Process Notes

Works in Progress

1) I’m writing in third person this year. This really isn’t my preferred narrative POV, but so it goes. I shall write slowly and suck more, neither of which are fatal conditions. 2) My writing goals are as they always were: take over the goddamn world. 3) I need to remove all forms of fiction from my work area for the foreseeable future. This would be easier if there wasn’t a bookshelf over my desk. 4) I’ve given up on planning this year. I write what needs to be written, then I write other stuff. 5) The parenthetical aside is a thing of evil. 6) There are edits that need doing. I should probably go do them.

PeterMBall 10/01/2011

Journal

Hello!

So, apparently I lied yesterday – I am back today. I didn’t mean to lie, or expect to be here, but after a day at the final Year of the Novel course at the Queensland Writer’s Cetnre there was a part of brain that clicked over and said wait, yes, I am meant to be writing, perhaps it’s time to reclaim that bit of my life again. And so I have critted work, and pondered problems with the novel-in-progress, and chatted with the awesome Angela Slatterabout when we can kick off write-club again and which day we can use so we can get some continuity going (we’ve traditionally used Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, all of which have become untennable due to semi-regular scheduling conflicts). It’s been chaotic fortnight around these parts – it kicked off with the news of my dad’s heart attack on the 24th of October that saw me spend much of the week on the Gold Coast,

PeterMBall 06/11/2010

Works in Progress

Process

So after a week of sturm-und-drang and putting forthblog posts and twitters that worry my parents, it’s time to get back to the talking cats. There seems to a process when I sit down to write novellas. It starts with this is easy, no problem, which is quickly replaced by aaargh! WTF? Who thought I could do this, and it eventually reaches okay, I’ll dump everything and start over, with a plan; planning for the win! This usually coincides with a healthy slice of screw this, I just want to write short stories, which is usually followed by some OMG, I totally forgot how to write a short story type flailing. Guess which stage I hit a few days ago. Fortunately, I’m already aware I’ve been here before and things worked out. It’s handy to track these things, sometimes. From memory there’s a stage or two that follows this one, although the fact that Claw is part of the series

PeterMBall 20/10/2010

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writing, Budgeting, and Shame

My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the moment of parity between the Australian dollar and the US*. In fact, I’m not really leaving the house much for anything, really. All of this takes considerable mental energy on my part, because the impulse is there to do all of them and in some cases (say, Locus) I can even partially justify why I should do them. Such are the realities of paying off credit card debt in my current circumstances – I’ve trimmed my budget to focus as much as possible on paying off the accumulated debt of the last year, and even then the realities of credit interest meant I’m only dropping the

PeterMBall 19/10/2010

Works in Progress

Metrics!

For the first time in a long while, I’ve managed to write two thousand words in the space of a day. While this is certainly good news around these parts, it comes with the somewhat sickening realisation that Giving Up Coffee is Working. Interestingly, kicking the draft version of Claw into gear has involved sketching the bare bones of a scene – basically, getting the conflict and the final line down – then trusting that I’ll be able to come back and flesh things out once I’ve got the structure in place. This is a new and different territory so far as my process goes, and may well come back to bite me in a few thousand words time. ________________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30 Rejections in 2010: 21/100 Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)

PeterMBall 03/10/2010

Journal

Coffee, Meaning, and Getting What You Get

I woke up this morning with a desire to blog, only to discover that the back end of my website is down for some kind of regular maintenance, and this presents problems because I’ve grown so used to using it that the thought of posting straight to livejournal seems redundant. So instead I write this elsewhere and assume it’ll go online sooner or later. It’s 8:36 in the morning. It’s raining. I’m barefoot and wearing my oversized winter writing coat and listening to old Cure songs. There’s a list of five things I want to accomplish today sitting beside the keyboard. The first thing on the list is the production of words for Claw. The second thing on the list is the revision of words for Black Candy. If you read yesterday’s post, you may be seeing a theme. Right now I’m missing coffee. Not the caffeine or the taste of it, just the comforting way it used to fit

PeterMBall 03/10/2010

Works in Progress

Once more into the breach, dear friends…

We’re fighting the doldrums here in the word-mines this week, trying to bully my work ethic into something resembling its normal state after house-guests, cons and the furious rush of getting a new book into existence. Such lapses are not unexpected, but they are unacceptable, and so I’ve deployed the Spokesbear into his advisory position and sat down with my giant to-do list of doom to work out what needs to be done for the rest of September. And so, September gets declared a win if I achieve the following: – Write the first 25,000 words of Claw, the third Miriam Aster Novella (This is the only non-negotiable thing on my list at the moment, since it has a deadline of November 15th and I want plenty of time to whip it into shape) – Revise the first 25,000 words of Black Candy (I tried to get this finished this book before worldcon, but redrafting led me to realise I’d

