Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 125

The Day After the Unity Walk

A few weeks ago my sister signed up for the Unity Walk to raise money for Parkinson's Queensland. Her initial goal, quite modestly, was raising $500 in sponsorship.

By last Sunday, when she started the walk, she'd raised $2185, most of that in the seven-day period between her first putting the link up on Facebook and now. According to the Unity Walk website, she was the second highest individual fund-raiser in the state.

I know a bunch of people donated after reading about the walk on this blog. Some did it openly, some anonymously, and everyone did so generously.

We wanted to say thank-you. You people, you all rock in the hardest and most rocking-est kind of way.

 

 

Unity Walk Redux

My sister's posted a short blog about the reason she's doing the Unity Walk for Parkinson's Australia. It goes a little something like this:

My Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2003, although in hindsight, he had probably been suffering some of the symptoms for about fifteen years before that.

Since the diagnosis came through, Dad has accepted this condition that life has chosen for him. He's never once asked 'Why me?', I've never heard him complain, he accepts the physical limitations imposed on him, and while he doesn't often ask for help, he does accept it gratefully when offered.

Parkinson's Queensland have been an enormous help to Dad, and Mum, who is inevitably his primary carer. They were there to offer advice on what medical staff in hospital needed to know when Dad had his heart operation last year. They provide visits to centres to show what little devices around the home are going to make life just a little bit easier. And they offer support to thousands of Parkinson's sufferers across Queensland, just like Dad.

So Sunday, I'll be walking for Dad, and the many thousands like him across Queensland. Thank you for your support.

At this point Sally's raised the $1,000 she was aiming for (already $500 more than she initially thought she'd get), making her the third-highest fund-raiser for the walk at the time I'm posting this. Given that she's only $500 off becoming the second highest fund-raiser of the walk,  I figured I'd make another mention of her walk and point people in the direction of her donation page, just in case you've found five bucks hiding in the back of your couch and you aren't entirely sure what to do with it.

And she's right about all the things she says here, especially the stuff about my dad, but it doesn't change the baseline message. Parkinson's sucks; Parkinson's Queensland is a source of help for people who need it long-term.

Besides, the Spokesbear totally thinks you should donate a couple of bucks, and there is no choice but to obey the spokesbear.

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So this weird thing has been happening for the past couple of days, and it largely goes something like this. I'll boot up Fritz the Laptop and think, "I'll just write 1,000 words on the next Flotsam story," and then I'll sit there and write 1,000 words or so over the course of an hour or two. The number is kind of variable – today was a 2k day, after all, because I was over Write Clubbing with Angela Slatter, and some days I'm aiming for 500 words instead – but by and large the result is the same. Pick a number, write that much, walk away feeling content that I've done enough.

This is not the way my writing process goes. I know, because I've been training myself to embrace this process ever since I started the old day-job back in November of last year. My process is resistant to the idea of enough, it's resistant to the idea of hitting goals, and its generally slow (like, snail with a broken leg slow).

Because I am nothing if I do not have da-writing-dramaz, I have decided this should freak me out a little. Because I have deadlines, however, I've decided to let it freak me out *after* the next Flotsam installment is done. All I have to do is write 2,000 words a day for the next three days, and I should be comfortably done with the first draft. My little nervous break-down about suddenly becoming competent and guilt-free can wait until then.

The Spokesbear, of course, just gives me serious and exasperated looks, muttering something about horses, gifts, and mouths.

My Sister is Walking For Parkinsons Queensland

My father has Parkinson's disease. It's one of those things I don't talk about here, but the short version is this: as a disease, it sucks in a pretty major way. It sucks for the person who has it, and it sucks for the people who care about them. It's a degenerative disorder of the nervous system that causes a reduction in the dopamine levels, and it causes tremors, slowness of movement, muscle rigidity, instability and has associated affects that are even less fun.

This Sunday my sister is planning on doing the Parkinsons Unity Walk to raise money for Parkinson's Queensland and she's currently collecting donations from supporters. If you're in a position to sling a couple of bucks her way between now and Sunday, please consider doing so. Not just because it's a good cause – there's lot of good causes – but because this is a pretty damn personal cause for me, my sister, and my family. Parkinson's isn't curable with our current understanding of the brain and the disease. At best, it can be managed. One of the things Parkinson's Queensland does is help thousands of people across Queensland do just that, working to help parkinsons' suffers lead productive lives after they've been diagnosed. They provide support and advocacy, counselling and information.

