Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 129

Bleh

I've written and deleted five blog entries today, all because I couldn't address the thing I wanted to address without devolving into whining. This on top of yesterday's thwarted blogging attempt for much the same reason.

So, yes, perhaps not quite as back as I thought. I no longer feel like swearing, but my head is far from being in a place where I can communicate like a reasonable human being.

The Return to Sanity

So, yes, I'm back, I think. At the very least, I can compose sentences without cursing, which is a good thing, and my weekend was actually pleasant in a mildly stressful kind of way.

On Friday night I taught at UQ and went to my sister's place to do washing, whereupon I was promptly fed delicious butter chicken (with bonus ham) and indulged while I ranted about my week. Afterwards we bundled into the car with a camera and a tripod and went galavanting into the night in search of the photograph of a somewhat spooky pedestrian underpass that will go with my next Flotsam story.

We found one by walking through a darkened bike-path through a stretch of scrub between Griffith University and the Highway. This process was made somewhat more exciting than it could have been by the fact that we'd forgotten to bring a torch, so we lit our way with the soft glow of my sister's iPhone screen.

I think it was the first thing I'd done all week that actually counted as fun.

My good mood was ruined a few hours later when my neighbor came home and blasted their stereo at four in the morning. The bass was so loud my bed actually moved while I was in it, twitching its way across the room in that strange little dance furniture does in the presence of loud music.

I did not kill my neighbor, which I thought was very restrained of me.

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On Saturday there was a desperate attempt to finish this week's Flotsam story, which was a) overdue, and b) overdue, and c) really, really overdue. If you're getting a sense of the theme there, you're probably understanding exactly why last week was so miserable for me.

I dislike blowing deadlines, even by a few days, and I couple this with a pigheaded stupidity that makes me incapable of admitting I'm going to blow a deadline even when it's patently obvious that it's going to happen. Couple this with the added dayjob stress and I spent much of last week in the red-zone, building up the kind of self-directed anger that's best released by destroying a major metropolitan area in a pique-fueled kaiju-esque temper tantrum.

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On Sunday I was afforded the opportunity hang with one of my Melbourne peeps, Kapowe, who was drifting through Brisvegas for the day. There was beer and bacon and catching up and I was forced to torture him with stories about the awesomeness of my current Deadlands game which is rapidly approaching my favourite RPG campaign that I've ever run. We also spoke of books and games and his rapidly rising career in voice-artistry, which is one of those unexpected and unfeasibly cool things my friends occasionally wander off and do when I'm not really looking. (Edit: were I a good friend, I would have mentioned Kev has a shiny new email newsletter for folks who may be interested in voice-over stuff)

After this, there was Deadlands, and it's not like I've been shy about how much that improves my week. Our games are usually fun, especially given something with obvious genre tropes like the western we can play off, but last night's session my players went above and beyond to make with the awesome. Wild flying machines were invented, plots were advanced, characters were fleshed out and given unexpected new arcs. At some point I need to stat out a guy named Dressed Up Eddie, himself a neat piece of meta-narrative lifted directly from the works of Raymond Chandler, and I didn't even put him into the game.

It was a good way to end the weekend. Possibly the best way I can think of.

And since I'll be freed from the dayjob at my usual time, I think I'll celebrate by doing some writing this afternoon.

Curtains

The curtains in my bedroom do a poor job of keeping the morning out of my face. I'm not going to speak about the week that was, because no-one really needs to see me complain and swear and generally carry on, but suffice it to say that the inability to keep out the morning sun was a source of great distress to me this morning. My first real night of sleep in weeks turned out to be not so full of slumber, and not for any of the good reasons, and I really wanted a sleep in to make up for it.

Alas. Alak. The daystar strikes again and I my internal monologue now inserts three swear words between every thought instead of the two curses that were my default throughout the week. I mean, you should see the words I've had to edit out of this entry. It would have read like an Erving Walsh novel in its original form ('cause, really, my internal monologue is far to fond of using gobshite and bullocks and now, apparently, goblinfucker).

So, things. There's apparently a Publisher's Weekly review of Eclipse 4, which is kinda exciting because I'm in the anthology and can't actually wait to see the finished book. There was a reprint request in the email this week, which I haven't responded to as fast as I should, because email has been beyond me for the last week and I haven't been at the computer which has the file I needed. I apparantly managed to miss an entire writeclub (see inability to answer email). There's 42 emails in my in-box at the moment, which is something of a record for me (it's usually lower). I would take it as a personal favour from the universe if it rained today, because I'm totally onboard for rain and cold and staring out my window at a drizzly, unpleasant morning.

