Black Candy

Yesterday

PETERMBALL Journal

Yesterday I spent about seven hours doing my washing and watching romantic comedies while waiting for the spin cycle to end. Not the most well-planned of plans, but one grows used to the speed of laundromat washing machines (aka fast and basic) and both the pace and variable options available when using my sister’s machine took me by surprise. On the plus side I got to see a bunch of films I was mildly interested in when they first came out and feel relatively pleased that I hadn’t spent money on them at the time. More and more I’m starting to acknowledge that I’m just not a film person – I always seems to be hoping for more than a movie delivers.

Yesterday was also about getting the writing back on track. I revisited my big list of novels I wanted to write and re-ordered them a little, setting them up so I know what’s starting next. This has become my cheap trick to keep myself focused on Black Candy whenever I feel the urge to stop and start something new – the idea gets added to the list and built upon, but once something is in the top of the list it gets stuck with until it’s drafted. Works surprisingly well, given that I got writing done last night and this morning. With luck I’ll be back at full speed sometime in the near future.

Horn Review

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

It appears we have the first review of Horn live on the internets, courtesy of awritergoesonajourney.com.

Meanwhile I’m peeling myself off the couch after three straight days of Veronica Mars DVDs and trying to figure out how to get back to work. My current to-do list: Black Candy draft, Clawredraft, third Miriam Aster novella draft (since I now have a plot for it), short story redrafting, marking of student assignments. I suspect what I really need to do is the latter, since it’s going to have the most psychic drag associated with it, but I do so hate the marking process…

Ineffective Panic Stations

PETERMBALL Works in Progress

This week I’m bringing the crazy in a big, big way. Not that I noticed, at first. It just crept up on me and mugged me while I wasn’t looking, and it wasn’t until I found myself re-arranging the furniture in my bedroom at two am on Monday morning that I realised what was really going on – uncertainty stress.

I tend not to think of myself as a control freak, but there’s an interesting pattern to the way I react to big ol’ globs of uncertainty. Stage one seems to revolve around a kind of mental explosion during which I start a series of low-reward, low-effort projects that serve very little purpose beyond shoring up my self-esteem. Stage two revolves around asserting control over my physical environment (or day-dreaming about it) – rearranging furniture or bookshelves is a big indicator, as is hitting real estate agent websites and researching the possibilities of making a big move interstate. Stage three usually comes once I realise what’s happening, upon which I take all the uncertainty out on my writing – projects are re-conceived and re-built from the ground up, small flaws in drafts become painful thorns in my side until they’re re-written, and I turn into an insane over-achiever who sets myself a dozen impossible career goals before breakfast.

Not that knowing this is keeping me from making any further screw-ball decisions about my working process, but it does give me a momentary respite when I step back and try to figure out why I’m awake at two am trying to transform 25000 words of Black Candy draft into third person.