Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 127

Two things, with a final statement (Actually, three things, I'm just forgetful)

Yesterday I went to the PO Box and discovered three copies of the latest One Book, Many Brisbane's anthologies waiting for me.

Naturally, my first response was sweet, free books, cause books that arrive in my PO Box are always free books by virtue of the fact that I've already paid for them and forgotten about it. It's one of the more pleasant aspects of ordering books via the internet, especially if you have the same inclinations towards pre-ordering things that I do.

Except this time they actually were free books, I think, presumably because I was tangentially involved in the workshop put on for the finalists in the One Book, Many Brisbane's competition, where, basically, I showed up and talked about writing for an hour or so with Cat Sparks and an editor for Overland whose name currently eludes me

Every now and then writers like to talk about how writing is a remarkably poor career choice, or at least a remarkably hard one, but the plus side is that every now and then someone will pay you to show up, talk about something you love, meet some new people who are generally interesting, and then hang-out with your friends for a bit afterwards.

And very occasionally you get sent free books, which is the sort of thing I'd hoped actually happened to writers back when I was ten and decided writing seemed like an interesting sort of job to spend the rest of my life pursuing.

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Today is my last class out at UQ. Given that the assignments are all done and the class was remarkably small to begin with (7 people), I have a small bet with myself regarding how many people will actually show up for a Friday afternoon writing class on the last day of the semester.

I will be sad that the writing classes are done for the year. I rather miss teaching writing, for a variety of reasons, but the last few weeks have really brought home how useful it is to go back to basics. It's no coincidence that we get to the tail end of the semester, with the marking and the what-do-you-do-when-this-story-is-done style questions, and there are suddenly stories being submitted again.

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There is no third part to this entry.

Edit: Actually, no, just remembered, there is – Happy Birthday to JJ Irwin, who is one of the more talented writers I know who continues to not be published enough by virtue of the fact she goes off to do things like getting Master's degrees. I recommend going back a few years and rereading her story, Still Living, over at Strange Horizons. Or checking out her story, Haniver, in the latest issue of Shimmer.

So it appears this is one of those weeks where I have ver...

So it appears this is one of those weeks where I have very little worth saying, which naturally results in spending less time online saying things. Instead I have been marking student assignments for the UQ dayjob, which is sadly reaching its end after tonight's class and tomorrow's class are done with, leaving me with nothing but the marking on the student's final assignments.

I suspect I will continue to be quiet for the next week or two for marking eats time like no-ones business (both the actual activity of marking and the procrastination as you try to avoid it).

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On the topic of things that are not marking-related, I recommend checking out the Conquilt currently being auctioned as a fundraiser for the  Continuum SF Convention in Melbourne.

I'm not sure I can really explain the Conquilt in sufficient detail to capture it's awesomeness, since descriptions largely come down to "it's a quilt made up of fabric signed by writers and editors and artists who were at Aussiecon 4," which puts the quilt in a context but not really the best way of doing so.

It's impressive and wonderful and congratulations to Rachel Holkner for making it happen. I recommend checking it out. And bidding, when the bidding becomes a thing that people do on the 9th of June instead of simply standing back and admiring the quilt.

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I've been submitting things again, which makes it the first time I've submitted a story anywhere since November of last year. Next thing you know I'll be finishing stories, and writing new things, and people will start poking me in the ribs and teasing me about saying "no, I'm out of stories for the time being, really I am."

Which is probably a good thing, in the long run.

And with that I'm out, and the not-much-to-say-ness returns.

Monday Morning: A Summary

Today I'm doing that thing where I stare without really looking at things, and it's entirely possible that there are portions of my brain that have dozed off figuring that the rest of my brain will pick up the slack.

Unfortunately no-one told the rest of my brain that, so I'm focusing on things in very short bursts, for as long as my concentration holds, and then I go back to whatever I'm doing when I'm staring into space. Which is mostly thinking about going back to bed or daydreaming about lunch.

