Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 135

The Sunday Round-Up

So this week I managed to finish reading Georgette Heyer's Cotillion, start reading Kirstyn McDermott's Madigan Mine, watched the third season of The Big Bangtheory, and went down to the Gold Coast to spend some time with my dad while he makes his way through the three months of rehabilitation that follow open heart surgery. I worked a whole bunch and got to play with the company website. I tried to write fiction without any real success: 2,500 words total for eight days of work. I had a long fight with my local vendor of mobile phones after the phone they sold me under the promise that it would do everything my old phone did proved to be false, yet this wasn't deemed sufficient to replace the phone for something else. I managed to lose track of what day it was twice, getting messages from people asking "dude, where are you?" while I sat there going "what? Come on, it's only Tuesday, isn't it?"

All in all, the events of the last month have left me weary and my one-coffee-a-day regime is well and truly gone. So in lieu of actual content, let me recommend some stuff:

- The Writer and the Critic podcast – Author Kirstyn McDermott and critic Ian Mond recommend books to one-another and get together every month to talk about that. It's just kicked off with a discussion of Marcus Zusak's The Book Theif and Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless, and given that its' two smart and articulate people discussing books they love it's immediately joined my list of weekly podcast listening.

- Elizabeth Bear discussing a trunk story and how it ended up there. This is a post from 2004 that I've had bookmarked forever because it's a pretty damn useful discussion of why some stories just don't work despite the fact that there's nothing inherently wrong with them.

- Laura Goodin's advice on Moderating Con Panels which she put together in the aftermath of Worldcon a few months ago, but I've been too slack busy to read until now.

- Review's of Sprawl over on ASif, including some nice things said about my story One Saturday Night, With Angel.

- And I'm going recommend subscribing to Daily Science Fiction now, both because I've been enjoying a bunch of the stories they've been putting out lately and it'll save time in the first half of 2011 when I'm all like "dudes, I've got this story coming out, and you need to go here to read it."

Hello!

So, apparently I lied yesterday – I am back today. I didn't mean to lie, or expect to be here, but after a day at the final Year of the Novel course at the Queensland Writer's Cetnre there was a part of brain that clicked over and said wait, yes, I am meant to be writing, perhaps it's time to reclaim that bit of my life again. And so I have critted work, and pondered problems with the novel-in-progress, and chatted with the awesome Angela Slatterabout when we can kick off write-club again and which day we can use so we can get some continuity going (we've traditionally used Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, all of which have become untennable due to semi-regular scheduling conflicts).

It's been chaotic fortnight around these parts – it kicked off with the news of my dad's heart attack on the 24th of October that saw me spend much of the week on the Gold Coast, either at the hospital or at my parents place doing stuff to help my mum out. It was followed with my first week of work at the new day job (acquired  on the day my dad went in for his triple bypass) while the list of post-operative complications from my dad's surgery filtered through (short version: collapsed lung, a longer-than-expected stay in Intensive Care, and a slower build-up to post-operative physio than we would have liked).

The good news is that Dad's looking like he'll be getting out of the hospital soon. I have to thank a bunch of people for their well-wishes and e-mails and support over the last two weeks, but since it'll be a while before I'm caught up on e-mail, I'll say a big public thank-you now. My peeps, they are awesome.

And with all the mental space that's been freed up, I get to move onto this week's problem: figuring out how writing fits into my new work schedule.

In theory, this is easy. The day-job is a part-time gig as an office assistant, which makes it somewhat ideal for my purposes – I go in every morning, I work until lunch, and then I'm out. It's the first job I've ever had where the work doesn't follow me home – no marking, no preperation for the next class, no figuring out of what needs to be done or jobs that get taken home to be worked on after-hours. I don't have to think about things until the following morning. In this respect its something of an anomoly for me, albeit a welcome one.

The tricky bit is this: I'm used to contracting and casual work, so I've never worked regular hours five days a week*. This means I've never had to be particularly disciplined about my writing in order to get things done – I didn't suck at it, but if I set a word-count of 3000 words a day in order to hit a deadline, I could pretty much rearrange my schedule to meet it without too much difficulty. If it had to be done in the morning, I had time to goof off and play computer games. If I hit the wordcount in the wee hours of the morning, I could wake up a little later the following day. In the rare periods where time was at a premium and regidly disciplined schedules were required, they were short-term.

The new day job, hopefully, isn't a short-term thing. Which means I'm going to have to figure out this "writerly discipline" thing in order to get stuff done at the speed they need to be. On the plus side it means I get to work a little smarter about things, but I also need to relearn how to resshape my expectations of what constitutes a good days' writing.

With luck it shouldn't take too long.

*I did work a full-time job  once, but that was a work-from-home gig I could do in my pyjama's most days and accumulated time-off-in-lieui like no-ones busines, so it wasn't quite the same as this.

Hello my neglected blog, how are you?I'm still away, doi...

Hello my neglected blog, how are you?

I'm still away, doing a mixture of taking-care-of-family type things and wtf-when-did-I-get-a-day-job type things.

I wear a tie to work. It's very strange.

I'll be back soon. Not today, and not tomorrow, but soon. Until then, I'm just going to point out that I'm listening to Guns and Roses this afternoon, and it's all Jason Fischer's fault.

Yours,

Peter

Updated

I'm temporarily back in Brisbane this morning, prepping for a job interview after lunch. My dad goes in for a double-bypass tomorrow morning, so I suspect I'll be driving back down to the Gold Coast tonight. I've not been this familiar with the Gold Coast highway in years. He's met with all sorts of specialists in the last few days, and the ultra-sound of his heart has shown that while the current episode wasn't a heart attack, there's been a minor attack at some point in the past.

The current plan, barring acts of employment, is to come back to Brisbane on Monday night once we've got a firm idea of what's going on post-surgery.

In the mean time, should you miss me, might I suggest heading over to Shimmer where they've posted the reading I did of my story from issue 12, The Mike and Carly Story, Without the Gossip.

I'm going to be scarce this week. Yesterday my father wen...

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 serious things are and how much worse they could have been. I, on the other hand, have irrational flashbacks to episodes of the Gilmore Girls in which not-a-heart-attack heart problems were a plot point, which is both totally inappropriate and oddly comforting at the same time.

I am going to be on the Gold Coast for the next week, for obvious reasons. I've tried to contact people and cancel all the things that need to be canceled, but I'm putting this up here as a safety net. If we're meant to be catching up, or if I owe you an e-mail, or if you're counting on me to do something for the next four or five days…well, it's probably not happening. Much of my time is going to be spent at the hospital. The rest of my time will be spent working on Claw and doing the things that absolutely need to be done. Everything else has kind of dropped off the bottom of the list.