heading over to Angela’s website and read through her advice on editing. Actually, I’d advocate printing out the entire post and keeping it handy next time you’re proofing something. I’ve been lucky enough to have stuff edited/proofed by Angela before and I can say with certainty that she knows of what she speaks here. 2) Interesting Writing Advice from Across the Interwebs Still on the writing front, I’d also recommend going and taking a listen to Mary Robinette Kowal’s guest-spot on the Writing Excuses podcast. It crams four really useful pieces of advice to fiction writers (based on

PeterMBall 04/09/2009

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