28 Days of Thesis Updates

i guess that i could get crazy now baby

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

I’ve spent most of the afternoon rushing around the house, MC5’s Kick Out the Jams buzzing through my head. I imagine it’s going to be something of a theme song during April – it’s certainly what I plan on listening to every morning this week (although I’ll probably cheat and cycle through the innumerable cover versions out there for variety). I’ve been looking forward to April since the start of the year – one way or another, it’s been the month where I get to try and reclaim my groove as a writer of fiction rather than theory.

The current plan for the coming month:

Do a whole mess of rewrites that have been piling up, then get the stories submitted
The problem with coordinating thesis writing and everything else isn’t finding the time to get drafts done – it’s finding the time to do the polishes and redrafting that transform those first drafts into something worthwhile. Over the last five months I’ve stacked up about six stories in this state, just waiting for me to revise and submit them.

Finish Claw…
Because there’s lots of stuff happening on Horn at the moment, so it makes sense to try and finish the next Miriam Aster novella while I’m all excited. Besides, it’s talking cats, a hard-boiled detective, a burned out actress from an eighties SF cop drama, and a oozing puddle of cat foetii in embryonic fluid – every time I look at the notes I sit there thinking “My god, I want to write this now,” so it’ll be nice to actually, you know, be able to do that.

Finish the next chapter in the thesis
Because work needs to continue, even if I’ve got the space to do other writing now.

Oh baby, here comes the fear again

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

It starts with what may well be the most dangerous question in the world right now: “So Peter, what happens after you finish your thesis?” 

Were I the melodramatic type, or at least the type in the mood for a different kind of melodrama than I’m running on right now, today’s entry would consist entirely of a you-tube clip of Pulp singing The Fear in answer to the question. It may yet come down to that – it’s been that kind of day, and The Fear is feeling very soundtrack-of-my-life right now, but with brave abandon I’m going to press on and risk letting some of the gloopy inner workings of my paranoia seep onto the web.

The answer: I don’t know. It scares the hell out of me. That’s probably why I’m procrastinating.

It’s not entirely true – I know, more or less, what I plan to start writing the day the thesis is off the plate. Hell, I know what I plan on writing for the next five years. The problem lies in my inability to conceptualise some form of support mechanism around the writing (since having a writing support system is actually one of the attractive qualities of doing a PhD). Today I’ve been distracting myself with paranoia over where I’m going to live, flitting between pleasant day-dreams about moving away from Brisbane and desperately cataloging things that can be thrown out should I find myself needing to go the cheaper option of renting someones spare room rather than keeping up a lease of my own. This has distracted me for hours. I find myself missing the relative plethora of folks willing to share a house that were around in my twenties.

In short, someone needs to ship me some torpedoes, if only so I can damn them and get on with things.

January is almost done

PETERMBALL Journal , , , , ,

Congratulations to Elena Gleason, whose story Erased picked up the chocolate in Fantasy Magazine’s  best story of 2008 reader poll. Congrats also to my Clarion South peep Michael Greenhut, whose story Watermark finished in the top-five, and thanks also to everyone who put in a vote for On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves – to my surprise, it snuck into the top five as well.

The temperature seems to have dropped to reasonable levels here in Brisbane – today I walked into my office and saw the temperature was below 30 degrees for the first time in weeks. That probably explains why the last twenty-four hours have been more productive than usual, although that could also be because I’m now loaded up with projects again after giving up January to the thesis exclusively (I suspect I’m just not built for the singular focus approach, especially not when I’m fretting about the things I’m not doing. There is still thesis work to do, quite a bit of it, but I’ve hit the point where I can’t put off other stuff anymore. There is rent to pay, if nothing else, and one can only put that off for so long).

With that, I return to work, but before I go I’m going to suggest heading over to SF Signal’s recent Mind Meld featuring Advice for Writers if you haven’t seen it already. It’s a solid read, chock-full of useful things to know.