Category: News & Upcoming Events

News & Upcoming Events

So, like, officially speaking…

If you haven’t dropped by the Twelfth Planet Press livejournal today, odds are you’ve missed this: Book Announcement: Sequel to Horn, due out April 2010 Twelfth Planet Press is proud to announce the acquisition of the sequel to Horn from Peter M Ball. Under the working title of Cold Cases, Miriam Aster works to solve an old file but her painful past refuses to stay buried. Book 2 in the Aster Series will be launched at Swancon, in April 2010. So it’s all official-like: the follow-up to Horn is on its way and sometime in the New Year I’m going to have to get cracking on Novella 3 in the series.

News & Upcoming Events

To put this in context, I love both Conan and Call of Cthulhu

I sold a story to Weird Tales. If you need me for the rest of the day, I’ll be over in the corner geeking out*. *For bonus points, I discovered that I like the first half of the novella enough that I’m not actually embaressed to let people read it. It’s still flawed, yes, but not *OMGWTF am I doing, this ferking sucks” flawed. As usual, the problem seems to have been cramming in way to much backstory in one go.** **Hell, this day keeps getting better. The Australian Government decided to ignore the shitty recomendation from the productivity commission that we remove Australian territorial copyright. I so thought Australian writers and publishers weren’t going to win that fight, for all that there were dozens of sensible reasons on our side and a handful of really daft ones on the pro-parrallel importation end.

News & Upcoming Events

Interfictions Two is out…now

‘Tis true, the Interfictions Two anthology has been released like a releasy thing (sorry, hard morning at the keyboard and I’m all out of simile). You can pick it up in hardcopy or DRM free PDF depending on your preferences. You can read the story by me, should you really want to, but personally I’m diving straight for the contributions by folks like Jeffrey Ford, Ray Vukcevich, Lavie Tidhar, Theadora Goss, and Brian Francis Slattery*. The anthology’s alreadybeen named as one of Amazon ‘s Top Ten Fantasy and Science Fiction books of 2009. And if you’re still left scratching your heads as to what an interfiction actually is, head over to the Interfictions Annex and peruse some of the awesome free fiction on offer as a warm-up. *And then, just quietly, I’m going to go have a cup of tea and a quiet lie down while I recover. My inner reader is a little geeked out after perusing the TOC.

News & Upcoming Events

Yep, the internets are full of stuff I’ve been involved with this week…

…so I may as well go with the hat-trick when it comes to blatant acts of self-promotion this week and mention the following: 1) The Coming Dark at the Internet Review of Science Fiction A long-ish article about the apocalypse in its varied form, put together by my write-club peep Angela Slatter and featuring a bunch of talented Aussie writers (plus me, who is pretty lucky to be sounding coherent given that I was drafting responses to these questions during Gen Con Oz a few weeks back. Not to self – don’t agree to deadlines that coincide with conventions you’re working at). Spec-fic writers tend towards the strange, the weird, the unpleasant—that’s their writing, not their personalities. We’ve had the apocalypse penciled in for a while now, so how are some of us going about documenting the coming dark? How is our changing, frayed environment affecting the writing of authors on our side of the literary divide? A small chunk (really

News & Upcoming Events

Of course, it may just be the fact that I’m a prude…

The October edition of Apex Magazine went online this week, with my story To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament among the table of contents and available for free online or via print or PDF for a reasonable cover price. I should probably mention that of all the stories I’ve written, Horn included, this one is probably the weirdest and the squickiest. And since the working title was “John Flamsteed has sex with aliens to save the world” you should probably get fair warning that it’s a little on the smutty side,  so it’s probably not safe for work unless your co-workers are particularly forgiving of alien-sex. Not that it’s all squicky sex, or even that it’s the focus, but…well, you know…it’s there.