PeterMBall 13/09/2010

Works in Progress

16 Days ’til Worldcon

And rejection 16 for the year arrived in my inbox this morning, which means there’s an outside chance that I may hit 20 rejections before the end of August. I like those numbers, . They mean things are starting to pick a bit on the writing front, especially since eleven of this year’s rejections have arrived in the last three months. And, honestly, I was going to do a longer post on rejection and laziness and how nice it is to have the regular stream of people saying “no, not for us,” amid the occasional “yes, we like, we’ll take it”, but I’ve already wasted my hour of blogging time thinking of the right way to say it. Suffice to say that I love my rejections – they make me want to get back on the computer and belt out a new story – and now I have to go and write a bunch of words on the novel *without deleting

PeterMBall 17/08/2010

Works in Progress

Writing Space

And so I have hit the point where I need to tackle that debacle that is my writing desk, which has been looking like this since I got back from my cat-sitting adventure: The irony of this is that I rarely spend much time writing at said desk, even when it is cleared off. I can chug along quite happily for weeks, writing in bed and on the couch and at the computer set up on the computer desk. Cleaning off the desk is a mindset thing more than anything else – having the dedicated space where I can retreat where’s there’s no internet or television or, well, sleeping to be done is a large part of doing more than the bare minimum of writing. ________________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 4 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30 Rejections in 2010: 15/100 Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

PeterMBall 13/08/2010

Works in Progress

The Writing To-Do list for 2010

Yesterday I sat down with the Spokesbear, a bunch of e-mail, my copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and a notepad to construct my to-do list for the rest of the year. It’s a habit I fell into a few years back (well, sans the Booklife part, but I suspect I’ll be rereading it often in July’s to come); those who’ve been following the blog for a while might remember the 80-Point-Plant for Awesomeness that resulted from last year’s state-of-the-union style gutcheck. Usually I’m pretty quiet about the results, but after reviewing my issues with last years list I’m going to go public with the writing portion of the process this year. It’s somewhat long. Sorry about that. If you want to skip it, I promise there will be more cat-sitting stories tomorrow. Some thoughts on the list before we kick off: – There’s a large amount of background work that goes into the decision of what to do with the

PeterMBall 22/07/2010

Works in Progress

Conversations with Works In Progress

Act One: Yesterday’s Short Story Idea Peter sits at Fritz the Laptop, planning his writing time for the day. WIP: Oooo, I haz a title. Peter: Go away, I’m meant to be working on my novel right now. WIP: “The Unicorns of Suffragette Three” Peter: … Peter: No. I will not be lured. Aroynt. WIP: (sing-song and tempting) I have an op-en-ing par-a-graaaaaph. Peter: You do not. WIP: Yes, actually, I do. Look it’s this. (Whispers in ear) Peter: … WIP: See? Peter: I hate you. WIP: You really don’t. Peter: … Peter: Fine. Lets talk. WIP: Good. Peter: So… WIP: I wish to be long. Peter: How long? I mean, crap, I don’t have time to write something long right now. You can have five thousand words, I think. I’d really like it if you’d fit into five thousand words. Six at the outside. WIP: I want more. Peter: How much more? WIP: I want…ten thousand. Peter: Eight. WIP:

PeterMBall 16/07/2010

Works in Progress

“Unicorns? Unicorns? Tra-la-la?”

This phrase has been running through my head for two days now, often borrowing David Bowie’s voice and intonation from a bit in Labyrinth where he says something very similar. It just sits there, repeated over and over, refusing to go away. This doesn’t become dangerous until I start listening to Suffragette City and pondering what happens when I mash Unicorns and the Goblin King Jared and space stations named after David Bowie songs together. It may be congealing into a story. I thought I was done with unicorns. Alas, I am not that lucky. People are going to start thinking that me and unicorns have a thing (I swear to god we’re just good friends). Wait, ‘scuse me a sec, I have to go chase a chicken out of the kitchen. Peter disappears to chase a chicken away from the cat food. Chicken leaves kitchen with cries of Attica! Attica! The chickens really do get a raw deal, what

PeterMBall 15/07/2010

Tag: Process Notes

Process Notes

Hello!

Process

Writing, Budgeting, and Shame

Metrics!

Coffee, Meaning, and Getting What You Get

Once more into the breach, dear friends…

16 Days ’til Worldcon

Writing Space

The Writing To-Do list for 2010

Conversations with Works In Progress

“Unicorns? Unicorns? Tra-la-la?”

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