Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 21

Blurred & Indistinct

One of the weird things about living in the twenty-first century is having these incredibly powerful, multi-purpose microcomputers in our pockets that don’t necessarily turn off the way you expect.

Ergo, you occasionally find weird photographs on your feed: blurred images snapped as the phone gets slid into the pocket; or snapshots taken while trying to set up the phone to navigate with GPS.

I like to think they’re glimpses of another universe, one that makes less sense than our own, trying to get out.

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

I’m ten thousand words into a crime novella at the moment, and in another two thousand or so I’ll hit a natural stopping point in the structure and set it aside to do spend some quality time on thesis novellas. Specifically, Project Bug, which I’d like to have done to submit to my supervisor before the end of january.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Kathleen Jennings sold me on Tessa Dare’s Romancing The Duke via the suggestion that it’s a regency romance about Star Wars fandom. I couldn’t picture such a thing, but dove into the novel regardless…and was immediately rewarded by a phenomenal regency that was, 100%, about Star Wars Fandom (among other things).

What impressed me most is that even with the warning, I didn’t pick up on straight away. The Star Wars riffs are so bald-faced that I overlooked them, and it’s not until the regency equivalent of a Comicon shows up it actually clicked. 

What action do I need to take?

It’s looking like Brain Jar will expanding its stable of authors beyond me next year, which means one of my pressing tasks is pulling together a contract outlining terms. Harder than it sounds, given the existence of ebooks and print on demand, as the return of rights gets a bit stickier due to the lfact that books are never truly “out of print.”

Current Gamer Kit

I’ve spent the last five or six years running Marvel Heroic at our weekly game sessions, which usually meant carting around a buttload of dice and ten years worth of game notes every time we had a session.

When that campaign ended last month, we transitioned to John Harper’s Blades in the Dark–a game about gangs of scoundrels in a pressure-cooker fantasy city where every bit of turf needs to be fought for with a scrap.

The group built themselves around the conceit of being a a cult devoted to an ancient cat goddess, the three core members consisting of an immigrant lawyer dealing in ghost rights, an immigrant academic who is basically Indiana Jones with feline features, and an immigrant locksmith whose turned into the crime-savvy burglar of the crew.

In the space of three sessions they’ve got involved in a gang war, pissed off a local consulate, found themselves embroiled in the affairs of several vengeful ghosts, and attacked people with ghosts, ghost-bombs, spectral honey badgers, and impressionable college students.

I’ll give the system this: it excels at generating hooks from play, and what seems like relatively straightforward system is surprisingly complex when you start playing. I’m really digging the tone–we’re a little more anime action than the default system seems built for, but the slow sense of the characters miring themselves in the muck as they try to do good is definitely seeping in.

The the thing that really pleases me is how lightweight the whole system is. I’ve got a game folder that is on the verge of being sidelined, as I basically need the core rulebook, a handful of dice between sessions, and two notebooks (one for brainstorming, one for tracking things session by session).

I’m very late to the party for this one, but if you’re a gamer with an interest in stories and spec fic, I heartily recommend this one.

Hanging at the Book of Face for a Stretch

For the past few years, I’ve largely left my Facebook Author Page as a secondary concern. It was a place to re-post links to blog posts after Facebook ceased allowing these to go to a personal feed, and occasionally served as the site for announcements of new covers or books.

This was partially a function of time—I invest a lot of energy in not being online, most days—and partially a function of a mindset where I wanted to keep processes controllable and focus as much energy at possible on writing new things.

As I’m getting some bandwidth back, this week, I’ve started trying to change that a little. Facebook is getting its own little stream of content rather than repeating things that appeared here or over on twitter. Basically, there’s now a version of me that’s increasingly Facebook Specific. A professional version of me, that gets a moderate amount of attention, as opposed to my increasingly diminishing personal presence on the book of face.