Walking and Book Buying and Peanut Butter & Sweet Potato Soup

Yesterday I caught a train out to West End, walked to my friendly local independent bookstore, unexpected caught up with Trent Jamieson while he was working there, bought a copy of the new Michael Cunningham novel alongside a few other books (Hell's Angels, A Fairwell to Arms), walked from West End to Anzac Square Arcade in Brisbane city, bought more books from Pulp Fiction – my favourite bookstore in the world, bar none – and then caught a train home whereupon I collapsed on the couch and watched old episodes of NCIS until I fell asleep.

And really, that was yesterday, and we call it a win. Exercise and books are an unbeatable combination.

'Course today I'll be dead on my feet at the dayjobs, forcing myself to stay awake, but these are small problems and entirely worth it.

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My friend Laura Goodin is an American ex-pat living out in the Australian wilderness (well, Woolongong), writing stories and plays and, if I remember this correctly, the occasional opera or symphony  cycle (I can't remember which, specifically, because it occurs me that  know too many people writing such things, which is one of those odd things to realise about your life).

She also cooks many tasty things, including this Sweet Potato and Peanut Butter soup recipe she's just posted for public consumption.

I got a copy of the recipe not long after Laura and I met in Clarion South back in 2007, and it's one of those meals that you occasionally make for people and they say you know, this is rather good, can I have the recipe please? and you have that lovely moment where you can be either magnanimous or cackle like a comic book villain and say no, it's a secret.

The latter can make you look cruel, but it will also prepare you for the hard decisions and harsh realities of eventual global domination.

But the Peanut Butter soup really is a nice meal, one that's become a staple of my winter diet and one of my sister's default shift-work meals, and since I tend towards magnanimousness I give you the link to try for your own self.

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Got one of those pleasant do you mind if we reprint this story? emails today, which also conveniently ticks off one of the entries on the secret list of writing goals I very rarely speak of.

I'm always caught by surprise when people want to reprint things. Especially since it's rarely the things I  expect people to want to reprint.

Tenters & Zucchini & Reasons to Shop for Books This Afternoon

This morning I went to start the blog with the phrase "waiting on tenterhooks," which is one of those expressions that's been around for a while without me ever really understanding where it actually came from.

And so there was google, and this rather succinct discussion of the phrase where I discovered the tenterhook was a series of hooks on a wooden frame used in  making woolen cloth, specifically in the bit where the  freshly woven  fabric was stretched out to dry after being cleaned in a fulling mill. The tenter was the frame and the hooks went around the outside, and it had the side-effect of straightening the weave.

We're not much with the tenters these days, but I found myself looking at the description and though, well, yes, life feels exactly like that at the moment. There have been doings and goings-on in regards to dayjobbery and we have hit the bit where I wait, quietly, filling in the hours with distractions so I don't over-focus and be disappointed if things that may happen do not, in the end, happen.

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Last night there was writing. Bits of Flotsam 6, bits of the other short story about faeries in paddle-steamers that in that state where I'm rewriting and bridging together disparate ideas, and bits of other things as well.

As distractions go, writing is a good one, although I'm starting to get that itchy-despairing-feeling that comes from being in the middle of lots of things without really getting things finished.

Say Zucchini, and Mean It went live over on the Daily SF site, for those who may be interested in reading the story but aren't particularly interested in subscribing. There's been a surprising number of people who've emailed or tweeted to let me know they zucchini the story, which is one of those things I hadn't really expected when I sent the story out, but is really very cool.

The last time this sort of thing happened, it largely involved unicorns. Honestly, I could probably handle being the zucchini guy for a bit.

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Apparently there is a new Michael Cunningham novel out. I foresee a trip to the bookstore this afternoon. Quite possibly by train, so I can finish reading the Laura van den Berg collection on the way, given that I've managed to devour all but the final story in the space of two evenings.

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us remains a phenomenal collection of short fiction. The kind I feel the need to foist upon people with enthusiastic burbling and enthusiastic recommendations. It is precise and lovely and understands how to make a collection a unified thing, rather than a series of short stories packed together between a common cover.

