Tag: Process Notes
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

On Writing In the Morning

Putting this one here as a kind of addendum to my last post: it’s time to start bringing the laptop to work and spending my morning writing-shift down in the State Library cafe. With everything being all NOW NOW NOW inside my head in the lead-up to GenreCon, it’s becoming increasingly easy to come into work early and start putting out fires (metaphorically speaking) related to the event. This isn’t why I come into work early every morning. Much as I like my job, I don’t like it enough that I’m willing to spend an extra hour a day working on it without getting paid (well, I am, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve stayed late to get some urgent stuff done a couple of times in the last month, but I’m not willing to give my job this particular writing hour).  The morning writing shift has become increasingly sacred to me over the last couple of months, which is weird, ’cause I’m

PeterMBall 17/10/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

A Few More Ideas About Ideas

You know what’s handy when you pre-write a bunch of blog posts and set them to post while you’re away? Actually remembering to set them to post. Seems I forgot to hit the all-important Publish button in my rush to get ready for the Adelaide trip last week, which means we’re starting the dancing monkey series a little later than expected. If there’s a topic you’d like to throw into the mix, you can still do so by pitching it here.  A Few More Ideas About Ideas A few years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the often-maligned question of where do your ideas come from. I wrote it ’cause I didn’t like the way most writers behaved when they were asked that question, and ’cause I kind of like understanding my process. Plus, as a guy whose occasionally asked to teach people how to write, it’s a useful thing to be able to talk about process

PeterMBall 15/08/2012
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
Works in Progress

Rain & Writing & Too Much Pizza, Man

It’s been raining in Brisbane for the last few days, but it appears that the rain has finally given up and sunlight is starting to peek through again. This makes me rather melancholy; I was rather enjoying the rain and the cold snap and watching the bands of grey cloud overhead while taking my afternoon stroll around the block. The best part about the rain has been walking the path alongside our local drainage ditch, where the grass is the kind of green I’d forgotten grass could be and the drainage ditch actually does an impressive job of seeming like a stream. # So I wrote a few things last night. Mostly the fifth installment of the Flotsam series, which was overdue and then overdue again on the date I said I’d have it sent through after emailing the editor and letting her know it’d be overdue. Afterwards I did a couple of hundred words on some new things. Flotsam

PeterMBall 10/05/2011
Journal

‘Tis a busy type of day today, so I’m going to just ramble on about things for the breif period I’ll be home between the first dayjob and the second. Plus there are several workmen helpfully digging up the road out the front of my house, ostensibly to lay down something or other involving pipes large enough to crawl through, which inevitably means my power or my internet or my phone line will go out at some point in the very near future. # On the list of conversations I never expected to have with my father, the one that starts with do you have any Warhammer 40k novels I could borrow? is pretty damn high on the list. I also never expected the answer to be yes, but you can’t borrow them right now, but you can have the short story anthologies if you like. Yet, somehow, we had that conversation yesterday, and my copies of Tales of the Heresy and

PeterMBall 10/03/2011
Works in Progress

A grumpy, crabby kind of blog post

Yesterday… Well, yesterday I did not run away and join the circus, but it was probably one of those days where I would have if I had viable circus-type skills and access to a travelling circus to run away with. I did not turn into the Incredible Hulk and smash things in a frenzy of anger. I did not resign from my dayjob to take up a position that would be more useful to the world at large, such as hunting werewolves or wrangling wild unicorns or, you know, going into politics. But, oh,  I was sorely tempted. Especially by the werewolf thing, which, really, goes to show how much I disliked certain aspects of yesterday, because I’m actually quite fond of werewolves. # We actually had a full cohort at write-club last night, which is the first time all four write-clubbers have been in the same place since other people started joining the inimitable Angela Slatter and I on a regular

PeterMBall 09/03/2011
Works in Progress

International Women’s Day and A Writer’s Woe

Today is International Women’s Day, which is one of those days that ought to be celebrated. I’m tempted to post more, but everything I come up with always sounds a little “yay for women” and/or overly patronizing, which isn’t really what I’m aiming for on a day that’s all about women’s causes and their achievements. So, instead, I’m going to go find a worthy and appropriate cause to donate money to in celebration of the day. And later, possibly, I will attempt to write something doesn’t make me feel like a misogynist arse every time I touch the keyboard. # I sent off the third story in the Flotsam series yesterday, after which I collapsed into bed and tried to sleep and eventually gave up and read all of The Hunger Games in one fell swoop because it was there and I was too lazy to climb out of bed and get something else to read and it was obvious that sleep

PeterMBall 08/03/2011
Works in Progress

On the…

A few years ago I wrote a story titled On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves, which eventually found its way into Fantasy Magazine in 2008. About a year after that I wrote On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War Machines of the Merfolk, which showed up in Strange Horizons in 2009 and then went on to be reprinted in a years best collection and pod-casted and other such things. I didn’t write an On The… story in 2010, despite my best intentions to do so. This makes me a little sad, ’cause it’s one of those things that I meant to do and simply didn’t find the time for.  In my head they’re part of an ongoing series, albeit a rather slow-moving one, and there’s a file on my computer where I put notes regarding possible titles. Every now and then I’d open the file, pick a title, and start writing, and somehow the story would always mutate

PeterMBall 01/03/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Saturday Morning

It’s Saturday morning and I’m drinking instant coffee. Maccona Classic Dark Roast with milk and one sugar, for those who might be interested, although I have no earthly idea why you would be. In an hour or so I’m going to ignore the rest of the internet and start talking to the scattered members of my online crit group, who conveniently double as a group of good and articulate friends, so there’s still good reason to skype on the dates when we’re meant to be critting and no-one actually submitted things. This, I suspect, is as close to being one of the hidden secrets of writing as I can think of – find people you enjoy talking too who happen to be writers, then talk to them as often as you can. Ideas will form, ambitions will solidify, and the day-to-day despair of being underpaid and frustrated by the blank page will gradually fall by the wayside. I remember this far

PeterMBall 12/02/2011
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

Toil

‘Tis actually a horrible name for the blog post, ’cause the writing thing doesn’t actually feel much like toil this week. Not even yesterday when it took me seven hours, total, to get fifteen hundred words down across two projects. There is probably toil coming though – there’s a Flotsam deadline looming in nine and a half days – but for the moment I get to skip through the word mines surrounded by bone-white moths and singing ravens and tinkling silver bells whose chimes echo strangely in the dark and shady corners. Plus I have Leonard Cohen CDs on, which is always a source of the happy. One day I will remember that the cure for not-writing is writing, rather than having to relearn that lesson every time I stop. I recently chatted to a friend of mine who enjoys the discussion of toil on the blog, watching the numbers stack up and the reports of work done come in. I

PeterMBall 27/01/2011
Works in Progress

Day Planner

Today I am: a) writing b) making plans c) washing up d) buggering off early to play DnD Last night there was write-club, whereupon I wrote about fifteen hundred words on my next Flotsam story, then sat up into the wee hours forcing myself to write 250 words on the novel project for 2011 (which is currently called Tarnished Silver Swords, but once existed under the working title of the weird lovecrafty-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo-novel; neither of these is workable as a final title). I thank Trent Jamieson for the reminder to do the latter, courtesy of his recent blogpost aboutgetting stuff done despite being a procrastinating slacker (which is not to say that Trent is a procrastinating slacker, just that I am and his advice came at the right point to remedy that). There has been too much not-writing in my life this January. I have another five days to rectify that.

PeterMBall 26/01/2011

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