One of the intriguing exercises, leading up to this, has involved sitting down and figuring out a plan for the kinds of content I want the page to focus on. My first version ran something like this:

Great science fiction and fantasy books/stories.Insight into my writing and publishing process.Book recommendations and interesting links for fans of SF and Fantasy, plus content about other genres that might be relevant to Speculative Fiction fans (My heart belongs to Spec Fic, but I’m a non-denominational genre fan and author).Personal updates about writing-related interests such as gaming, movies, television shows, and pro-wrestling. Also, the occasional photograph of my cat when she’d being adorable.Links and writing/publishing advice.

Much as my heart may belong to blogging, in the grand scheme of things, there’s no escaping that Facebook is where a lot of people congregate. Ergo, it gets a short trial period while I see how it fits into my daily schedule, and whether it’s something I can maintain over the long term.

If you’re interested in checking out what I’m doing, you can find the page hither and yon.

Anger Is An Energy

The most bewildering comment I’ve ever gotten on social media, from an old family friend: “Who knew you were carrying around so much anger?”

To me, the answer seemed obvious: “Anyone who was paying attention.”

But it wasn’t the anger that caught them off-guard, it was the decision to do something with it. To use anger as an impetus, not just a feeling. To speak about the anger, and why it existed, rater than staying politely silent.

They reacted to the use of anger as a spur to look at the state of the world and say this is not good enough, rather than a flagellum turned against the self to diminish your expectations.

Do not diminish the anger. Use it to get shit done.

10 Dec 2019

I’ve been watching a motorized scooter helmet migrate around the neighbourhood for the last few weeks. It started out in the neighbour’s yard, moved to a spot behind another neighbour’s rubbish bins, and now exists in the liminal space beside the trainline that the public can’t access.

My guess is that it will stay there until the next round of track work, or somebody needs it bad enough to jump the high fence and recover it.

The days are long and hot here in Australia. Two states are basically on fire courtesy of the Summer bushfires. Our government has largely shirked the issue, as treating bushfires like this as serious seems to suggest that they may be wrong on issues of climate change.

I keep thinking of a quote from a recent news article over on the ABC:

“If anything, this Government is more ideologically driven than Abbott. They want to win the culture wars they see in education, in the public service, in all of our institutions, and they’ll come for the ABC too, of course. There will be a big cleanout at the top of the public service, but Morrison will wait for a while to do that. They believe the Left has been winning the war for the last 20 years and are determined to turn the tables. Morrison will just be craftier about the way he goes about it.”

Sourced from: Inside the Public Service Shakeup, Laura Tingle, ABC.net.au

As someone who, frankly, wishes the culture wars of the last twenty years had seen more gains for the opposite side, it’s a timely reminder that you no can no longer get the kind of government (or world) you want merely by voting for it and hoping other people will do the work.

Judging Books By Covers

It’s been just over a year since my second short story collection came out, and it did pretty well for itself. It made the shortlist for Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards, and had some pretty strong sales for one of my ebooks in a year when my attention was mostly on other things.

At the same time, it’s lagged behind my first collection in a lot of milestones. Most notably, getting a print edition together, and attempting to refine the messaging and branding.

Last week I started to change that: taking a bunch of newly acquired skills from some dedicated research into making better book covers, plus a workflow that is better suited to going from ebook cover to print, I made the revamped cover you can see above (and, if you want, contrast against the old cover to the right).

They’re small changes, but just repositioning things and strengthening font choices has a big impact in setting reader expectations about genre and content. The original cover left the image to tell the story of what’s coming; the new version says it with the whole cover.

More importantly, it was easy to import the design into a print book cover, rather than redesigning everything from the ground up as I did previously. This drastically cuts down the design hours needed to get a book up-and-running, and makes the time invested in learning-to-do-things-better considerably more valuable.

All of which means Print Editions are now available via the ‘zon, while the ebook editions are still available from pretty much everywhere.