Since that's not going to happen, I guess I should get on with things.

The reason I'm not blogging this week.

There's people on leave at the dayjob this week, which means I working a lot of overtime this week and my dayjob has gone from "seriously, wtf did you hire me for, there's nothing to do" to "not enough hours in the day to do the work of the two people I'm covering for."

I have the next installment of Flotsam to write.

My house is a mess, I'm sleeping four hours a night, and I'm living on baked beans 'cause I don't have the time to go shopping at the moment.

I'm incapable of communicating with the world in a language other than panic and bile this week. In the words of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge.

See you next week when things are calmer.

What I Did on My Weekend

So, by my standards, it was an awesome but crazy-busy weekend.

Often, when my weekends are quiet and sedate, I feel like I'm letting the side down and I find myself thinking, "man, I wish I had a crazy-busy weekend, you know?" Then the crazy-busy-weekend comes along and I go along with the flow and then Monday comes and I wake blinking like a stoned raccoon wondering why I'm so tired.

I need coffee. I need to catch up on the writing that didn't get done. And I really do need to schedule some more crazy-busy weekends in the near future.

The weekend itself is kind of squished together, a little, in my head. Things bleed into each other.

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Okay,  I guess the first thing is that I've been shortlisted for some Ditmar Awards this year, in both the Short Story category for One Saturday Night, With Angle, and the novella category for Bleed.  I found this out while having Breakfast with some friends on Sunday morning, largely 'cause I'd been light on the internets over the weekend, and on the whole it was a rather pleasant surprise.

So thanks to all the people who nominated me, and congratulations to the various other people who have been shortlisted. The full Ditmar short list can be found on the Natcon Fifty website and it's a frickin' awesome list this year.

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On Saturday night I sat down to watch the Evening With Kevin Smith DVD for the first time, which was basically as entertaining as I'd expected it to be after catching bits and pieces on youtube. Except for this one stretch which was profoundly uncomfortable, which is largely when a young queer member of the audience brings up Chasing Amy and how it contributed to a culture that made her life difficult as a younger woman.

The response is uncomfortable to watch. This is not to say that Smith doesn't have some good points (Does no-one ever notice that the character who says "All lesbians really need is a good, deep dicking" is the idiot who is wrong about everything throughout the movie) and some that are straight off the back of the white male privileged bingo card (my brother is gay) and at least one that explains why he at least attempted the film that's interesting (I once had a conversation with my brother about the fact he isn't represented in narrative, and I try to change that).

But mostly  it's just uncomfortable because there's no real attempt to engage with the question before bulldozing through the answer. It's one of those real I-had-good-intentions style responses that argues that good intentions excuse the faults.

And really, when you're a geek, there are times when that does actually count as a victory, 'cause there are portions of geekdom that are scarily entrenched in their white-male-privilege and don't want to let it go.

Which is why, a few hours later, I was really, really happy when a friend sent me the link to Bioware telling a white-straight-male to Get Over It when he complained about the possibility of female and queer relationships being given equal weight in Dragon Age 2.

There are exactly three computer games I've bothered to play for longer than 2 hours in the last six years: Total Extreme Wrestling, Blood Bowl Online, and the first Dragon Age. The mindset exhibited by Bioware above is one of the reasons why I got sucked into DA Origins for as long as I did. I'd talked myself out of Dragon Age 2, not because I don't expect it to be awesome, but because it's likely to be narrative crack that 'causes me to stop writing and lose my job.

That one response, linked to above, is probably going to change my mind.

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Okay, what else.

Saturday afternoon I did errands. I bought new jeans for the first time in about five or six years (which is one of those facts that's readily apparent if you've seen the current state of my jeans, most of which have holes in them somewhere). In fact, since they were on sale, I bought a whole lot of jeans, which will cost even more to have hemmed (since I am not-so-handy with a needle and thread and thus happily pay professionals) than I did for the jeans themselves.

I bought some books at proper bookstores – Burn Bright, by Marianne de Pierres; Heist Society, by Ally Carter – then I went to my local Borders and watched the gleeful gutting of the stock by people who were all omg-the-bargins. It made me kinda sad, because I really liked my local Borders despite it's flaws, and it made me feel sorry for the various people who worked there.

