Tag: Random Observations
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Lady of Situations and Moby Dick

I’m always a bit ish-ish about recommending books to people. Giving books to people is fine – there are few things I enjoy more than randomly giving friends books they might enjoy – but asking people to trust my taste and spend their hard-earned money on something is…ish-ish. This doesn’t mean I don’t do it. And after slinging stones in their direction last month about some writer’s guidelines I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few of  Ticonderoga Publications publications, especially since they’re running a sale that takes  10% off pre-orders and 20% off direct orders of their existing fiction until the February. The former, for instance, would include Bluegrass Symphony by L.L. Hannett in both Hardcover and Softcover, while the latter would include Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories, and ordering work from either of these fine writers would be a worthwhile use of your hard-earned discretionary cash. I’d also point out that aspiring writers

PeterMBall 17/02/2011
Journal

The Day After Valentine’s Day

I’ve just seen the first review of Electric Velocipde 21/22, courtesy of Lois Tilton at Locus online, and it says very nice things about Memories of Chalice and recommends it to readers. I’m going to steal a bit from the end, since the beginning mostly sets up what the story’s about: While the narrator speaks of dollars, rock stars and penthouses, the setting seems more to be some timeless European castle in a valley isolated from the mundane world, where wealthy gnomes guard vast fortunes in their vaults beneath the mountains. This author is one I always look forward to; his offerings are fine and well-crafted. And really, there are worse ways to begin the day than reading that, aren’t there? You can read the entire review for EV 21/22 and a few other fine magazines over at the Locus website. # Yesterday I stopped off to buy some groceries on the way home from work and the guy manning

PeterMBall 15/02/2011
Journal

Credit Where Credit’s Due

On Friday night, after a panel at the QWC’s One Book, Many Brisbanes program, I got the opportunity to go hang out with Cat Sparks, Trent Jamieson, and the elusive Ben Payne. There was beer and chatter and hot chips with tomato sauce. The true value of this experience probably doesn’t sink in unless you know Cat and Trent and Ben, but fortunately for me I do, so I got to be there (although, given I had to drive home, I elected to drink coke. This seems to keep happening when I find myself in pubs; somehow I seem to have lost the ability to get my drink on). Should you not know Cat and Trent, the short version goes something like this: one is the author of Death Most Definite and Managing Death and more quality short stories than you can poke a stick at, while the other possesses a resume similarly stacked with quality short stories and recently

PeterMBall 14/02/2011
Journal

Sunday Morning

When I was about twenty I lived in a motel, and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever rented in my life. If you’ve read Bleed, you’re already kinda familiar with it, ’cause it served as the basis for Palm Tree Row and abandoned motel where Aster finds the corpse. If you read the second installment of Flotsam when it comes out, the motel pops up again, albeit in a more inhabited form.  It’s one of those touchstone places in terms of my fiction, a secret I’m still trying to unravel. The motel had these green fluorescent lights running along the first floor patios that turned on automatically at sunset and stayed on until midnight, which meant my second floor bedroom was lit up with an alien-abduction glow that was accompanied by the unearthly buzz that close comes from close proximity to bad lighting. One of my neighbours was a six-four American hip-hop fan with tourette’s who used to come home at

PeterMBall 13/02/2011
Journal

Things I Would Be Blogging About, Were I Blogging this December

1) The rejuvenating power of The Birthday Party’s Release the Bats when you’re tired, pissed off, and generally unwilling to engage with things. 2) How unfeasibly cool it is that Angela Slatter had her books mentioned on Ellen Datlow’s list of book recommendations for XMas. 3) The somewhat tricky process of making the first installment of Flotsam, my series due for the Edge of Propinquity next year, work the way I want it to work. 4) Getting the chance to interview Dan Abnett for a friend’s podcast, only to have the technology fail us at a crucial moment and steal away the audio. 5) Plans for the blog in the new year, many of which have already been discarded as unworkable because, yo, I am weary of plans. After being lured back to the working world by the promise of paying rent and eating meals that consist of more than potatoes and Soylent Green, I’m finding the ideas of plans

PeterMBall 20/12/2010
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
News & Upcoming Events