It makes, I think, the whole a much more precious  thing than the sum of its parts.

 

Sometimes the World is Just a Three-Minute Sex Pistol's Song

Last night I started reading Laura van den Berg's short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,  which became one of those books that you start reading at a reasonable hour and stop reading in the wee hours of the morning, many hours after you planned on going to sleep.

It's not simply that it's a good book, more that it's fiction that's brushed with that touch of magic that great short stories are capable – brief and delicate and surprising and altogether beautiful. Not quite fantasy stories, but certainly on that strange intersection of literary and almost-fantasy-but-mostly-weird where all sorts of interesting things happen.

It reminds me very much of reading Miranda July's short story collection for the first time, or the peculiar rewriting of the familiar that comes from your first exposure to Kelly Link.

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I may be a little scarce online this week. I'm trying not to be, of course, but the Third Edition of the Mutants and Masterminds roleplaying game landed in my mailbox over the weekend and that means the next week or so will be a frenzy of updating my old superhero campaign notes and preparing for the resumption of the superhero game I'm playing with some friend on Thursday nights (temporarily on hold due to teaching commitments).

Yes, this is quite possibly the geekiest thing I've ever put on my blog, but it's not like that should come as a surprise to anyone. I am, after all, a huge freakin' nerd and roleplaying games where I get to create my own superhero universe from scratch are my kryptonite.

If you need me, odds are I'll be over in the corner of my office, giggling to myself while I try to figure out how many ranks of fighting and agility guys named Shadow Boxer and Archon should have while Justice League: Umlimited is on the television in the background.

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I found todays post on unemployment and the creation of a perpetual youth underclass on Tiger Beatdown kind of fascinating, especially since it touches on the same issues that were brought up by an Alain de Botton talk that I saw on (I think) TED some time last year.

The gist of Botton's talk went something like this: the idea of living in a meritocracy is actually kind of terrifying, because if you're being rewarded for your hard work and achievements, what does that mean when you fail? The shadowy side of a merit-driven culture is that those people on the bottom have only got themselves to blame.

I gather the ideas are explored in further depth in his book , which I'm probably going to unearth from my to-read pile now that I've been reminded of its existence.

It's never really been a secret that these kinds of issues were going to become a problem, culturally speaking. Graying populations, massive changes in the marketplace, the class divides growing wider and wider – this things have been occurring for the better part of my lifetime and the solutions proposed have been stop-gap at best.

For all that SF have moved away from its tropes, these kinds of issues suggest it's still a cyberpunk kind of future we're facing.

Still in Sleep Zombie Mode

Say Zucchini, and Mean It went out to Daily SF subscribers yesterday, which generally means it'll be up on their website for the rest of the world to see some time tomorrow. There's some comments over on wall of the Daily SF fanpage in facebookland, which seem to indicate people have enjoyed the story.

Some people seem to enjoy the title too, which makes me glad since I once contemplated changing the title, and I can now be somewhat pleased with myself that I did not succumb to the temptation.

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Day two of the random insomnia, which Wikipedia tells me is actually Transient Insomnia, which is the kind of thing that amuses me in my current state of sleep deprivation. It makes me think that soon my insomnia will wander off and become someone else's insomnia, which isn't really pleasant for them, but at least we're sharing and neither of us has to put up with it full-time.

Last night's sleeplessness was accompanied by an upset stomach, which suggests I'm either getting sick or starting to stress about something that my conscious mind hasn't yet caught onto. Past experience says that the latter is probably more likely.

Tonight is the fortnightly D&D night, if I haven't lost track of the weeks, which means I shall indulge in stress release by smiting strange and eldritch evils in the name of Denithae, goddess of apples and fields and having a damn good harvest when spring is done.

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Facebook keeps suggesting that I click on ads about Mutant Gum. Honestly, I don't think anyone has really thought that one through. I keep wondering if it's gum that's mutated, gum that induces mutation, or simply gum for those who have mutated.