I still remember when they first opened the Borders at my preferred shopping center, and how awesome it was to be able to shop for books I actually read before picking up my weekly groceries.

I've already burned through Heist Society, which is just as awesome as Tansy Rayner Roberts promised it would be when she reviewed it on her blog. I would have burned through Burn Bright already, but this copy is a gift.

Sunday I went to Avid Reader and bought more books – the Collected Stories of  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (so I can read it at the same time as my dad), Motherless Brooklyn, and Yellowcake by Margo Lanagan.

There is something blissful about acquiring new fiction. Which probably explains my out of control To Be Read pile that's taking up two bookcases at present.

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On Sunday afternoon I gamed with my Sunday Night Cthulhu group.

We've missed a bunch of games recently – due to illness, travel for work, celebrating the birth of one member's son, etc – so there was something very comforting about slipping back into the Sunday Night Cthulhu routine, even though we're not actually playing Call of Cthulhu at present.

One of the realities of being a RPG gamer in your thirties (and older) is that weekly gamers are supposed to be impossible, but at this point we've been gaming every Sunday for so long that it barely even registers as something as something remarkable. I can't even remember when we started, although I'm sure it was prior to the first Gen Con Oz and a quick perusal of the blog sees things like "we kicking off the weekly Cthulu sessions after the xmas break" appearing in February of 2008.

Which means we've been going for about four years, I think. We've lost a player in that time, and recently gained a new one, but for the most part a  core group of four people has been there the entire time.

We played Cthulhu pretty much eclusivly for the first two or three years, hence the fact that Sunday is permanently branded as Cthulhu night despite the fact that we've slowly added more systems to the mix (Space 1889 for a while, currently Classic Deadlands which is proving to be 9 kinds of awesome).

Last night's game, though. Man, it kinda reminds me why I enjoy gaming, you know? Undead revenants kicking the crap out of solitary gunslingers who got caught unawares; the entire team getting caught in a firefight against desperado's who have the advantage of cover upon the ridge; a mad scientist coming to realize his blueprints are haunted because things keep changing while he's asleep; the same mad scientist unleashing his flame-thrower for the first time, going a little crazy as he does so.

There is nothing quite so awesome as knowing I get to game with these folks every week, especially since we're largely in agreement as to the kind of game we want to play.

418

This is my four hundred and eighteenth post to this blog, which I guess means we're on the downhill slope towards five hundred blog entries (whereupon I probably turn into a pumpkin).

The last few days have settled into a comfortable kind of routine – I get home from the dayjob, I don't turn on the internet, I read a book until five o'clock or so, then I eat dinner and force myself to write 1000 words before I go to sleep. My brain's resisting the latter – last night I wrote the first five hundred words with ease, then scrambled for the last four hundred or so for hours before admitting defeat and collapsing into bed.

Tonight there is teaching, which means I'll have to forgo the reading, and the 1000 words will be an even bigger challenge. It needs to be done, because at this point 1000 words a day is pretty much the line between me and wholesale insanity, and I'd prefer not to be going into guilt-induced craziness as the year progresses. I am far too fond of drama, after all, and I really need to get over that.

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In my spare time, at the dayjob, I'm trying to figure out how to sculpt a horse out of paperclips. Not a terribly good horse, for I'm not that artistically inclined, but something that's satisfyingly horse-like. I'm currently struggling with the tail.

So if anyone knows any good sculpting-horses-out-of-paperclip type tips, I'd be happy to learn them.

And now that I typed that, man, I really miss working from home. At least there my time-filling exercises were things like cleaning the bathroom or baking cupcakes.

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I did make chili last night, and it was quite good. Unfortunately, I left out the bacon. Fortunately, this means I'll be eating bacon and eggs for lunch today, which is one of those side-effects that make me happy.

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I'm listening to the Prodigy a lot this week, which is kinda weird. It's been years since I last plot-danced to Voodoo People. We're talkin' the fricken' nineties.

I would imbed the video, but apparently that doesn't work for this site anymore (which means, I suppose, there's a redesign in the works somewhere in the future). I guess you'll just have to make do do-do do doo, do do-do do-do sounds yourself, then whisper the words magic-people-voodoo-people yourself to get the right effect. Or you can follow a link.

Mmm, BBQ

S0 yesterday was pretty good day.

There was a delayed birthday dinner with the family, whereupon we set out for The Smoke in New Farm and ate our own bodyweight in American-style BBQ, then we set out to see Wil Anderson at the Brisbane Comedy Festival, and then because I was full of food and happy I stayed up to listen to the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast instead of going to sleep.

