Word Counting – Page 3 – Peter M. Ball

Journal

Bookshelves, Write Club, and Interesting Things Said About Cities

I wasn’t going to spam you with dodgy phone-camera records of the Great Bookshelf Reorganisation of 2011, but I got a phone-call from my dad and at some point he asked for an update, and I like my dad enough that I’m going to oblige him. The photograph above contains the first seven shelves of the reorganisation – top left is the brag shelf, the first two on the right are the selected nonfiction shelves, and the rest are just books by writers that remind me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. The vast majority of books on those shelves were written by about a dozen authors, and in a year I’ll have to reorganise the whole thing because many of them are still releasing books. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with the bottom shelves, though. I tend to fill bookcases based on a theme, but bottom shelves ruin that by being

PeterMBall 02/03/2011

Works in Progress

Heading off for a few days

I’m preparing to decamp to the Gold Coast and hang out with my parents for a few days, which is a process that would probably go a lot better if I hadn’t just spent an hour drinking my morning coffee and checking my RSS feeds on the internets. On the other hand, the more internets I get out of my system now, the less time I spend wasting my parent’s bandwidth. I’ve also been deploying kitchen timers and to-do lists this week, which is slowly starting to make a difference when it comes to getting things done. I’m yet to actually finish a to-do list, mind, but I’m usually averaging five or six things on a list of ten goals for the day. I’m still debating whether the timer is going with me to the Gold Coast or not; in theory I’ll be spending the bulk of my time down there doing a rewrite on the sparse first-quarter of Claw

PeterMBall 08/10/2010

Works in Progress

To Do

Things I have to do today: write job applications; attend a meeting; pick up the mail at the PO Box; eat dinner with my parents. Things I wish I was doing today: fixing the current wordcount on Claw, since the bits I’ve got written thus far are so damn sparse and rough that it makes me itchy to think about them. What writing I’m going to get done today will take place in small gaps – a half-hour here, twenty minutes there. I suspect this will be enough to hit Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity (aka 500 words), but it may not be enough to hit the Comfort Zone (aka 2000 words) or a Good Day of Writing (aka 5,000+ words). All in all, I’m starting to remember how this writing thing goes again.

PeterMBall 05/10/2010

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

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

A Not Terribly Exciting Update

And lo, I am back. Going to buy groceries, then get some writing done (Note the new project du-jour in the Metrics below). ________________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 0 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30 Rejections in 2010: 19/100 Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)

PeterMBall 07/09/2010

Works in Progress

State of Play

Last night I braved the outside world and joined Trent Jamieson and Chris Lynch to talk about SF as part of the QUT Informational Professionals Alumni Chapter’s Bookclub, which was an enormous amount of fun given the books we were discussing (the fact that I’m a nerdy bibliophile who rather enjoys chatting about books didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that Trent and Chris are lovely blokes to share a panel with). Today I started tackling May’s to-do list from hell. It’s a long list, and its terrible, and there were at least two things on there with a deadline of “May 31st”. The first of these is done (short story submission, although given the length my stories are when I’m finishing them these days they may not deserve the title short); the second of these is daunting (going through the fourth rewrite of Cold Cases in preparation for May 31st, when I hand it back to TPP). The rest of the list has a little more

PeterMBall 11/05/2010

Works in Progress

Deathmarch, Day 2

I’ve been at it for six hours today, and I’m about halfway through the second chapter of the novella. I’m okay with that. The first half of the second chapter was actually the hard bit, given the amount of damage I’ve been doing to the plot. The second half is mostly rewriting a scene to fit it into a new location, which should be relatively easy to do. All in all, I’m digging the deathmarch as a way of getting this done. I always forget how happy I am when focusing on a story like this. It starts off feeling like a drag, this whole sense of OMG-there-is-so-much-to-do, but once I’m underway it all settles into a comfortable routine and things get done. I like it when things get done. I like it even more when I can spend two hours on the couch, staring into space while I try to figure out how I get between two points in

PeterMBall 20/04/2010

Works in Progress

Novella Death March: Day One

About ten hours ago I parked myself in front of the laptop and started rewriting Cold Cases. I came up for air a few times, primarily to check e-mail and eat cake, but otherwise I’ve had a pretty consistent day at the keyboard working on the novella. I’ve made a terrible mess of the story. Possibly seven or eight terrible messes, given the plethora of drafts littering my computer. This is the way rewriting goes in my neck of the woods. I fiddle with things. I break them and see what’s wrong. I look at a scene and wonder what the hell I was thinking, then hammer away at it until it starts to look a little better. Also, rewrote the first chapter. Like, heavy rewriting of the first chapter. And for the first time, I actually like the way it ends. The 2010 rejection count has hit 2. That means there’s just 98 rejections to go

PeterMBall 19/04/2010

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Whip It and Writing

1) Whip It I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog post-reviewy thing about Whip It for about two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen. Not because I think it’s a bad film – it’s utterly charming in its ability to recognise that something can be simultaneously camp as hell and the most important thing in the whole damn world – but because it fits into the same space as contemporary art where I find my critical vocabulary isn’t really up to the task of expressing what I’m thinking about after seeing the film. My short, haphazard take on the film goes something like this: it’s endearing. Specifically, the kind of awkward-coming-of-age endearing you find in Taylor Swift film-clip, only Whip It comes without the puritanical undercurrent that usually causes me to froth at the mouth when encountering Swift’s oeuvre (and thus, Whip It comes closer to having actual substance). The film

PeterMBall 08/03/2010

Works in Progress

Chairman of the Bored

My process, an overview: start a new story; write eight hundred words; start another new story; write three hundred words; think “fuck, I really do need to finish a novel”; make revision notes for Black Candy; realise Black Candy is horribly flawed and wonder if starting a new novel will be easier; write a hundred words; hate them; write another hundred words; hate them too; pick up a finished novel and read the opening paragraph; think “the new novel I’m writing is complete pants. I’ll start a new one.”; write 100 words; delete one hundred words; work on black Candy; start a blog post about Whip It; delete it; start a blog post about how much I hate writing; delete it; work on the second short-story I started; work on the first short-story I started; work on Black Candy; start a new novel; research boredom on Wikipedia; find the following quite comforting and accurate – Boredom has been defined by C.

PeterMBall 03/03/2010

Works in Progress

This Weeks Project

It took me most of February to get there, but I finally climbed back on the submission horse and sent out short stories last night. Night quite the February I’d planned for back at the beginning, but given the distractions of dead computers, illness, parental birthdays and toothaches I’m settling for getting 25% of the way towards my submission goal and carrying the rest over to the month of March. This week I’m getting even more basic and going for straight wordcount goals. Between now and the 7th of March I’m aiming at the following: In other news, the most excellent peep Jason Fischer is co-editing an upcoming issue of Midnight Echo and he’s looking for cross-genre SF/Horror works. And I’m almost out of coffee, so that’s it for me this morning.

PeterMBall 01/03/2010

Tag: Word Counting

Bookshelves, Write Club, and Interesting Things Said About Cities

Heading off for a few days

To Do

Metrics!

Once more into the breach, dear friends…

A Not Terribly Exciting Update

State of Play

Deathmarch, Day 2

Novella Death March: Day One

Whip It and Writing

Chairman of the Bored

This Weeks Project

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