Flotsam – Page 2 – Peter M. Ball

Journal

I’m working late at the dayjob today, having started late under the assumption that driving back from the Sunshine Coast would be a foolhardy undertaking this morning. I’ve had to much good food and not enough sleep, and I’m suffering from the vague ick that comes from sleeping in an overly air-conditioned room. When I got to work I was told about the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Every couple of minutes someone plays a youtube clip of the events, or downloads a snippet of news from the internet, or simply sees something new on twitter. Some people have family over there, others were just planning to head over to NZ for a holiday in the near future. I’ve never been to Christchurch, but I hear it’s nice. I’m starting to suspect that nature has it in for the whole southern hemisphere of the planet at the moment. If you have the resources to do so, it may be a

PeterMBall 22/02/2011

Journal

Ditmar, Etc

So about six months ago I won the Best New Talent Ditmar, and I have to admit that I’m rather fond of the trophy. It’s a clean design and it’s got a nice weight to it, and it makes for a nigh-perfect book-end on the brag shelf in my living room. Plus its not made of glass like the Aurealis Award, so it’s somewhat easier to photograph with the camera in my mobile phone. I didn’t really expect to win it, so it was rather nice when it happened, even if I was so convinced I wouldn’t win that I wandered off to have dinner with friends instead of going to the ceremony. At the time my name was announced, I was tucking into a particularly good hamburger at a nearby restaurant. Oops. On the plus side, at least I was surprised. I mention this for two reasons. The first is that my dad’s health problems hit not long after Worldcon

PeterMBall 16/02/2011

Journal

Fists of Steel: Write Club Edition

Tonight there was write club, which is usually good news for the wordcount. I managed to bang out the first six hundred words of the next Flotsam story (faster than expected), but fell a couple of hundred words short of my goal to finally crack 5,000 words on the great-lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft. I also tinkered with the Black Candy draft for the first time since starting the gauntlet, working out how it’s going to fit into the daily routine. And because I cannot help myself, I even added a hundred or so words to a short story that I’m resolutely not-writing and will continue not-writing until it magically becomes written. I absconded from proceedings slightly early because day-job demands rising early and I now turn into a miserable bastard if I’m not in bed by 11 o’clock. I was already a miserable grump this evening because I got the news that the owners of my flat are planning sell in the

PeterMBall 08/02/2011

Works in Progress

I guess this is why people have day-jobs, huh?

It’s been a long time since I thought hard about the thing I’m writing as I wrote it, rather than sprinting for the finish because I needed stuff to be done and sent out and justifying itself now now now! 600 words on the great-swashbuckly-lovecraft-ghoul-wahoo! novel draft this afternoon, which brings the total up to about 5,000 for the week. It feels so very slow, working like this, but I suspect it may actually be better for me – when I’m not trying to rush things and get wordcount for the sake of wordcount, I have time to start picking at phrasing and thinking about the pace and structure of the scenes. Oddly, writing slow and considered is also a means of curing myself of my addiction to semi-colons. Also, 2011 is the year I teach myself to write in third person or die trying; place your bets on whether it works, but my money’s on the latter. I’m going to

PeterMBall 27/01/2011

Works in Progress

Is This Thing On

Today is the day I returned to work (both day job and the real job), and that means my blogging hiatus is over. Admittedly, it should have been over back on the first of January, but those of you following the twitter feed will already be aware of the somewhat crappy way I kicked off 2011. I spent New Years Day dealing with the catastrophic aftermath of an accident with a bottle of red wine, a somewhat less catastrophic car accident on my way to pick up cleaning supplies and a bunch of new work shirts, and an encounter with a rusting hot water system in the garage that caused my elbow to swell up to twice it’s normal size. If I’d blogged on the day, I probably would have spent five hundreds trying to say what can be summed up as, essentially, fuck fuck fuck. I’ve just spent the last two hours banging out some much needed worded count

PeterMBall 04/01/2011

Tag: Flotsam

Ditmar, Etc

Fists of Steel: Write Club Edition

I guess this is why people have day-jobs, huh?

Is This Thing On

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