Somewhere in there the home internet was fixed, so I rejoined the online world, and I wrote some things. About 1 o'clock I went to bed and actually slept for five hours, which is something I rarely do since starting the dayjob and discovered that being employed is actually far more stressful and soul-destroying than being unemployed (who knew?).

So yesterday was a pretty good day, against all expectations, and tonight I make chili in the hopes that it'll redeem today in much the same way.

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The Aurealis Awards short-lists came out yesterday, which includes all sorts of awesome news such as: Jason Fischer making the final list of the Best Horror Novel for Gravesend (and really, it's about time the Fisch made an Aurealis Shortlist); four nominations for the inimitable Angela Slatter (both her collections were shortlisted, as was the story Sister, Sister and her collaboration with LL Hannett, The February Dragon ); Trent Jamieson making the shortlist with Death Most Definite; Dirk Flinthart making the list  YA Short Story; all sorts of love for Twelfth Planet Press up and down the shortlist.

I'm inevitably forgetting to congratulate *someone* in the list above, for which I apologise and offer a blanket congratulations go out to everyone. Full details of the list can be found over at the Aurealis Awards website.

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I read Ian McEwen's Solar over the weekend, which quickly became one of those books that I'm ish-ish about. It was my first McEwen book and I found myself intrigued by the idea of the book after it was featured on First Tuesday Book Club last year, and while it's got some beautiful writing and characterization it left me feeling utterly unsatisfied at the end.

Basically it's one of those comic tragedies where you follow the life of an utterly appalling human being who's rarely punished for their follies until the end, only when it comes the tragedy is so utterly weak that I found myself shrugging and thinking "really? That's it?"

I mean, I would have been more satisfied if he'd gotten away with everything, which isn't really really the kind of thing tragedy should strive for. Still, it's an interesting read, and the narrative POV  is so hands-off and telling-oriented that I'm fascinated by the fact that it seems to work.

It just doesn't inspire me to read more McEwen, which seems a shame.

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I keep forgetting to mention this and it should probably be something that gets a blog post of its own, but the latest installment of Flotsam is out over at the Edge of Propinquity website.

Grr. Arg.

Tomorrow night I am making chili. If I'd thought to defrost some of the necessary components, I'd probably make chili for lunch when I got home from the dayjob, but since this morning was one of those mornings where I was lucky to leave the house with pants on the defrosting will have to wait. Ergo, tomorrow there will be chili, which is a better dinner meal than a lunch meal anyway.

I'm behind on things again. It's like a magic trick, the way it happens. One moment I'm chugging along, happily getting things done, then the world gestures with the left hand to distract me from the right hand, and then I'm looking at the to-do list and going "really? All of this? When did all of this arrive?"

So it will be a light week of blogging this week, because I'm behind, and one of the things on my to-do list is ringing the internet company and informing them that they've accidentally cut off my internet access. Again. It's just a given, really; roadwork happens somewhere on my street and the internet goes out, even if they're not working on the phone lines. I'm tired and I'm cranky and I'm hovering on the edges of a cold and talking to the phone company isn't very high on the list of things I'd like to do right now.

So the plan for the week is this: go to the dayjob, come home, make chili, write. Theoretically, if I do that often enough, I will pull of that second magic trick where one gets *ahead* of all the things that need doing.

And Now We Are 34

Right, first things first, I give you the traditional dodgy cell-phone camera self-portrait, because no birthday is truly complete until my parents ring me and say "really, Peter, did you have to put that up on the internet?":

Of course, this probably qualifies as an improvement on last years birthday photograph, but I've made up for that by wearing the-hated-hawaiian-shirt-I-tricked-my-mother-into-buying and eating-unhealthy-things-that-are-not-breakfast-foods-for-breakfast and being-mildly-hangover-dammit, which should make up for that in my parent's eyes. On the other hand, this is the first time in three years I'm suffering no physical pain on my birthday (2009 – buggered up my shoudler; 2010 – root canal) which helps things considerably, and I'm not at the primary dayjob today, which removes the major source of emotional angst from my mental landscape.

To celebrate my birthday I will clean the flat, re- read Haruki Murakami's Birthday Stories anthology, because it's a damn good collection of fiction, then I will toddle off to teach a class on Historical fiction at the secondary dayjob and spend an ungodly amount of time sitting in rush-hour traffic trying to get home afterwards. If I am not complete exhausted after that, I will go play boardgames with some friends of mine.

