Stress – Peter M. Ball

Works in Progress

Shadows

So there’s a shortlist for the 2010 Australian Shadows horror awards available online, which includes Bleed in the Long Fiction category alongside such brilliant works as Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories and Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine and a handful of books I haven’t yet come across but I’m sure are excellent ’cause, really, once you start with Madigan Mine and The Girl with No Hands I’m inclined to just trust the judges tastes – those books are freakin’ great. So it’s a happy sort of day, even if it feels a bit odd to be on the short list because Bleed isn’t really a horror story. The complete short-list looks something like this, and it’s full of names that I’m very happy to see on short-lists. Congratulations to all who made it. LONG FICTION Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott (Picador Australia) The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga Publications) Guardian of the Dead by

PeterMBall 25/02/2011

Works in Progress

Fists of Steel: The snooze button edition.

– Gauntlet, an update: distractions, distractions, distractions. One Flotsam story is down, which means there’s three to go ‘fore the Gauntlet is done. I lost much of the afternoon catching up on things that needed doing (deadlines, proofs, contracts) – The weekend was long and only about 30% pleasant. I’m running short on sleep and planning on turning in early tonight. Hopefully today’s writing-induced adrenaline spike won’t keep me awake. I may take the laptop to bed and try to nail down 300 words of the lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft. – Tomorrow there is write-club and going through more proofs. February is odly busy on the writing-and-getting-stuff-out front.

PeterMBall 07/02/2011

Journal

Bad News

I’m going to be scarce this week. Yesterday my father went to hospital with what we’re not technically calling a heart attack (he has blocked arteries, but the “heart episode” didn’t result in damage to the heart muscle), and we’re currently waiting to find out when the bypass surgery is going to happen. Presumably it’ll be some time this week, after the blood thinners they gave him when he was first admitted have started to wear off. All in all, none of this news is as bad as it could have been – my dad has been extraordinarily lucky given the circumstances, and open heart surgery has been around long enough that the bigger concern than “they’re cutting him open and messing with his ticker” is “how is all this going to interact with his Parkinson’s medication.” It helps that my sister is a radiographer with experience working with cardiac-style cases, so we have a fairly accurate barometer of how

PeterMBall 25/10/2010

Journal

4 Things

1) This morning I introduced a friend to the glory that is Hark, A Vagrant, which is kind of like XKCD for literature and history nerds instead of math-geeks. I mention this purely because I just assume everyone reads these things, but every now and then I’ll be all “the hippos will always be hungry; they will never be satisfied” and people will be all “WTF Peter? That makes no sense.” 2) A fairly neat review of Twelfth Planet Press’s Sprawl anthology, which was released at Worldcon and contains new short stories by me and Angela Slatter and LL Hannett and many other awesome folks. In an odd moment of synchronicity, my contributor copy arrived in the mail yesterday too. Should you want your own copy, you can go order one on the TPP website. 3) I suspect being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers would be mildly uncomfortable. And no, you do not context for that. 4) I find myself, post-worldcon, staring at

PeterMBall 06/10/2010

Journal

Cutting back on coffee, redux

So it’s been a week since I started cutting back on caffeine, replacing my 9+ cups of coffee a day with a single cup in the morning and the occasional cup of tea in the afternoon. It’s made for a trying week, especially since it came with a side-order of mandatory workshopping and a slew of ongoing problems with my internet access*, so I haven’t yet gotten around to answering all the various people who keep asking “why, for the love of god, why?” whenever I mentioned this on various social media. The short-answer goes something like this: I recently availed myself to the counselling service the Australian social-security system offers to the long-term unemployed, during which we spoke of many things. The Fear was among them, as was my frustration at my inability to put a consistent writing routine together due to increasing anxiety about bills, rent, insomnia, the inability to find consistent employment, and assorted other issues I generally don’t

PeterMBall 27/09/2010

Journal

7 Days ’til Worldcon

Man, I’ve been all over the place for the last week. Good stuff happened and bad stuff happened and my emotional state bounced around like one of those 20-cent rubber crazy balls you used buy from the machines out the front of the grocery store, but there was rarely a moment where stuff happened all on its own and demanded no real engagement on my part. Fortunately the last three or four days have trended towards the good rather than the bad, but I suspect any seven day period that starts with your parents ringing from the other side of the world and saying “we were almost killed in a car crash” is going to struggle to come out ahead on points. Still, among the cool stuff: – Doing edits and contracts for my short story, L’esprit de L’escalier, which will be coming up at Apex Magazine in the future. Astute readers may put two-and-two together and realise this was