Either way, I'm not buying, but it makes a nice change of pace from facebook trying to sell me dating services and advice on how to sculpt my body into some unfeasible Herculean physique. Not that I have anything against Herculean physiques, mind, but I rather suspect the advice will involve long stretches of exercise and weight training at some point, and I suspect I could go organize such things without facebooks help if I really desired.

 

 

Posts of a Random Sleep-Zombie

Very random attack of insomnia last night, especially since there wasn't any of the usual triggers that set off my sleeplessness. In the old days I used to welcome such things, since I could just wander off and do other things and sleep in the day afterwards, but I am now a working man with a dayjob that starts in the wee hours, and insomnia has become a thing that I no longer care fore.

Things I should post about today, and would do so in more detail were I not yawning:

- Jason Fischer's short story collection, Everything is a Graveyard, scheduled for release by Ticonderoga Publications in October 2013. The collection's slated to revolve around Jason's post-apocalyptic and zombie-themed work, which is the kind of news that makes me extremely happy, if only because it'd be damn handy to have all those stories in the one place.

- The May issue of the Edge of Propinquity is up, including Sabbath, the fifth story in the Flotsam series. I suspect I'll do a "what I've learnt from six months of Flotsam" post sometime in July, whereupon I'll try and nail down exactly why writing a serial short story series on a monthly deadline is the hardest thing I've ever done, and this story may well be the poster-child for both why it's hard and why it's been worthwhile.

- Un Lun Dun, which has slowly re-insinuated itself into my readerly affections after the hiccup I mentioned yesterday and become, more or less, the kind of book I was hoping it would become when I started reading it a few months ago. Really, you should read it, especially if you're unlikely to get as caught up in the concept of the binja as I did.

- Getting the dates wrong on my Daily SF story in yesterday's post, since it's coming out on the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth. So, yes, sometime tonight there will be a new story in the world, and it will be my last non-Flotsam story in a while.

- Something else, I'm sure, although I can't really remember it. Oh, wait, I know: starting a new draft of Claw, the third Miriam Aster novella, that throws out a large chunk of what I'd written in the period known as last-year-before-my-life-exploded and substitutes something, well, good instead. I found myself unexpected scribbling notes for this last night, and suddenly the beginnings of an entire scene fell out of my head, and I looked at it for a long time and thought, "okay, sure, we're going with this."

Un-Moroccan Chicken and Un Lun Dun

It's Monday morning here, but due to the vagaries of international timezones I suspect there will not be much of Monday left by the time Say Zucchini, and Mean It arrives in my in-box. Such are the drawbacks of living on the other side of the world, I suspect.

Tonight I shall make the most un-Moroccan Moroccan chicken imaginable, given that it will consist primarily of pumpkin soup with chickpeas and bits of chicken in it, spread over a layer of couscous. The couscous, by and large, is probably going to be the best bit. Possibly also the only bit that qualifies as Moroccan.

It will, at least, be healthy un-Moroccan chicken, if the Australian Heart Foundation website is to be believed, and that's probably a good thing after the week of pizza that occurred when I was last chasing a deadline.

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There's a rather nice review of both Horn and Bleed over on the Living in SIN blog, which is  not the kind of blog you'd expect it to be from the title and entirely safe for work. I keep meaning to point people towards reviews of my story in Eclipse 4 as well, but every time I think about it I'm writing a bit of the blog during a coffee break at the dayjob, far away from the bookmarks where I group such things together and keep them handy for linkage.

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I kept trying to disappear into the bunker over the weekend, but somehow events conspired to ensure I never really made it there. I kept being distracted by, say, dinner with my sister and our friend VillainousMog who was visiting from London for the first time in two years and made for some excellent company.

On Sunday I was distracted by sleep and goodreads and the search for a good hotdog and the usual Sunday night gaming session, which meant I hit the end of the weekend feeling oddly relaxed and socialised and in possession of about three thousand words to account for two days work.