If I *am* completely exhausted after that, I will drink scotch alone in my apartment and hate the world like the misanthropic hermit that I am

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Today's also the inimitable Ben Francisco's birthday, which is both awesome ('cause it's nice to share a birthday with someone whose not only a friend but a smashing writer of speculative fiction) and sucks (because he's over in New York being awesome and I'm stuck in Brisbane being, well, mildly grumpy and swearing at people about sit-coms).

And so, Happy Birthday, Ben. May you be doing something very cool to celebrate the day (and will please write some more stories so I can stop re-reading the ones you've published thus far).

Situation Comedy, Redux

To give you fair warning, this is a cranky post. It's possible I'll swear. Often. Loudly. You have been warned.

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One of the more interesting threads running through the comments on yesterday's post, both here and over on Facebook, was this attitude that sitcoms are inherently limited and/or required to suck by virtue of the genre conventions they operate under.

To which I respond, no, fuck that, genres are as limited as we want them to be, pleas take your they-cater-to-the-masses-and-therefore-must-suck class-oriented modernist bullshit to someone else's discussion. 'Cause, you know, that kind of attitude is the reason we get bad science fiction, bad romance, bad action-adventure films, and pretty much everything else. You reap what you sow, in that respect, and unless you're willing to ask for more it's unlikely you'll ever get it.

I no more accept the inevitable suckiness of sit-coms than I do the argument that Avatar needed to be a three-hour exercise in narrative tedium; it sucked because stupid choices were made, not because of some inherent fault of the  genre.

Take, for example, How I Met Your Mother. It's not a show that's without faults – I'd direct you to Cat Valente's excellent take-down of the shows central preimse – but for a considerable period of time it managed to be funny and geeky and not treat it's audience like idiots. I can point you to precisely the moment it became a show I looked forward to, rather than this thing I happened to watch, which is right about the point in the second season where they closed an episode with Marshal slapping Barney well after the  Slap Bet episode where the joke was set-up. It was simple and beautifully done. Slap. "That's two." Done. No references to the Slap Bet to set things up, no flash-backs to the previous episode, just the show writers  trusting you to remember something that happened earlier in the seasons and get the joke.

Nothing appeals to me more than writers assuming I'm not an idiot. It's the thing that, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie got wrong, because ever time they made that kind of reference the writer's were sitting next to you, nudging you in the ribs, going "hey, we mentioned Phineas Fog, from Around the World in Eighty Days, get it? Get it? We're being metatextual here."

Metatext doesn't work when you say you're being metatextual. It just annoys the fuck out of people. In this respect, I can point to them moment when I realised How I Met Your Mother stopped being a show I really looked forward to, and became just another show I watch when it's on. It's called the second Slapsgiving episode (If they do a third Slapsgiving, the show will join the ranks of shows officially be dead to me, and I will be happy with the two enjoyable season, one okay season, and one sub-par season I've seenthus far).

There's a sliding scale on all these things. I find Big Bang Theory's underlying narratives abhorent, for example, but I'll still watch it because it's doing something mildly more interesting with the same core theme than, say, Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Men.

There are also different kinds of audiences – not everyone enjoys metatext as much as I do, nor do they sit there chanting interrogate your fucking theme, you fuckers when shows get particularly annoying. I have no problems with shows pitching to a particular audience, but I reserve the right to get annoyed when they start pandering to them.

There are no good sitcoms. Sitcoms are inherently limited by their format. These aren't arguments, they're an admission of defeat. They're willing acknowledging that we expect so little from our entertainment that the only real response is to shrug and kill off a few more braincells in the hopes that one day we'll see movies the same way whatever those mythical test-audiences who kill anything smart do.

I'd ask you to stop being part of the fucking problem and start engaging. Acknowledge the problems with individual narratives, individual shows, individual characters, instead of writing off entire genres. Find smart people who love the genre and ask their recommendations (this, coincidently, is how I found romance writer Georgette Heyer, who is mindblowingly fucking awesome).

Quality is not mediated by genre, nor is the ability to create smart and interesting narrative. The *willingness* to pitch smart narrative, sure, but that's the writer's choice when faced with the audience, just as it's mine to watch and say hey, man, this shit isn't on, in the hopes that if enough people say it loudly enough, one day things will change.

To argue otherwise is to mire you in the kind of close-mindedness you're trying to rail again when you condemn the genre as a whole.