L’esprit de L’escalier live at Apex Magazine

So the latest issue of Apex Magazine is now online and features my story L’esprit de L’escalier about a guy, and endless staircase, and the things you think about during the descent. There’s already some discussion about the story taking place over at I09 which has left me thinking, among other things, “wow, I really do need to read House of Leaves.” And since we’re talking Apex, I’m going to take the opportunity to re-post something that the Apex Chief Alien Jason Sizemore put up on their blog recently. It interests me for two reasons: firstly, because Apex has been pretty good to me as a writer. This is the third of my stories they’ve published, and the first two have managed to sneak onto the occasional recommended reading list and awards shortlist, but I was a fan of the magazine long before I was published there. I subscribed, back when they were a semi-pro hardcopy magazine, and I’ve signed up to

PeterMBall 09/09/2010
Journal

A Post in Four Parts

1) There’s is nothing quite so pleasant as heading out to one of your favorite bookstores on a rainy night and having someone read to you, but it’s doubly awesome when the topic du-jour is the Art of the Reading. The irony is that this totally wasn’t my idea – my sister e-mailed a few days back and asked if I’d be interested, and I was all “sick now, whatever, yeah? Put me down as a yes and leave me alone.” And so I was put down for a yes and Tuesday night rolled around and after I remembered I needed to be somewhere at somewhen there was much confused flailing and wondering what the hell I’d gotten into and then…then…then there was a pleasant night of awesomeness. And Nando’s chicken for afters, ’cause nothing says “pleasant night of literary discussion” like following things up with fast food. 2) I’m finally starting to find my routine again after nearly two

PeterMBall 11/08/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Furnace Room Lullabye

Since it came up in comments on in the livejournal feed, I’m going to make quick mention of this. I can understand the desire to make fun of country music, because much of it isn’t my thing and there are far too many examples of bad country music out there (especially in Australian, where the genre deserves to be razed to the ground merely for the existence of Slim Dusty). But it’s worth remembering that for every ten or eleven bad examples  there is at least one good, often lurking in the background, that wouldn’t exist if we put up with the genre as a whole. I mean, country music gave us the genre of rockabilly (which was good) which in turn gave us The Living End (which was not). It gave us Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails tunes and giving them a tenderness they never would have had in their original incarnation. I will argue tooth and nail

PeterMBall 25/07/2010
Big Thoughts

Apropo of Nothing

My friend Jason Fischer has expressed his consternation regarding author bios that mention cats in the past, so I feel obligated to mention this in the interests of scientific research: People love them some cats.  I mean, seriously, the spike in visitors once I started blogging about the cat-sitting scares me a little (and that was *before* Angela linked to them). I find myself thinking of the motivational poster that went up on John Scalzi’s site a few days after he taped bacon to his cat. People love cat-related stories, Mister Fischer. They like knowing the cats exist and that you have them. Give it up, mate. The Cats win. ________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 3 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30 Rejections in 2010: 12/100 Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

PeterMBall 24/07/2010
Gaming

Farewell Gen Con Oz 2010

I talked to the inimitable Ben Francisco over the weekend and was immediately reminded of the fact that this doesn’t happen often enough. There is something dreadfully wretched about having people I enjoy talking too spread across the globe, accessible only via chat programs that require one of us to be awake at an ungodly hour. Not that it would change if he were local, because I am inherently lazy and am horrible at catching up with people, but there it is. Fortunately the gist of the conversation was largely worldcon is coming, yay, which means there will be a whole bunch of people I enjoy talking too in the same place at the same time. Including Ben. Which will be awesome. About ten minutes after this conversation I read the press release informing the world that Gen Con Australia is cancelled in 2010. Needless to say, this cast a pallor over the rest of the weekend. I tried to write

PeterMBall 19/07/2010
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I Write Like

Bugger who I write like*, when presented with a tool of complex literary analysis such as this I can think of only one sensible thing to do with it. And now I give the you the results of my most important and detailed analysis: When you plug in the lyrics to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back, you get: I write like J. D. Salinger I Write Likeby Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing! And this amuses me no end. Poor Holden Caulfield – if only he’d learned to dial 1-900-mix-a-lot, his life could have been very different**. So can we all go back to the infinately more interesting 30 Days of Television meme now? * I tried Horn, got “You write like Jane Austen”, then figured we were done. ** Of course, on further reflection, it makes perfect sense. No-one understands poor Holden and who understands those rap guys anyway?

PeterMBall 16/07/2010

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