Journal
As promised, the hat of awesome
Many Sri Lankan love cakes died to bring you this photo. Thanks for the donations, peeps. I have never been so happy to abandon my dignity for a good cause.
PeterMBall
21/12/2012
Tag: Pimp
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx
Bake Off! or, I Offer to Throw My Dignity Away to Make Up for My Lack of Skillz
We’re in the midst of a competitive bake-off at work this week, endeavoring to raise money in support of International Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month. QWC staff have diligently unearthed the most impressive cakes they can, pitched their merits via facebook, and asked people to donate and vote for their favourite baked treat. Funds raised will go towards supporting the ongoing work of the Garvan Institute and the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative. That’s the serious bit. The not so serious bit is that the staff member who raises the most money will be required to wear the Hat of Awesome, which I’ve been assured is an actual hat, and therefore MUST BE MINE. ‘Cause, you know, hat…awesome. I can spend an entire day pretending to be a Jäger, speaking in a German accent and generally befuddling my colleagues with random Girl Genius references. I may also declare myself LORD OF THE CAKES, simply because I can. Now I suffer a disadvantage in this contest ’cause I’m
PeterMBall
16/11/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
5 Short Story Recommendations in 1,012 Words or Less
Over the last few weeks I’ve occasionally thrown a short-story link up on twitter, in that way that you do when you remember there are *fucking awesome short stories* out there and you want to share them with other people. Twitter is a horrible medium for recommending short fiction though – it has the kind of immediacy that makes it easy for people to go follow the link, but it lacks the real space to provide any kind of context beyond saying *awesome story here*. So I wrote a blog post. And threw in some stories I haven’t linked to on twitter so people who follow me there still have something to go read on this fine Monday. All of the stories are free to read online at the time of writing, so links are provided. And so, in no particular order, I give you… 5 SHORT STORY RECOMMENDATIONS IN 1,012 WORDS OR LESS 1) MARY MARGARET ROAD-GRADER by Howard
PeterMBall
08/10/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
In this post, I swear a lot for no apparent reason
I’m sitting here on a Sunday trying to remember what I was going to blog about. There was plan a while back – perhaps even a written one – but I’m afflicted with a curse that causes me to forget anything remotely plan-like the moment I sit down at a keyboard. Fortunately, I have a back-up plan: 4 Random Things where I place Fuckin’ in the centre of the entry title. 1. DENNIS FUCKIN’ LEHANE One of my favourite book stores is Brisbane’s Pulp Fiction, a speciality-store focused exclusively on Fantasy, SF, and Mystery/Crime fiction. When I first started patronising the store I stuck to the fantasy/SF side of things, revelling in the ability to pick up fiction from small presses and mid-list authors I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to track down. All that changed about…jeez, I don’t know, but a while back…and these days I tend to pick up a few things from the crime side of things. I’m a fan of the
PeterMBall
16/05/2012
News & Upcoming Events
Cool News from the Day Job
So yesterday we made a small announcement at my dayjob. It went a little something like this: Source: GenreCon News Blog The Australian Writer’s Marketplace is pleased to announce the launch of the first annual GenreCon, a convention for professional and aspiring writers of romance, mystery, science fiction, crime, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and more. One part party, one part professional development: GenreCon is the place to be if you’re an aspiring or established writer with a penchant for the types of fiction that get relegated to their own corner of the bookstore. Featuring international guests Joe Abercrombie (Author, The First Law Trilogy, Best Served Cold, The Heroes), Sarah Wendell (co-founder, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books), and Ginger Clark (Literary Agent, Curtis Brown), with more guests being announced in the coming weeks. GenreCon is the place to be if you want to: Educate yourself about the publishing industry Learn what it takes to become a successful genre author Network with other writers who are passionate about genre fiction Meet editors, agents, publishers, and
PeterMBall
18/04/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Provocation
I’m flying out to Rockhampton at six AM tomorrow morning, so I really should be in bed right now. And I will be soon, I swear, but for this: earlier today I learned the latest Review of Australian Fiction is out, featuring stories by Kim Wilkins and Meg Vann. Perhaps this requires some context. Let me start again. One of the nice things about being a writer is meeting people you find yourself liking. This isn’t one of those things that happens immediately. In fact, it starts quite slowly: you spend a year or two meeting people you kind of like, or don’t like at all, and then suddenly you’re are a writing event of some kind and you stumble over a reader or fellow writer who you get along with quite well. And then you keep going to writing events, or you start hanging out with other writers, and these same people keep showing up again and again. This
PeterMBall
20/03/2012
News & Upcoming Events
Me Teach You to Write Good, eh?