This isn't an easy post to write. For better or worse, this isn't something I dwell upon in public all that often, and the number of times I've written things and deleted them is…considerable. Parkinsons makes me angry, it makes me scared, and it makes me extraordinarily sad that it's a disease that's touched my family and the families of far too many people I know. To repeat the sentiment we started with: Parkinson's sucks, big time, and I'm forever grateful that there are organisations like Parkinsons Queensland who are there to counsel, support and help the people who have it. People who will have it for the rest of their lives, measuring the effects accross a span of years, knowing that it's never going to get better.

I'll be scraping together what I can from my paycheque this week to donate, and the only thing I can guarantee is that it won't be enough. If you'd care to join me in sponsoring Sally on her walk, please do. If you'd prefer to donate to Parkinson's Queensland directly, that'd rock pretty hard too.

Rain

More rain, today, and I do love the rain. Last night I turned off all the lights around nine o'clock, trundled off to bed with Fritz the Laptop, and wrote things while it was deliciously cold and wet and almost rainy. There were houses in the neighborhood who'd lit their wood fires, filling the air with a piney-smokey scent. It was…kinda awesome really. A deeply satisfying end to the evening, and one where I felt utterly justified in finishing my writing stint after hitting the thousand word goal I'd set myself.

Completely satisfying days at the keyboard come along so rarely that I celebrate them when they happen. My default state is…anger, I guess. Desperation. An incessant need to do more. Doing *enough* is a foreign concept. There is never enough, really, just nights where I feel like I've reached the outer borders.

This morning I've been plugging dates into calendars, marking off deadlines. I'm plugging in things I'd like to go do, writers festivals and gaming conventions and catch-ups with friends, many of which have been floating around my subconscious for months without me ever plugging them into a calendar and figuring out whether I can actually go to them, or I just think I can. I've been at it for an hour now, and I'm still nowhere near done.

I'm looking askance at things like, say, the Queensland Poetry Festival, trying to figure how much time I can spend there without utterly blowing the next Flotsam deadline (some, but less than I'd hoped), or whether I can afford to duck off to a second convention this year (nope), or indeed at any point inside the next year (maybe).

I'm looking at the things that need to be fit into the deadline calendar. Projects that…well, projects that I want to start. And projects that I want done. And projects that need to be done, but haven't actually had to fit in for a while now.

There's something enormously satisfying about the calendar. It'll remain satisfying until it all goes wrong.

Two Short Thoughts

It's a cold and blustery morning here in Brisbane, and after I get home from work this evening I'm going to need to disappear down the rabbit hole and get some writing done. The entire week is something of an experiment in that front, figuring out a new routine that works around the dayjob. I'm experimenting with getting up earlier, packing an extra hour into my pre-work routine so I can tend to my email and the website and get some reading done. It seems to be going well, although by "going well" I really mean "I have time to write this here blog post and might do it again tomorrow, if only so people don't keep assuming that I've been kidnapped by ninjas and sacrificed to great C'thulhu."

My curse is to spend my life wandering the earth, bemoaning the fact that I do not write enough. And it occurs to me that. as curses go, that's probably not a bad one to have.

After all, I could have been a werewolf. Or I could live in interesting times. By all accounts, both these curses suck.

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Last night I started writing something I suspect is a blog post, although given that it's looking like becoming a 4,000 word monster it's entirely possible I'll never get around to posting it. There's a reason I put very little thought into planning and pre-editing these things; the moment I take them on as a project, rather than a means of dropping by and saying hi to the world, I start writing essayish things that eat hideous levels of wordcount.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure what else I'm going to do with this piece once it's done. There's not a huge market for four thousand words of me drawing parallels between The Paradise Motel and Hotel Sorrento.

Just in case I do change my mind and post it tomorrow, I'll make this a short one and hope people will spot me the change.

