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LATEST RELEASE Eclectic Projects 006

Eclectic Projects 006 features more original fiction and non-fiction from Aurealis and Ditmar-award-winning author Peter M. Ball. Features four original stories, two original articles, and one ongoing serial. 

The front cover of Eclectic Projects 005, depicting a staircase winding up through a hellish underworld.

About Peter M. Ball

PETER M. BALL is an author, publisher, and RPG gamer whose love of speculative fiction emerged after exposure to The HobbitStar Wars, David Lynch’s Dune, and far too many games of Dungeons and Dragons before the age of 7. He’s spent the bulk of his life working as a creative writing tutor, with brief stints as a performance poet, gaming convention organiser, online content developer, non-profit arts manager, and d20 RPG publisher.

Peter’s three biggest passions are fiction, gaming, and honing the way aspiring writers think about the business and craft of writing, which led to a five-year period working for Queensland Writers Centre as manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace and convenor of the GenreCon writing conference. He is now pursuing a PhD in Writing at the University of Queensland, exploring the poetics of series fiction and their response to emerging publishing technologies.

He’s the author of the Miriam Aster series and the Keith Murphy Urban Fantasy Thrillers, three short story collections, and more stories, articles, poems, and RPG material than he’d care to count. He’s the brain-in-charge at Brain Jar Press, and resides in Brisbane, Australia, with his spouse and a very affectionate cat.

THE LATEST FROM THE BLOG

RECENT ESSAYS AND POSTS FROM THE ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

Notebook Mojo

Last week, I ran a bunch of writing workshops for Villanova College here in Brisbane. Four workshops spread over three days, focused on writing a

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WRITING ADVICE

Over the years I’ve published a bunch of posts and essays designed to help aspiring writers. Here’s a selection you might find interesting:

Talking Writing and the Alex Caine series with Alan Baxter

There is a short-list of people with whom I will always take the opportunity to sit down and shoot the breeze about writing. Alan Baxter is pretty damn high on that list, despite the fact that we very rarely agree and this occasionally results in me taking on crazy-ass projects to prove a point. He’s also the first guy I turn to when I need someone to talk to new writers about putting together action scenes, and his Write the Fight Write workshop at last year’s GenreCon was basically packed to the rafters, and the wait-list of people wanting to get a spot was basically long enough that we could have run another packed workshop without breaking a sweat. You can find out more about Alan at his AlanBaxterOnline.com, and he’s frequently on the twitters @AlanBaxter, but for now I’ve grabbed the opportunity to ask him a few questions about the writing, the zombie apocalypse, and the Alex Caine trilogy which will hit stores in paperback for the first first time this week. SO, THIS WRITING GIG: WHAT FIRST ATTRACTED YOU TO SCRIBBLING STORIES AS A CAREER? An inability to successfully work for anyone else is a large part of

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POD, Publishing Mad Science, and White Mugs

Two years ago, when I first two my business plan for Brain Jar 2.0, one of my long-term goals was taking the philosophy we used to create books and use it to find other places for written work to exist. Webcomics and artists had been monetizing their art with merchandise for years at that point, and print-on-demand merchandising systems like Redbubble had flourished.  It’s taken me a bit to move on the idea because, frankly, the learning curve and the technology weren’t really at the place I wanted it to be for the audience size I was working with. Much as I love Redbubble and the artist friends who sell there, the lack of integration with other storefronts presented a problem for me — putting merch on Redbubble means pushing people to Redbubble, and 2020 was basically a long exercise in figuring out how important direct sales could be. Other services offered better integration, but were location-centric in a way that wasn’t useful; they could service clients in Europe or American at a reasonable price, but shipping POD products to Australia was…well, prohibitive. But the nice thing about the new job is having the spoons to dig and research/try stuff

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Some Thoughts on Finance Advice and Writing

This post is inspired by two separate things. The first is an article about kicking your year off right that a friend of mine linked to on Facebook, which advocated a handful of things to do in the early days of 2016 that would level-up your coming year. It was a solid article – I could see why my friend linked to it – but then I hit this section where they talked about email practices and broke out a very specific example: If you open a bill, the writer advocated, then pay the bill then and there. Only touch your email once. The second thing is a year-long subscription to Money magazine, which was a gift from my sister not long after I acquired a mortgage. I’ve now been reading the magazine for twelve straight months, and its been a very interesting experience. Writing advice and money advice have a lot in common, in that you need to make all kinds of assumptions about the reader to be in a position to deliver either. Often, those assumptions aren’t terribly well articulated, which gives this gloss of one-size-fits-all-ism to what appears on the page. One of the things no-one tells you, when you first

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

I’m off to teach a course on characters in a few hours, so I’ll refer people back to last week’s post if they need a whole bunch of context about the how and why of The Sunday Circle. Short version: I am interested in what people are working on, what people are reading, and in providing a weekly check-in on creative projects for accountability purposes. If you’d like to be involved: Post your answers to the three questions above in the comments or on your own blog (with a link back here, so the rest of us can find you). 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 week two (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? Still working my way through the opening chapters of Space Marines: Pew! Pew! Pew! My patten for this book consists of writing a scene

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The Back Cover Synopsis in the Backlist-driven world

We used to sell books by telling you how exceptional the story was. The whole back cover synopsis pushing you to invest in the character journey and atmosphere of the story contained within. Selling you on the author was a secondary concern, because the author was an invisible presence nine times out of ten. Your primary relationship was with the book, the bookseller, and the story, not the person who wrote it. Then blogs came along, and then Facebook, and then Twitter. YouTube and TikTok and Tumblr and Snapchat and Patreon and gods know how many others that I’m ignoring in that list. Find an author and like their work? Odds are you’ll be following them on one platform or another, the first step in a long-term relationship. Which raises an interesting question for marketing books: do we now sell readers on the author and the contents of the book? Make them sound like the kind of author that needs to be followed and engaged with beyond this one story? Inviting a long-term commitment from a reader might not sell the current book as efficiently as the traditional conventions around the back cover synopsis, but the long-term relationship sells books

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Crazier, Faster, Better

I started April full of confidence. I had a plan for a novella. Nothing important, just a goofy 40,000 words about dinosaurs and apocalypse and super-intelligent battle-orangutans that’s mostly being written to amuse a friend of mine. I knew could hit two thousand words a day, so I figured I’d get through a rough draft in the space of thirty days. Now we’re nineteen days in and I’ve burned the entire draft to the ground so I can start over and build something better in the wreckage. Not that I’m getting rid of the any of the goofy elements – there will still be dinosaurs and apocalypse and orangutans – but I wasn’t happy with the draft I was writing and desperately needed to change it. The voice didn’t fit. The plot was wrong. My 40,000 word novella draft was up around 30,000 words, and I was only just getting out of the first act. The middle act belonged to a completely different story (and, now, can go become that story without being hampered by the first act that didn’t fit). I can usually tell when I’ve done something wrong with story structure because my entire life grinds to a

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