Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 22

Post-Its

When my dad passed away in March, he left behind a whole bunch of post-its. Parkinsons disease tends to affect levels of dopamine in the brain, which in turn generates various impulsive and compulsive behaviors as to ease anxiety.

Having enough post-its was a big thing for Dad, to the point where he accumulated more than he’d ever actually need at the late stage of his life. Mum passed them on to me, on the logic that I’d be most likely to need them over the day-to-day course of life.

Reader, I now have a metric buttload of Post-Its. In fact, it’s possible I’m set for the next decade of my life.

And it turns out I don’t use them anywhere near as often as I thought.

2 December 2019

Everything on my reminder board focuses on dates back in November, and even then I lost track of half the things I needed reminding of in the back half of the month.

It’s been four and a half weeks since I last worked on fiction projects. My brain is inciting a rebellion against this focus on one project until it’s finished approach I’ve been trialing.

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

I just realised that the Sunday Circle turns four years old this weekend, which is a lot of weekly check-ins about projects, inspiration, and identifying sticking points.

It’s probably a sign that I need to revise the intro to these posts. A project to think about for the new year.

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?

Finishing off a few chapters in the exegesis that have blown out past word count, and doing a lot of the busywork in terms of making the draft readable (ie checking references, proofing, etc).

What’s inspiring me this week?

Monica Valentinelli’s Make Art, Not War Challenge, a book of essays, writing prompts, and rules for making art in times of enormous social turmoil. This one started out on Valintenelli’s blog a few years back, an online movement that gradually ran out of steam as Valentinelli moved on to other things.

Which is a shame, because the book the Make Art, Not War rules are a great toolkit if you’re feeling harried and beleaguered in your creative life.

When times are tough, the feeling that artists are not necessary tends to permeate. Art is viewed as frivolous or a luxury since we don’t produce food, clothing, or housing. The exact opposite is true, however, because in charged political climates artists document and represent our humanity and all our struggles be they violent or peaceful for present day and future generations. Often, propaganda posters, victory songs, and other forms of art are specifically commissioned as well. Art is omnipresent, it is always political, and the choices we make affect our audiences and everyone around us.

Valentinelli, Monica. Make Art Not War Challenge: Rules, Essays, and 31 Creative Prompts

In a month where Australia burned and the global political climate seemed to veer closer and closer to bleak and corrupt, it’s one of those books that’s full of timely advice and reminders.

What action do I need to take?

I want to compile a new revision and release checklist for Brian Jar Press, especially since I’ve now adjusted my proofing and editorial process by moving things online. This works well with short stories, less so for longer works where it’s easy to find myself losing track of what stage I’m up to and what still needs to be done.

EXILE pre-orders!

And lo, my urban fantasy thrillers about an occult hit-man running home to the Gold Coast in order to duck the start of Ragnarok will hit digital shelves once more in January 2020.

Keith Murphy is back, yo, in a shiny new edition you can pre-order now.

Keith Murphy’s coming home to a city full of demons. What’s following on his heels is much worse. 

Ever since he left the Gold Coast, Keith Murphy’s been the triggerman for the sorcerer-assassin Danny Roark. Then they screwed up a job and all hell broke loose, unleashing a vengeful cult of necromancers eager to take down the hit man who gunned down their leader and reclaim their master’s soul from the bullet around Keith’s neck. Roark was already running when Keith made it the rendezvous, and the old man left Keith three simple instructions: go home, lie low, and wait for me to call.

Easier said than done.

The Gold Coast is full of old friends and even older enemies, and nobody is happy to see Keith back on his old turf. He’s got to cut a deal with the local demons and survive an ex-girlfriend who turned to the dark side, all while trying to duck the agents of the Raven Cult using magic to track Keith down and cut off his head.

Roark’s always handled the weird stuff, leaving Keith to focus on guns and tactics. Now the old man’s gone and Keith’s running solo—and he’s got to figure out how to use what he knows to survive the hell that’s coming.

If you ever wanted to see Lee Child’s Jack Reacher or Max Allen Collins’ Quarry taking on demons, sorcerers, and magic, you won’t be able to put down the Keith Murphy series.

Ebook available for preorder from Amazon; paperbacks will be added on Release Day, January 29.

Longtime readers will remember the first release of Exile, which came out through Apocalypse Ink Press back in 2014 and built upon a project originally written for the Edge of Propinquity ‘zine. I had a ton of fun revisiting the project and doing little tweaks, in addition to refining the branding to focus on some of the non-fantasy influences. In my head, this series was always Quarry meets Harry Dresden, or John Wick crossed with Constantine.

The second book in the original Flotsam cycle, Frost, is scheduled for release in February 2020, with the final book, Crusade, following in March.