There’s a more substantive blog post coming, but I’m just dropping past to announce the following to anyone who may be interested in this writing course that’s kicking off next Wednesday Night. It’s an introductory course run as part of my dayjob at the Queensland Writers Centre. ‘Course, I’m a sucker for talking about writing, which is one of those reasons I regard the dayjob as one of the best-damn-dayjobs ever Details as follows: Introduction to Creative Writing Presented by Peter Ball If you’re the kind of person who loves books and films, who gets brilliant ideas for characters and plots while sitting on the bus, who scribbles in a journal or is just inspired to imagine and create stories… well, it’s quite likely you’re a writer! Take the plunge and join us for this four-week course where you will explore your unique writing voice, discover your own abilities and learn new tools and exercises to nurture that inner storyteller.
PeterMBall
28/02/2012
Works in Progress
Horn Spotting
So back in 2010 I get an email from Alisa over at Twelfth Planet sent me an email that said, in effect, there’s some people making a TV show that’d like to use a couple of TPP books as background props. Apparently there are contracts that needed to be signed when this kind of thing happens, which is one of those things about making television that I never really thought about, and I was being given a heads up that the permission had been granted and there was some kind of TV show which may or may not use Horn and a bunch of other Australian small press books in the background. This was two days after my dad’s heart attack, so I mostly nodded and made sure there was nothing I needed to be doing and went back to fretting and coping with the fact that my dad was due for open heart surgery in a few days time.
PeterMBall
16/02/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Stories told, Stories Consumed, and a link to Cats Sleeping
There was no story unlocked when I walked across the Kurilpa bridge this morning, which is a matter of some sorrow to me. I was counting on that moment today, since I’m looking askance at the second chapter of Claw and trying to figure out what’s going to go in there. I know some things, yes: corpses, cheerfully gloomy coroners, a modicum of angst. It’s just the details that go around that I’m struggling with at the moment, writing a paragraph or two before thinking, no, that’s not right, and going back to the well for a new idea. I’m sure there’s something coming, sooner or later, but it isn’t quite there yet. Everything that’s been written thus far is weighed down by the burden of history, calling back to Horn and Bleed, and the thing that made me happy about the draft of chapter one is how much less of that it does than the last time I tried to write
PeterMBall
09/02/2012
Journal
The Writer in a Silly Hat
I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last few weeks. Not that she’s wrong about me posting a picture here, just the time frame: Best. Present. Ever. The hat came about because my sister buggered off to Nepal a few months back, planning on walking to the base camp of Everest, and asked if there was anything I wanted. Usually when my sister goes places I shrug and mumble something non-committal and end up with a motley array of t-shirts when she returns, but Tibet proved to be a special case. “You know what?” I said, “I’d really dig a sherpa hat.” The fact that she found one with its own woolly Mohawk is really
PeterMBall
04/01/2012
News & Upcoming Events
Things I wrote doing stuff out in the world
I’ve been meaning to drop past and blog a few things for the last couple of days, but my times largely been taking up by packing and writing and desperately trying to reach the pre-moving deadlines, and so most of this is old news to anyone following me on twitter or facebook. In any case, my story Dying Young from Eclipse 4 has been selected to be part of Gardner Dozois’ Years Best Science Fiction athology due out next year, which means I can go scratch another thing off the big ol’ list of places I’d like to get published but rarely talk about. There’s a full ToC over on SF Signal, and it looks like a very cool book to be included in. I should also mention that my story, The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again, is online over at Daily Science Fiction so that those who don’t want to subscribe can go check it out.
PeterMBall
13/12/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online
I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something). I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met
PeterMBall
07/12/2011