Confessions of an Absentee Writer

It's been a quiet handful of weeks. I wrote, I got the latest instalment of Flotsam away on time, despite the fact that it's a giant bastard chunk of story, then I collapsed onto a couch for two weeks watching the glory that is the Bruce Timm DC Animated Oeuvre.

I have know come to the conclusion that Bruce Timm's animated works are kinda like cocaine, but awesome and not really bad for you.

Batman Beyond has Henry Rollins as a supervillain named Mad Stan that is every bit as glorious as Henry Rollins playing a supervillain should be.

The Superman animated series has Lorry Petty playing a supervillain, and as a child of the nineties who has watched Tank Girl far more often than is healthy, it's safe to say that there is never enough Lorry Petty being awesome in the world.

If the Justice League Unlimited series managed to wedge Ice Cube into its voice actor list alongside Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres, we could just call Bruce Timm the ultimate nerdcore showrunner and be done with it (if you're not a comic geek or animated fan, Bruce Timm is kinda like Joss Whedon, except he doesn't disappoint as often).

I could easily continue my mad cartoon bender for another week at least – I'm only halfway through the Superman series, and there's four glorious seasons of Batman to go once I'm done, but I suspect I'd start showing up for work smelling funny and start getting odd looks from my co-workers.

Once upon a time this wouldn't have been a problem, but I kinda like my current co-workers and value their respect. It still catches me off guard.

Plus, I guess, there's the other stuff: the next instalment of Flotsam to finish, so I don't undo all the progress I made with this month's on-time delivery; the novel I keep telling people I'm going to revise; the next Aster novella people keep asking about; the short stories I keep agreeing to write.

The internet knows everything, and so I ask…

I was at work today, innocently doing my job, when one of my co-workers turned around asked "have you ever come across a transgender zombie story?"

At which point I allowed that a) I had not, b) google wasn't inclined to find me one, and c) I adore my new dayjob more than any other dayjob I've ever had.

Still, it's a vexing kind of question to be unable to answer in the affirmative. I fired off the question to a couple of friends in the hopes that they've heard something, then figured I'd ask the question here just in case someone had come across such a thing. Transgender zombies and/or protagonists appear to be fair game, so far as such things go, so if you've come across such a thing in your readings please drop by the comments and let me know. In short: help me, Obi-net-kenobi, you're my only hope.

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I'd be linking you to Catherynne Valentes not-quite-review of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, but it's on livejournal and LJ has been buggy for the last few days, so I'm not entirely sure the link is going to take you where it's supposed to take you. Should it work, I really recommend taking a gander at the review-slash-essay posted there, for it immediately makes the movie one that I absolutely must see and, I think, articulates something quite important about the reason people wander off to become artists and writers, that kind of long-term chasing down of a tribe that's smart and passionate and engaged with the world in a very particular kind of way.

And I, as ever, want a book of Catherynne Valente essays, for they are frequently phenomenal when she posts them online and they deserve to be a book one day. I would be deeply grateful if someone would pay her to write one.

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So, of the six killer copyediting tips delivered in this blog post, I've managed to internalize…two. Unfortunately, the ones I still get wrong are generally the more embarrassing options on the list. I should probably work on that, since it seems like a perfectly reasonable list of things that it'd be a good idea to learn, and my problems with apostrophes are getting quite out of control.

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Every second Wednesday has become the bane of my writing routine. There simply isn't time for sustained writing, just little bursts of wordage that are fit into a spare half-hour or so. I try not to begrudge Wednesdays this – I work and I go out, doing that thing where I see other people, which is presumably important for my continued status as a sane human being – but I am not built to take breaks from work. I live in fear of my own sloth, where I give in to the temptation to not-write because it's easier, rather than force myself to put down new words.

Thursdays are meant to make up for it: a day off, a writing day, free of distractions. Yet I'm four weeks into the day job and it's never quite become that, always winnowed away by odd jobs and far too brief a time spent writing.

Still, I'm getting better at carving out writing time. Not as good as I used to be, but better than I've been for much of the last twelve months, and I plan on getting quite a bit done on the morrow. I just wish I could come up with a solution for tonight that made me felt like I'd done enough to warrant going to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. I mean, I've written something on the Flotsam draft, which is almost certainly better than nothing, but somehow I can't quite talk myself into believing that 250 words is a reasonable day's work and no amount of but tomorrow I'll finish the draft of the next story and be able to start editing seems to satisfy the spokesbear and my inner taskmaster.