Netflix, The Christmasing: Phase One

Well, folks. ‘Tis the season in the lands of the streaming services, and the yearly inundation of dodgy holiday films have landed. Netflix, in particular, seems to have doubled down on the genre. What started with an unexpected hit in The Christmas Prince—a franchise due to get its third film in three years come December—is now bolstered with in-house movies made on the cheap and newly acquired made-for-TV fare all about the Christmas romance

My partner and I aren’t the biggest fan of Christmas, but we do love a trashy film and that love isn’t limited to action and sci-fi projects. We’ve made ourself a list of unwatched Christmas trash and checked it twice, then fired up the ol’ Netflix viewer to make our way through the sixteen holiday films on our radar this year.

Here’s some quick capsule reviews of the stuff we’ve watched thus far.

THE KNIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

The Christmas Prince may be the franchise that started it all on Netflix, but last year saw the streaming service launch Vanessa Hudgens as a franchise player in the Xmas romance space with The Princess Switch. There’s a sequel to that film coming in 2020, but this year Hudgens is back with a time-travel romance that sees a medieval English knight transported to modern-day Ohio in order to fall in love with a high school science teacher and learn a valuable lesson about knightly virtues.

It’s not a particularly ambitious script, but that’s not the point of a film like this one. What’s impressive is the level of care that’s brought to pretty much everything else given the budget and lack of innovation in the major beats. I’m obsessed with the set and costume design of this film, which is so coordinated that subtly eliminates any sense of reality by virtue of everything matching perfectly. It’s set the tone perfectly, because reality has no place here on any level.

Then, of course, there’s the acting. Hudgens has already proven that she’s a dab hand at these kind of roles—The Princess Switch largely rests on her playing to a similarly absurd premise—and she delivers here. Josh Whitehouse’s Sir Cole is more of a surprise, but manages a level of charm that carries the film through some of its absurd beats and narrative revelations. He manages a kind of Heath-Ledger-minus-the-intensity vibe (or, possibly, a Heath-Ledger-On-Home-And-Away vibe, but I don’t remember that era well enough).

Basically, this is Grade-A trash. As my friend Adam would say, this is a qualified recommendation—f you don’t grove on the trash aesthetic, you’re going to hate it. If you do, it’s great. Four out of Five chocolate meads.

SANTA GIRL

Santa’s daughter runs off to college so she can experience the “real world” before going through with her arranged marriage to the son of Jack Frost. While there, she’s a fish out of water who develops feelings for one of her fellow fish-out-of-water classmates, which unleashes shenanigans as Jack Frost and other supernatural beings get involved to try and manipulate the situation.

I’m intrigued by the supernatural world set up here—a place where holidays and mythical beings are essentially private corporations that are engaged in a constant give-and-take as they barter for influence. Casting Barry Bostwick as a hard-assed corporate Santa desperate to hold onto his influence is a great choice, as he’s both effectively goofy and able to sell the idea that this version of Santa—lean and off cookies for his own health–is a natural reaction to the loss of Mrs Clause.

It’s a sweet film with some surprisingly ambitious world-building. Three and a half junk-food breakfasts out of five.

MERRY KISSMASS

The writer behind 2015’s Merry Kissmass, Joany Kane, seems to have carved out a niche with made-for-TV christmas romances. Her all revolve around the theme of Xmas and kissing, and they make up at least half her credits overall.

What’s intriguing about Merry Kissmass is how it handles the crafting of a romance story where the main protagonist, Kayla, is engaged to someone who is not her happily ever after for the first part of the film. It’s a big thing to work around, and the movie does it by making really, really sure that her fiance Carlton is an awful person who utterly deserves what’s coming. This is coupled with a series of tropes that are all about making sure that the HEA guy, Dustin, is the obvious choice (and I give the movie bonus points for its deployment of puppies in the service of this).

Two hunks covered in puppies out of five.

LET IT SNOW

Adapted from a novel cowritten by multiple A-List young adult authors (Maureen McHugh, John Green, Lauren Myracle) and featuring an ensemble cast of great actors, this feels like a movie that should be a bigger deal than it is. It’s the first film of the season where my partner and I truly diverge in our opinions—she really enjoyed it (largely because it has Joan Cusack being whacky), while I felt like it overstayed it’s welcome and could have had a storyline or two pared back.

If The Knight Before Christmas feels like a movie where everyone involved is working to a level beyond the ambitions of the script, this is a film where the collective competence of everyone involves largely exposes the lack of a strong, beating heart at the centre. Never quite bad enough to be make you turn off, never quite good enough to make you feel like it’s going to be worth the time invested. It suffers an awful lot from the central protagonists who unify the film being a lot less interesting than the small-town-girl/rock star pairing who provide the second narrative spine—-if you swapped the pairings, this would have been stronger.

