Val Vega makes an epic debut 🚀
17/03/2024
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It’s almost my birthday here in Australia—a birthday I share, give or take a few time-zones—with an incredible Brooklyn-based sci-fi writer named Ben Fransisco. I
HARDBOILED SPEC FIC | NEO-PULP FANTASY & HORROR | GENREPUNK
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.
About Peter M. Ball
PETER M. BALL is an author, publisher, and RPG gamer whose love of speculative fiction emerged after exposure to The Hobbit, Star 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
Never Fall In Love With The Fey
04/03/2024
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Miriam Aster made a big mistake: she fell in love with the Queen of the Fey. All this was ten years ago, when Miriam was
Notebook Mojo
13/08/2023
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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
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:
Bonus Post: Tuesday Therapy and Some Additional Thoughts on Rights
You may have noticed that there’s a routine building around these parts. Or not, ’cause really, it’s mostly a routine that exists in my head and it’s only been going for, like, a week. In any case, this is a bonus post. As in, something I didn’t intend to write, but I’m going to anyway. I’ve offered some advice about Writing and Tracking Your Rights over on LL Hannetts blog as part of her Tuesday Therapy series. I am, for someone who once made a career of dispensing writing advice in the tertiary sector, remarkably squeamish about the process. I either want to impart everything or nothing, since the wrong piece of advice delivered at the wrong time can be fatal to a developing creative process. I still suffer crippling moments of doubt induced by something I read in Samuel Delany’s About Writing four years ago. It’s not bad advice – it’s remarkably good – but I heard it at the wrong time and I can’t let it go and its incompatible enough to my practice to be a problem. I’m also aware that the vast majority of my writing advice isn’t mine, since teaching writing means you accumulate advice like a bowerbird, lining
15/05/2012
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My Writing Goal For 2019: 1,460 Hours
My goal for 2019 is to spend 1,460 hours working on first draft material, spread across my fiction, my PhD, and some projected non-fiction features I’m looking at for the blog. This largely equates to twenty-eight hours of drafting every week, or approximately 4 hours a day. If I’m right in my estimates, this should be good for about 700,000 to 800,000 words over the course of the year, but I’m utterly unconcerned with the word count produced. My sole determinant of success in 2019 is pure hours spent with my but in the chair and my internet blocker turned on so I’m focused on drafting new words. This is a pretty big departure for me–like most writers, I’ve tended to forward plan based around word count. My goals around this time of year would be focused on the number of words produced, or the number of things finished. I want to write 2,000 words a day, or I’d like to finish 20 short stories. Switching over to an hour-based goal is an attempt to try and overcome the fundamental flaws of this approach: I cannot schedule 2,000 words a day or writing a story effectively, because I’ll only ever
27/12/2018
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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
06/12/2015
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Sharkandos, Zombie Tidal Waves, and Verisimilitude
Last week, my partner showed me the trailer for the next film from Ian Ziering and the guys who did all those Sharknado films, a little flick they’ve dubbed ZOMBIE TIDAL WAVE. For those who haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to take a look: As fans of large chunks of the Sharknado franchise, we’re naturally excited about this film. It looks decidedly B-Grade and terrible, but at least 50% of the time this combination of actor and director have taken a terrible concept and made it into something far more interesting. They pushed the ambition of the film and played things straight, delivered above and beyond what was expected of them. The other 50% of the time–I’m looking at you, Sharknado 4–they blew it by playing things for laugh. I did a write up of what made a really good Sharknado films in my newsletter after we rewatched the series last year. It ran a little something like this: I am known, among my friends, for complaining loudly about the fact that Sharknado 4 is the worst of the franchise because it finally gets silly. Peter, they tell me, it’s a series about shark-infested tornado, it’s already quite
21/08/2019
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Two Components of a Big Return
There are projects that feel like you’ve captured lightning in a bottle, and they’re only partially fueled by talent. The biggest story in professional wrestling right now is the return of CM Punk. A man who walks down to the ring to talk, and gets a standing ovation from ten thousand fans that lasts through a commercial break. It’s the kind of buzz that wrestling hasn’t got since it’s dwindling heyday in the late nineties, when two major companies fought for supremacy, and household names like Steve Austin and The Rock were consolidating their status as superstars. Part of the reason fans are coming unglued: this return wasn’t meant to happen. Seven years ago Punk left the biggest game in town—the WWE—after mismanagement and ignored health warnings left him burnt out on the business. He was at the top of his game, but he wasn’t happy as a wrestler anymore, and especially unhappy with the way WWE treated him, frequently suggesting he was too weird, too alternative, too small, too difficult. Punk did a lot of things in his time off: trained to fight for the UFC; wrote comic books; acted in small films. He sued the WWE’s doctors for
22/09/2021
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Some Ideas About Ideas
So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer. So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this: Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one point, “other people’s ideas” at the second point, and “knowing how stories work” at the third. The ideas happen in the middle of the triangle, because ideas are basically a combination of those three things. Sometimes I’ll lean towards one
05/08/2009
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