This, I suspect, is because they know me too well. One good week of getting things done doesn't mitigate of year of saying such things and not quite getting around to doing them.

I suspect it's time to aim for five hundred words and try again. Which means I'd best get on with things, I suppose.

 

 

Once we give toasters a modicum of AI, the whole damn world is doomed

If you haven't read Kelly Link's Swans before, you can do so over at Fantasy Magazine today. I really recommend it, and I'm totally okay with you going over and reading it now. I mean, I'm not going anywhere, and I'm happy to wait.

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Tried cooking chili tonight. Ordinarily not a thing that's noteworthy, but so far I've managed to burn the bottom of the saucepan and forget to put on the rice and leave off half the optional ingredients that I usually put into a bowl of chili in order to transform it into the kind of chili I enjoy eating.

Tried to work at the day-job today. Again, not ordinarily noteworthy, but after spending three hours watching tech support try to figure out why my computer wasn't actually interested in doing things necessary to my job – on my computer, or any others in the office, for the work server obstinately believed I shouldn't be there – it was generally acknowledge that I should take an early mark and come back in to make up the time on Friday when things had been corrected.

Personally, I blame the toasters. They know I'm on to them. My ailing toaster huddles in the corner of the kitchen, unwilling to toast things that should be toasted, plotting my downfall. One of these days I shall wake up with the power chord 'round my throat, the prongs waving menacingly in my face, the toaster glaring down at me with that angry, heated, amber glow seeping through the toast slots. "You were warned, lad," it'll tell me, "you were fucking warned, eh? Should have kept your big gob shut. What's with all the spare toasters, indeed. Bollocks to you, eh. Bollocks to fucking you."

My toaster, apparently, watches far too many British gangster films.

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One of the perks of my new work-place is that there are far to many interesting things on the internet that are either a) sent to me by colleagues, or b) stuff I go looking for as part of my job. A while back I got into the habit of sending links to my home email, lest I end up spending my entire work-day chasing down stuff on the internet and muttering words like Oooo and shiny. One of my favourite things that I've stumbled across this week was the mashable feature on creative (and attractive) QR codes, one of the first things I've ever seen that's actually made me interested in QR codes as anything more than an academic exercise.

Being a writer's center, there's also the occasional flurry of links pointing people towards writing advice. I generally go back back-and-forth on posting links to online writing advice here, usually because I either disagree with it or figure it's redundant to a large portion of the folks who read it (I'm a short-story writer, after all, and short story writers are generally read by other short story writers). Despite this, I figured I'd throw up the link to 5 Creative Flaws that Will Expose Your Lack of Storytelling Experience, since there were at least two entries on the list I hadn't thought about before.

Still, all writing advice is dangerous if you hear it at the wrong time, even the best bits.

Hell, especially the best bits, 'cause you know deep down that they're right and you live in fear that you're  doing it wrong and lolcats will eat you in your sleep.

In other news, I totally want one of these tshirts retelling the story of Star Wars with unicorns. 

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It appears that I've become one of those people who are best described as "local colour" and more colloquially known as "total loons."

I've mentioned my habit of writing stories on my morning commute, scribbling away in my notebook while stead on the train platform, but today I seem to have taken the next step and introduced the part of my process known as walking around the house speaking the dialogue aloud and occasionally acting out a scene so I can figure out how the movements feel. 'Cept today I wasn't doing that in my house, but in the quiet bit of the train where you're not supposed to make loud noises.

On the plus side, I discovered something important about Black Candy, and I've half talked myself into writing the damn thing long-hand rather than trying to type it all into the computer.

On the down side, my fellow commuters looked at me strange, and heard me repeat about six variations on the following phrase: there are two of us in here, Sammy Dunn and Sammy Dunn. He lets me ride shotgun when he's wearing the meat, close enough to the surface to remember what's going on. It's not a Jeklye and Hyde thing, I swear. We work together, we want the same things, but he isn't me and I'm not him. Sammy does the crying, the moments of angst and depression. I do the hard work, the guns and the stakeouts, but it's always been that way and I'm not here to complain…

Not quite there yet, but that's the curse of testing these things out while far away from a computer. There's no place to sit down and capture things once you're done.