Joan Cusack is phenomenal, though. As are some of the supporting players, particularly Jacob Batalon and Liv Hewson, who make an awful lot out of the very little the script gives them. Two stolen kegs of beer out of five, although it’s three and a half tinfoil hats out of five every time Hewson or Cusack are on the screen.

Are you Studying To Dream of Stars at the moment?

If my email and messages are to be trusted, we’ve hit the point of the year where a bunch of students are sitting down to analyse To Dream of Stars and discovering they have questions.

I’m not in a position to respond to people one-on-one due to deadlines right now, but for those of you who have found your way here looking for more information, there’s a whole FAQ post about that story that might be useful.

Then again, it might not. The interesting thing about writing fiction is the way other people see things in the work that you don’t, and that’s been particularly true for To Dream of Stars since I sent it out to my beta readers and they started pointing at interesting-things-I’d-done that I was completely blind too.

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?

My deadline to get a rough exegesis draft to my supervisor is this Friday, which largely sets my to-do list for the week. There’s about four thousand coherent words left to write, and about ten thousand incoherent ideas half-written in another file. Much of my week will be spent winnowing out the bad ideas and finding the stuff that will fit.

Once the draft is turned in, I’m taking a few days to chill and then getting back to fiction…but that’s likely to be next week’s project.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. The first Rian Johnson film I encountered was the low-budget indie Brick, which took the tropes of film noir and ported them into a high school setting. The result was such a startlingly fresh, tight, and innovative mystery that I found myself rewatching the film over and over for the space of a week, puzzling out all the tricks.

Johnson’s Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, took his knack for visual framing and turned it up to eleven. Whether you come down on the side of loving that film or hating it, it’s hard to deny the visual impact of what’s put up on the screen. Johnson, when given a budget, prooved to be both stylistically flashy and incredibly coherent in terms of visual style.

Knives Out is a blend of those two approaches. It’s got the really nuanced understanding of its genre that made Brick great, although it’s taking on the cosy mystery rather than film noir. It uses that nuance to recretate the genre from the ground up and deliver something fresh, accompanying a cracking script with really great performers.

And then it’s got the budget for Johnson to turn his knack for visual style loose, and the results are spectacular. 

What action do I need to take?

Setting myself an easy one this week: hit up the various social media sites and edit my interest profiles. I do this fairly regularly on Facebook, which maens it stops assuming I’ve got a prevailing interest in things I checked once or twice (or assuming I’ve got an interet in certain interests showing up on facebook, whe that’s not really how I use the site). I’ve never done it on twitter, though, which my explain why the site is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and engage with. 

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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’ve just spent two weeks marking, and like all end-of-year grading exercises, it obliterated any other work. Which means this week is all about gaining ground on the two projects earmarked for end-of-November deadlines–getting my exegesis draft finished, and getting a new short story collection together. Everything will be drafting and line-edits for the next seven days, possibly the next fourteen.

What’s inspiring me this week?

My partner and I finally caught up with Season 4 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which is a phenomenal series in and of itself but also a really interesting one to look at in terms of series.

Serial fiction is often predicated on keeping characters iconic and close to archetype, particularly in animated narratives. She-Ra pushes its characters to evolve and change, a constant disruption of the status quo. The characters still cleave close to archetypes, but the series is finding new iterations on those archetypes and shedding new light upon them. Things that happen resonate through the series.

And the season finale…well, it’s a big status quo change. The kind that actually has me wondering whether everything we’ve seen thus far is the first act of a longer story, or if we just hit the end of a second act, or possibly the whole thing is unreadable in those terms.

It’s a fascinating thing to puzzle over, given where my head is at in thesis terms. I just wish I had the time to go down that particular rabbit hole.

What action do I need to take?

So many things. The key word for this week is regroup, since marking blew all plans out of the water and I don’t have any real sense of where I’m at with any projects. I new weekly checkpoint and project review is due, and it’s worth revisiting all my project plans for the quarter and seeing how challenges, goals, and timelines may have shited.

Fighting For Your Life With Shia LaBeouf

1.

Here is a morning thought for a Friday: the glory of the internet is that there’s always someone who hasn’t seen Rob Cantor’s Shia LaBeouf. And there’s always someone who has forgotten the song and needs to see it again.

Being the one to rectify either situation is a gift that keeps on giving. Go forth and be that person.

2.

And here’s a challenge for your Friday: what can Rob Cantor’s 3 minute clip offer you as a creative person (regardless of how that creativity manifests). Yesterday I logged a quote from a recent Garth Nix in-conversation I attended: we are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read. This applies to three-minute clips as well as great works of literature and non-fiction.

These days I run through a list from Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative designed to help capture creative sparks and insights.

ARE THERE ANY PATTERNS YOU’RE EXPERIENCING THAT ARE SIMILAR TO SOMETHING YOU’RE WORKING ON?