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

I’m finally at a point where the exegesis draft only needs half my daily writing time, rather than all of it, so I’m going to try and kickstart a fiction project this way. My goal is to get a few words down on a novella draft, and plot out the novella that I’ll be writing after it.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Loretta Chase’s Mr Impossible, a historical romance about a bookish widower and an irresponsible English nobleman chasing across Egypt to track down the rapscallions who have made off with said widower’s brother. It’s incredibly solid romance, reminding me a lot of the sheer glee I take in Anne Gracie’s work, but anyone whose a fan of the Brandon Fraser Mummy films is going to recognise this dynamic and thrill at the characters.

For me, it also got me thinking about the notes for a planetary romance series I’ve been meaning to write for years, in which a character named Mrs Northbrook investigates wrongdoing on Steampunk Mars.

What action do I need to take?

I need to go through my thesis draft and check all the references, then compile the bibliography. I’ve been putting this one off for a while now, but the time has come.

Notebook Geekery — the Special Editions

My notebook preferences are deeply entrenched and codified. For example, I use a Leuchtturm1917 (preferably pink and unlined) for drafting and a Leuchtturm1917 Grid Ruled (of alternating colours) as a bullet journal. The colour switch on the journals lets me remember bullet journal “eras” when I’m looking back, while the pink drafting notebook frequently amuses me because I’m generally writing something horror related.

Brainstorming typically happens in project-specific notebooks, usually soft-cover Cahier Moleskins that can be colour-coded to different projects. Pocket notebooks will typically be Field Notes (I’m obsessed) or a Moleskine softcover.

I’m slowly experimenting with larger hardcover moleskins as project-specific brainstorming, especially for series works, as I’m rapidly discovering that certain projects are filling notebooks at a rate of knots. I’ve got three for my PhD novellas, and could well fill another three before I’m done.

All these decisions are largely made so I can quickly scan a row of notebooks on the desk and grab the one I need right now. Rather than looking for notes, I can search for a specific colour and size. It speeds things up.

Recently, I’ve broken ranks with this and started using fancier notebooks for very specific projects that I know will run long-term.

The smaller notebook in the image above, featuring art by Kathleen Jennings and produced for the Brisbane Writers Festival a few years back, is now the repository of frequently-checked-publishing details.

For instance, there’s page devoted to the standard price-points I use for Brain Jar Press so I don’t have to prevaricate about “How much can I charge for this project?” Instead, I just check the length and genre against the grid, and list the price.

There’s another page that breaks down certain price-points based on country. And another where I’m breaking down my editorial workflow, so I can quickly construct a checklist for each project and make sure I’m not skipping a step. The mostrecently filled in pages list the things I need to remember when setting up a cover, and Photoshop tools I’m not yet used to reaching for instinctively.

To put it in blogging terms, it’s evergreen content that I’m going to refer back to for years to come. Ergo, a notebook with cover art and some really nice paper quality, easily distinct from all the others.

The other notebook—picked up cheap a few years back, because JRR Tolkien-style art applied to Game of Thrones amused me—features a similar archive of research notes and key take-aways from my more in-depth research journals. Space where I can do quick reviews of core principles while simultaneously serving as an index if I need to get more in depth with what I learned.

These are the shorts of notes I keep meaning to transfer into digital storage, but there’s never enough time to do that in the day.

Milestone

Word count on my exegesis draft ticked past the minimum viable word count last night, although I’m still a few thousand words away from having a final draft. Which puts me behind the self-imposed deadline I set up back in April, but well ahead of my last attempt at writing one of these where I stalled out five thousand words in and ultimately dropped out of the RHD program rather than continue.

There was a point where it felt like that was a perfectly logical choice this time, as well. My imposter syndrome is strong with theoretical writing, and the fear that I will expose myself for an idiot triggers my social anxiety something horrible.

Fortunately, my beloved was there to suggest it might be time to check in with my GP and have a chat about how my mental health is going, and my GP promptly set me up with a plan to pull things back from the brink.

I’m still nervous about writing this damn thing, but not paralysed by indecision and fear.

Next deadline isn’t until early January, but that’s where I need to hand over something way cleaner than what I’ve got now, with all the referencing done properly and the chapters making sense. Still, after nearly six weeks of this eclipsing everything else going on in my life, it’s nice to have the to think about fiction a little more.