Apnea updates – Peter M. Ball

Big Thoughts

Coping

It’s a dreary kind of morning here in Brisbane and 2015 is almost done, ready to be laid to rest with singing and dancing and libations with friends. Unless you’re me. I shall celebrate the end of the year in the same way I wish to kick of 2016: lying in my bed, notebook on my lap, scribbling words and pondering what will come my way in the future. For once, I find myself very fond of the passing year. It’s been forever since I looked back over twelve months and felt myself at peace with everything that happened – usually, at this time of year, I am waging desperate war with an internal monologue of frustration and horror about the lack of…well, everything. Playing endless games of if only I had done this better and if only hadn’t fucked that up. I spent my life incredibly angry. I am probably understating this a little. My greatest fantasy, for the last five or

PeterMBall 31/12/2015

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Sleep Thing, Blogging, And Writing Without a Net

The sleep thing. The apnea. The bad habit my body has developed of asphyxiating me a couple of dozen times an hour, while my body drifts into a REM state. I’ve called it all sorts of things over the last nine months, but it always opens up a quiet moment of panic inside me. It lies at the heart of a very specific debate I have, regarding social media and being a writer. Because I do not know where the line is, when it comes to discussing it. It came up a few times, over the weekend, and figuring out when I’d crossed over into the territory where I’d become the guy banging on about something everyone else was done with got difficult even when the non-verbal queues were present. I do, after all, have a tendency to bang on about things when I’m trying to figure them out. Usually, long after everyone else is wishing I’d shut up. And

PeterMBall 17/11/2015

Journal

A Curious Thing

Ducked around to my PO Box earlier today and discovered that my contributor copies of Gods, Memes, and Monsters had arrived. And lo, it is a handsome book, once you see it in the flesh: That’s not the curious bit. This is: I have a bit of a ritual with contributor copies these days, which has developed over the last few years. Basically, they come in, and I make myself a nice cup of tea to calm the nerves before cracking the book open and taking a close look at my story, figuring out how much of it I actually remember writing. The answer, thanks to the exhaustion associated with undiagnosed apnea and the desperate attempts to hit deadlines, is invariably less than I’d like. For Gods, Memes, and Monsters, it was virtually nothing. I could basically remember the idea I pitched and the things that inspired me to tackle that particular topic, and that was about it. Reading the story was kinda

PeterMBall 22/10/2015

Big Thoughts

The Sleep Thing

I run into people, from time to time, and they ask: how is the sleep thing? Usually, I tell them the sleep thing is fine. Way better than it was back April, when I was falling asleep in front of the computer. Way better than it was back in May, when the diagnosis of chronic sleep apnea became all kinds of official and they sent me off with a machine that’d stop me from asphyxiating while I slept. This is not a lie. Compared to the state I was in at the start of the year, life is a magical wonderland full of candy unicorns. I sleep better. I concentrate better. I do not feel like I am messing up every aspect of my existence as a default state. I keep discovering all sorts of secondary problems – shoulder pain, neck pain, teeth grinding – that were basically linked to the apnea and have now cleared up. The sleep thing

PeterMBall 22/09/2015

Stuff

Morning Shift

So this is pretty much how my morning went: Peter gets up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off at 6:00 am Peter sits down to write a half-hour ahead off schedule Peter finishes the 1,300 goal he set for his morning writing shift forty-five minutes early. Peter wombles around the internet for ten minutes, then realise everyone else is asleep or on their way to work. Peter gets bored. Peter goes back to writing. And that, folks, is why I’ve missed getting up early to get writing done. It wasn’t possible for much of the last year, courtesy of the apnea and my tendency to sleep through alarms, so I gradually cut back my morning writing to a bare minimum of getting up a half-hour early and getting a couple of hundred words done (and, even then, there were mornings it didn’t happen). It’s nice to be back. # Speaking of things coming back, tomorrow night will see the

PeterMBall 25/05/2015

Tag: Apnea updates

Coping

The Sleep Thing, Blogging, And Writing Without a Net

A Curious Thing

The Sleep Thing

Morning Shift

Book Information?

Need Help?

About Laautor

Support

Newsletter