One project I’m kicking around at the moment is a year-long research-and-report series based around being more satisfied with my writing. Not necessarily being more successful with my writing in purely monetary terms, but hitting the end of 2020 and feeling like I’m pushing towards something instead of treading water. I found my way back to this clip as part of that, thinking about the works of art that really resonate with me and get me excited about creative possibilities. Cantor’s work is part of an emerging pattern: B-Grade ideas treated with po-faced seriousness, an appreciation for small absurdities in the genre, writing everything from a different perspective so you’re forced to re-examine the familiar.

At the same time, the project I’m noodling with the moment is a straight-up crime novel. No supernatural elements, no magic and no SF. Just a downright nasty thug doing bad things to bad people. Despite this, it’s not a book that’s grounded in realism—I wanted a very stylized feel to it. Realism heightened to the point of absurdity, then filtered through genre tropes. So I look at little patterns in Cantor’s song—the sheer pleasure of whispering Shia LaBeauf’s name and the way it lures you into the moment; the constant escalation from band, to orchestra, to dancers, to children’s choir, to acrobats, and the way the structure constantly mirrors and pushes the increasing absurdity of the story to the point where “but you can do jui-jitsu” feels like a natural progression.

You can’t do that in the same way when writing fiction, but the general idea of it seems like it could be replicated in some way.

WHAT DO YOU FIND SURPRISING ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE EXPERIENCING?

Two words: production values. Doing weird, gimmicky songs on the internet is nothing new and Cantor’s work had already gone viral two years before the clip appeared. That he doubled-down and produced this amazing, bizarre clip is just magical—one of the few things that has ever gone viral where I’m really blown away by the production and effort that went into it.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE EXPERINCING AND WHY?

The fusing of “high art” forms like dance, choir, and an orchestra with an ostensibly low-art aesthetic of a goofy horror movie plot. Also, my god, the production values on a three-minute Youtube thing is incredible. There’s an intent here that’s often missing when people do this kind of thing, a real seriousness and gravitas that elevates the goofiness of the concept. The dedicated seriousness of everyone involved . They don’t treat it as a joke and therefore elevate this to the level of parody within the story, so you’re able make those decisions for yourself as a viewer. There’s an ideology of trusting the reader here that I appreciate. The Shia LaBeouf guest spot at the end . Always fun to see someone willing to go along with a joke, but it also really nails the dedication and willingness to go all-out on production values.

WHAT DO YOU DISLIKE ABOUT WHAT YOUR EXPERIENCING?

The second “Shia LaBeauf” not really being whispered by the violinist. There is so much impact in the first one, and the kid’s repetition of “quiet, quiet,” that gets lost when the name is said in a low voice instead.The little details that get lost. I missed the blindfolded mohawked dancer in the final stages of the song because the clip had gone all maximalist and drowned us in detail. It’s only today, after about fifty repetitions of this clip, that I finally noticed something going on int he background.

Two Things I Took Note Of from “Garth Nix In Conversation with John Birmingham”

Last week, I ventured out into the streets of Brisbane to see Garth Nix in conversation with John Birmingham at the Brisbane Square Library. The in-conversation was nominally about Nix’s new book, Angel Mage, which got described as “Three Musketeers meets Joan of Arc with Angelic Magic and Kick-Ass Heroines.”

As these events are wont to do, the conversation took a turn through inspirations, process, and industry lore, courtesy of two career writers digging into one another’s work and trying to figure out how they did what they did. Nix is largely a make-things-up-as-I-go-along writer, and Birmingham is not, and the disconnect in their respective approach proved fascinating.

I walked away with two quotes from the event, both marked in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget them.

Nix got the first of them, when talking about “research” and the slow filtering of everything he reads into his process:

“We are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read.”

Which is one of the best ways of describing the ongoing research process of writers I’ve ever come across (Historical novelists used to confuse the heck out of me–how in hell did they do that much focused research?–but then I sat down with a couple of historical writers and listened to them talk, and really they’re immersed in that stuff all the time. They live and breathe it for fun, then take what they need for fiction when it becomes relevant.)

Later in the event, Birmingham nailed one of the great things about being a writer in the early stages of the 21st century, and how that’s different to the film and TV field.

If we write something, and we do our jobs right, it’s going to get published. It’ll go to our publishers, and if they don’t want it, we can publish it ourselves and take home that sweet 70% self-pub royalty.

In screen, there’s still a line of two hundred people between you and having a show come out, and if any one of them says “nah, not for us,” you’re toast.

I am, of course, going off rough notes and the text of the quotes may not be 100% accurate, but the gist of them is right. And they’re both things that I’ve logged here because I wanted to remember them long after the current bullet journal is retired.