PeterMBall 26/08/2010

Journal

My Hate, I show it too you…

Peter wakes up to find the Spokesbear sitting on his chest, staring him in the face. Spokesbear: Time to work. Peter: Fuck off. Spokesbear: You’re not sick anymore. Peter: I feel like someone’s taken a razor blade to the inside of my oesophagus. Spokesbear: Yes, but you can *stare at a screen without bleeding from the eyes*. That means it’s time to work. Peter: You’re mean. Spokesbear: It’s what you pay me for. Peter: I pay you? Spokesbear: Yes. Peter: You’re an anthropomorphised fraction of my own subconscious guilt, why do you get paid? The Spokesbear punches Peter in the throat with a padded paw. Spokesbear: That’s why. Next time you ask a stupid question, I’m going after a kneecap. Peter: I kill you. The Spokesbear makes a cute face. Peter: Okay, I don’t kill you. Spokesbear: I don’t do this for free, dude. Time to work. Peter: Sadist. Spokesbear: Wuss. Peter: Crazy bear. Spokesbear: Slacker. Peter: Tyrant. Spokesbear: Slug.

PeterMBall 10/08/2010

Journal

Chaos and Rejection

It’s entirely possible that I’ll spontaneously combust at some point today. Somehow it’s become an intersection of deadlines, doctor’s appointments, social engagements and other madness that all needs to be done *now*. Naturally, I have a plan for getting everything done. Just as naturally, it’s all going to hell the moment I hit the doctor’s surgery. While I totally dig my local surgery, they’re often overbooked and the waiting times are haphazard. On the plus side, I seem to have moved past the nightmares where the stitches in my head split open and I bleed over my bed. Now the only thing waking me up is the stitches hurting when it gets really cold around 4 in the morning. In other news: the yearly rejection count hit 7 today, but this is counterbalanced by having the first new story sent out in a long, long while.

PeterMBall 14/06/2010

Journal

Doing my best not to swear in this post

I keep trying to be online this week, but the world moves against me. It has ever since Monday, when my internet provider decided I’d had enough of a good thing five minutes from the end of the latest Doctor Who on I-Tunes. Since then my internet access seems to have been choked to the point where I long for the glory days of dial-up where webpages could load in ten minutes on a good day. It’s gotten to the point that I have no idea whether this post will actually post – I’m writing it, hitting the publish button, and walking away for three or four hours. There’s even odds the connection will have itmed out before this paragraph was loaded onto the webpage. Needless to say, this presents problems with e-mail (it takes an hour for gmail to load, longer to actually get into a specific e-mail message). If you’re waiting on something, I’ll get back to you whenever

PeterMBall 03/06/2010

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

This Week, Furnished in Youtubery

Because I’m tired and unable to articulate much today, so I give you the general mood of my week via youtube clips from the family Wainwright. ‘Cause even if my week isn’t awesome, I can share the awesome of others. 1) Anger 2) Absurdity 3) An Ill-defined longing for longing

PeterMBall 11/09/2009

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

In which I overcomplicate the notion of furniture.

Allow me to introduce you to the great redundancy in my flat: The redundancy, for the curious, comes in couch form (and possibly the desk in the lower foreground since I’ve already got two others, but the desk is awesome and thus excused from such considerations). My lounge room can seat six or seven people, yet it’s rare that I’ll ever have that many people in my place. I’m a little weird about letting people into my space at the best of times, and I’ve filled all three couches only twice in a two-year period (and that was for gaming purposes, the one exception to my I don’t invite people around weirdness). Therefore the primary purpose of having three couches is so I can do horrible things to my back while falling asleep in front of the TV – swapping between the two-seat couch and the three-seat couch on a daily basis keeps the kinks from settling in one part.

PeterMBall 16/03/2009

Works in Progress

Thesis Update

Just dropping in with the following reports: The official wordcount (aka words actually in draft documents, rather than random notes) just topped 10k. I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually finished a chapter. I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually got a plan for proceeding that seems workable. This, of course, just means I have to get 20,000 words written between now and Wednesday evening. That’s a far worse thing than it sounds, incidently; I could probably get 5000 words a day done in a pinch, but I’ll be utterly useless for anything else afterwards and that’s not a luxury I’m going to get anytime soon. I suspect there will be some measure of begging for mercy in my near future.

PeterMBall 23/02/2009

Tag: Stress

Shadows

Fists of Steel: The snooze button edition.

Bad News

4 Things

Cutting back on coffee, redux

7 Days ’til Worldcon

My Hate, I show it too you…

Chaos and Rejection

Doing my best not to swear in this post

This Week, Furnished in Youtubery

In which I overcomplicate the notion of furniture.

Thesis Update

Book Information?

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