News & Upcoming Events

Some quick pre-order info as I head out the door…

I’m currently preparing to head off to the Gold Coast, primarily to spend a few days catching up with my parents who I haven’t seen for longer than a dinner since they came back from their trip OS a month ago (and, it must be said, to languish in the peaceful surrounds of their home and get some writing done while I’m away from the internets). With that in mind I’m going to forgo today’s entry and make mention of an anthology due to hit shelves in December. Of course, you don’t want to wait for December to organise your copy, because *all the really cool kids are preordering now*. You want to be one of the cool kids, don’t you?* Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Volume 1 Scheduled Released December 1st, 20009 Man, I’m excited about this one. Descended from Darkness collects a lot of the work that appeared on the Apex Magazinewebsite during the first half of 2009 (and

News & Upcoming Events

This week has been deemed Awesome.

This is not the blog post you were meant to be reading today. Not that you’d know this if I hadn’t told you, but there it is. The blog post I had planned for today was inspired by a question Karen Miller asked earlier this week (“isn’t it time the boys of the Science Fiction grew up”) and put forward a bunch of thoughts about why they wouldn’t, because not growing up is kinda integral to the contemporary cultural narrative of geekdom and folks seem to be unwilling to change it in any significant way. You’ll probably still get that post, sooner or later, since I’ve half-drafted it in my head and it’s still kicking around and gathering arguments, but I just don’t have the energy to unleash snark and ranting on the world today. ‘Cause this week, really, it’s been rather awesome. How awesome, I hear you ask? This awesome: I had two three short stories accepted in the

News & Upcoming Events

Work in the Wild

Just passing through, what with the novel draft being perilously close to being done, but I thought I’d mention a little story called On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk that went online at Strange Horizons. Not for any particular reason, mind you, I just thought I’d mention it’s there.

News & Upcoming Events

Another Fly-By Post

1) More Hornspotting today, this time courtesy of a review over at Horrorscope by Craig Bezant. 2) Apex Publishing are offering pre-orders on Descended from Darkness, the anthology that brings together a years worth of stories (including my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) from Apex Magazine. 3) Last night there was write-club, and I wrote up a storm on the Black Candy draft between chatting with Angela Slatter and exchanging texts with Jason Fischeras he had his own write-a-thon in Adelaide. Then, because my sleep patterns are horribly messed up and 1 AM seems like a really appropriate time to be doing things, I came home and wrote even more. Net result was about six and a half thousand words:

News & Upcoming Events

Horn Review at Coolshite

Another review of Horn is live, this time courtesy Coolshite.net and the mildly notorious Dirk Flinthart. This excerpt, incidentally, may be my favourite thing anyone is ever going to say about my writing, ever: Peter M. Ball has got it right. This book is smart, funny, nasty, and wicked as hell. He gets the noir-ish tone spot on, delivers with action a-plenty, kick-ass characters, intelligent plotting, and good, clean evocative writing. Best of all, he takes a turgidly overused fantasy trope out behind the backyard toilet and puts a dum-dum bullet through its brain, after which he whips out his tackle and pisses all over the steaming corpse.

News & Upcoming Events

Things I need to do in Adelaide

1) Eat a pie floater. Maybe two, if I survive the first one. 2) Eat a frog cake. Oddly, the pie floater does not fill me with fear, but this little sugared treat does. Insidious looking things, I tell’s ya. Insidious. 3) Launch Horn on Sunday (5pm) 4) Pick up a bunch of Horn pre-orders for family & friends who aren’t attending the con. 5) Remember the names for the beer sizes in SA (you have pints, right guys? right?). Find a pub that has Cooper’s Stout on tap. 6) Slap Jason with a big steel gauntlet of iron resolve until he starts working on his novel. 7) Take part in the Urban Fantasy, High Fantasy, and Magic Realism panel on Saturday morning. If you’re trying to track me down at any point during the con, that’s your rough guide for finding me. All offers to help me go find pies and black beer will be gratefully accepted 🙂

News & Upcoming Events

Horn now available for Prepurchase

The latest news out of the Twefth Planet Press camp is that Horn is off to the printers and available for prepurchase – you can now reserve a copy and pick it up at Conjecture in Adelaide or have it posted to you.