Which isn't bad, I'll grant you that, but isn't really the stuff of a heroic effort in the word-bunker either. Still, the novel has a shape forming that's actually novel-like, and the short story I'm working on hit a point where I figured out what it wanted to do, and I suspect that this afternoon I'll get back hitting 2,500 words in a day, if only because I've run out of distractions and large portions of my house are now clean.

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I started reading China Miéville's Un Lun Dun over the weekened, which was going swimmingly until such time as I hit one of those things that makes me go "oh, really? We're doing that? Okay, I guess," and then suddenly be much less interested in the book.

It's the sort of thing that happens to me and books all the time. I'll be enjoying myself immensely and then, out of nowhere, there's be a parenthetical aside in a third-person narration, and I'll find my enjoyment deflated and listless from there on. Un Lun Dun doesn't do the parenthetical aside thing, but it introduces a concept and bit of wordplay that's distracting enough that I can't get back into the story.

It's like that moment when you're at a party, having a good time, then you realise that you're actually quite drunk and you can't get your equilibrium back once that realisation happens.

Still, I persevere, slightly less enthused than I was before, but still enjoying myself. And because The City and The City was brilliant and full of words that didn't alienate me, and so I'll trust in pretty much anything Miéville does after that.

And because, more often than not,  Miéville manages the opposite thing, where the right word or concept is introduced at exactly the right time, and thus there is a moment of joy to be had.

Saturday Morning

It's been a cold morning here. I pulled a spare blanket onto the bed last night and woke up this morning feeling toasty warm and, more importantly, not several hours earlier than my alarm. The latter has happened a few times this week, and I suspect that I've found the culprit. I rather enjoy sleeping in a warm bed, but that requires the bed staying warm and temperatures in my flat tend to shift several degrees over the course of a few hours.

It's been a pleasurable kind of Saturday. Last night I ducked out to do some late night laundry, getting home on the cusp of midnight, and this morning I finished reading Dreams Underfood Underfoot before getting up and eating breakfast and drinking too much coffee while skyping friends I don't really get to talk too often enough. We spoke of books and writing and hopping vampires and eventually got onto the topic of Eurovision, which only one of us was watching, and that was as good a sign as any that we were done.  Somehow, amid all that, it has become Saturday afternoon and I'm studiously ignoring the fact that there are people coming to my flat tonight and I should probably tidy up a bit.

Somewhere amid the skype discussion I remembered that I'm meant to be giving people a copy of Black Candy to beta-read in July. It's probably handy that I spent most of my writing time working on it yesterday, and that I may actually have the shape and the core of the first act figured out. It seems Winter is my writing time, as it always has been, and one day I will succumb and move to Narnia where it is always winter, and I shall be enormously prolific while eating turkish delight and volunteering to opress the native fauns and mice and beavers.

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I joined Goodreads yesterday, and promptly celebrated the fact by spamming everyone whose ever emailed me with a friend frequest. It was not my finest hour; one of the thigns I like least about our socially media world is the sudden rush of email that comes when someone discovers something new and forgets to turn off the email-everyone-I-ever-knew function that inevitably occurs during set-up.

Still, I find Goodreads a somewhat addictive place to spend time, and it seems a much more convinient place to track my reading that the iGoogle to-do list I've been using for the last few years. Should you wish to see what I'm reading, or what I've read, or even just find out which obscure Queensland town I was born in and can't really remember, you can probably find me registered under the cunning disguise of PeterMBall.

Having finished Dreams Underfood Underfoot this morning, I'm now contemplating whether to add another new to to the "currently reading" pile or simply move one of the books I'm already dipping into up to the bedside reading position. I suspect I may finish reading Un Lun Dun, which has been patiently waiting for me to pick it up again since I set it aside during last year's cat-sitting antihistamine haze.

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I really do have to go and clean now. I suspect I will not post tomorrow, for tomorrow is a designated day-in-the-writing-bunker, at least until 4PM when it becomes a designated day where I wander off and play Deadlands with a bunch of people I really like.