Sunday

It's generally a bad sign when the cleanest room in my flat is the study, but it appears I've reached that point. I predict a day of epic tidying and cleaning in my future, but right now I'll settle for getting the washing up done and putting away the clean laundry.

That's next hour's problem, though. Right now there is coffee and bloggery and answering some emails. Possibly some toast while I try to work out whether the toaster is really broken, or just bitching about the cold. It feels like that kind of afternoon.

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Every now and then I come across people who really, really like the idea of creativity. It drives me crazy. Otherwise ordinary conversations are derailed by statements like "writing? Wow, it must be nice to be so creative" or "I'm a writer and creativity is one of my strengths," mostly because I then froth at the mouth and stomp around until someone gives me a cup of tea and tells me to have a lie down.

Creativity is one of the most ill-defined words in our culture, with a myriad of different meanings that all rely on understanding the context in which it's used. And unlike other context-driven words – like, say, love – you can never be entirely sure which context people are using when they deploy creativity. It's too bound up in myths about muses and inspiration and the idea that somehow creativity is automatically a transcendent thing.

Near as I can tell, creativity is just training yourself to see the connections between things sooner than other people. Or doing it naturally, in an "inspiration" driven rush, and never questioning how it is you just did what you did.

Everything after that is process, actually sitting down and making things, and once you're at that point there's very little creativity can do to help you.

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Toast with ginger marmalade for breakfast, confirming that the toaster is either on its last legs or simply unable to cope with winter. Even turned up to its highest setting, the best it seems to manage is "lightly browned".

It seems to be the month for appliances going wrong around these parts. My mobile phone is starting to develop some of those hiccups that occur when you've owned a mobile phone for a a while. Not enough to be unusable, but enough to be occasionally annoying.

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Here is a thing I've discovered this week: the version of Claw in my head no longer resembles the (unfinished) draft version of Claw I was writing before my dad's illness last year.

This isn't a huge surprise. The news of my dad's heart attack basically hit like a depth charge to the subconscious, blowing apart the various stories and projects under construction, and it's only recently that I've had the brain-space to go back and start trying to fit things together. But the opening scene for Claw that I wrote this week looks more like one of the closing scenes I'd planned for the first draft, a couple of sub-plots have been dropped away, and the book seems to be drifting towards the darker side again.

Still not sure whether it has a happy ending or not. I'm not even sure if the new beginning is right, but it feels more like the beginning of the book than the older one did.

And it's becoming a fun book to write again, which is a good sign because, for a while there, I thought it was unlikely I'd ever find Aster stories fun to write again. At some point tomorrow I'm going to get to the first corpse in the book, and I'm unexpected excited about figuring out how to put the scene together.

So after setting myself the goal of blogging every day in...

So after setting myself the goal of blogging every day in the coming week, I'm sneaking this one in under a technicality (specifically, the one that says a new day doesn't actually start until your sleep and wake up in the morning. It makes sense in my head, even if the clocks disagree). It's one of those rare Saturday nights when none of my neighbors are having a party, so the flat is remarkably cold and quiet. Dark too, since I've replaced the broken office chair with one that's actually comfortable to sit in and that allows for prolonged periods of sitting and working and not really noticing that sunset slipped past and you missed it.

Fortunately I have defrosted spicy tomato soup to ward off the oh-right, I-forgot-dinner-too hunger pangs.

The downside, now that I've stopped, is that I don't really have the option of not-noticing the cold anymore. I find myself wishing I'd invested in fingerless gloves. Or, at least, a jumper with very long sleeves that would go over my very cold hands when I type.

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So, two links before I head off and get some sleep.

There's a new installment of Kathleen Jenning's Dalek Game illustrations out today, combining a particular sad and pensive-looking dalek with Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book. I found myself wishing Kathleen put the illustrations on coffee mugs and such, for it seems like a very friendly kind of image to have on your morning coffee. Plus, honestly, who can say no to a dalek in a pirate hat?

On the other hand, if you're a writer-type, I might suggest not doing this sort of thing when editors reject you. Even the prelude is to be avoided.