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:
Pick Your Poison: Upcoming Trashy Movie Writing Schools
Every now and then, my flatemate and I argue about whose responsible for the ongoing #TrashyTuesdayMovie phenomenon. I say the blame is entirely his, since he’s the one who maintains the schedule and the associated wiki and generally makes sure that we have copies of the movie. He blames me on account of the fact that I continue to show up and tweet every week, and I keep talking it up among people I know. Also, that people I know keep adding fucking films to the list. I think, with the creation of a banner graphic to accompany this post, I have officially lost the argument. Not that it’s a great banner, nor even likely to be the final version, but I was having a slow evening and felt the need to crack open photoshop. Tonight we’re going to kick off the first of Six goddamn Josh Kirby films, which I gather are actually one long film that’s been broken up into arcs. We both blame Jason Fischer for this, since we didn’t even know Josh Kirby existed until he foisted Quest of the Delta Knights on us, which led to some furious IMDB searching in order to keep ourselves from
28/05/2013
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Getting Shit Done is Always Subjective
If there’s a pattern in my writing routine that remains unassailable, it’s this: Thursdays are the hardest days of the week. It’s rare that I get a day where writing is the sole thing I’m doing – there is always thesis work, and meetings, things that need doing for GenreCon and spending time with my girlfriend – but Thursdays are inevitably the day where the balance tips towards not-writing. It’s the day I spend six hours at work, the evening in which I will go game with my friends, and it’s often the evening where my girlfriend and I will abscond to the local sushi place for pre-game dinner. On Thursdays, I get stuff written before work. Yesterday, I managed about two thousand words, which is a pretty fucking efficient day given there was only about two hours of writing time before I had to jump on a train. It just felt like a failure, in many respects, because the rest of the working week I can usually manage twice as many words before my brain grinds to a halt and refuses to do more. Everything else that gone done in that day didn’t register, because my brain is focused
15/09/2017
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The Line When Soup Becomes Soup
I spend a lot of time fascinated by the mutability of words, which is one of those things that’s seeped into my fiction from time-to-time. This made me a sucker for Something Something Soup Something, a concept that’s part-online game and part philosophy experiment about the mutability of a simple concept like “soup”. The narrative behind the game is simple: it’s the future; aliens are making soup and teleporting it into your kitchen, but their understanding of soup is often flawed and needs a level of oversight. You stand by the teleporter and look at their creations, saying yes or no to each, and after a round of 20 or so serves the game will put together your personal philosophy of soup based upon your choices. It’s a really simple concept and a similarly simple bit of coding, but the gameplay is secondary to the experiment going on behind the scenes – while there’s a general consensus about certain elements that make soup soup, these aren’t universal. The concept is vague, shifting, and impossible to define, particularly once you’re presented with options that might be soup. The results challenge the idea that any concept is truly knowable, despite our belief that there
29/12/2020
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The Nine Business Mantras of A Cranky Writer
So, here’s the thing: I spend the vast majority of my daylight hours talking to aspiring writers about what they’d like to achieve and how they can get there. This is one of the things that comes with the territory when you work at a place like Queensland Writers Centre, and it’s pretty sweet gig. You get to meet up-and-coming writers as they’re getting their shit together and help them along the way; you get to meet older, established writers and glean what you can from their experience. You get to talk to the absolutely raw rookies, the people who have just decided I want to be a writer and want to know what they should do next. When I answer questions at work, I’m polite and enthusiastic and eager to give you the best answer I can. I do that ’cause that’s what work-Peter does. This post isn’t written by the guy that’s politely answers your queries if you call us at the centre. No, this post is written by the guy who actually does the hard yards of sitting down and writing stuff; the grumpy-as-shit professional who spends the other half of the day trying to earn some
21/07/2014
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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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Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part One
Unless you’re a wrestling fan, you’ve probably never heard of Al Snow. He was a wrestler, and a damn good one, and he’s spent years behind the scenes training new wrestlers and talking about wrestling and generally holding forth on the state of the industry. Basically, Al Snow is a smart wrestler whose fond of a good rant, and as a fan of wrestling in general I’m okay with paying twenty bucks for an entire DVD full of his rantings. Some of his rants about wrestling contain remarkably good advice about writing. For starters, Al Snow never lets you loose sight of the fact that wrestling is a business. It may be fake – it’s always been fake – but the wrestlers job is to get in there and put on a match that allows fans to suspend their disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s real. This is no different to fiction, at all, and it’s one of the reasons I’m always perplexed when people look down on pro-wrestling. In Al Snow’s wrestling world, “good” is less valuable than “profitable.” He looks at Wrestlemania III, arguably the biggest and most-watched wrestling show of all time, and challenges the
08/06/2012
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