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:
I’m Far To Easily Amused By The Phrase “ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL”
So my friend Nic, who scribbles a bit but doesn’t have a website, snuck a final question in on the end of the dancing monkey series: What do you do with an idea or story that just runs out of steam far too early? (Say many thousands of words short of what it needs) Well, much as I’d like to say I’ve experienced this one, I’m generally an up-against-the-word-limits-can-I-have-a-few-thousand-more-please-gov’ner kind of writer. I spend half my structural redrafts trying to cut things out of my manuscripts, so should a story come in several thousand words under my approach I’d probably sing hallelujahs and weep with goddamn joy. Writing shorter is one of my goals, not a problem. Assuming for the sake of argument (and blog post) that I did suddenly run into such a problem – say for whatever unlikely reason an editor really needed a 10k gap in an anthology filled and my pinch-hitting story only came in at 7k – I can think of a handful of things I’d try. 1) ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL Named for SF writer Nancy Kress, who first described this process on her blog back in 2011. Basically she was writing a story that
01/10/2012
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The World’s Worst Story Opening (And How To Do It So It Works)
Back in May, Chuck Wendig did this post about breaking rules. I like Chuck. He’s a smart guy. Knows his shit when he talks about writing, too, which is why we flew him out as a guest for last year’s GenreCon. But I’ve gotta admit, when he put up his post saying, well, fuck the rules, and included the following list of rules worth fucking, it kinda made my testicles crawl into my body and seek refuge from the terror he’d unleashed upon the world: Don’t open on weather. Don’t open with a character looking in a mirror. Don’t open on a character just waking up. (Wendig, IN FICTION, NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED) Oh, Jesus, I thought. Why in hell would you tell people that? Don’t you realise what you’re unleashing on the world? Those poor fucking editors. Hell, those poor writers. DAMMIT, WENDIG, WHY ARE YOU USING YOUR POWERS FOR EVIL? Then I got distracted. ‘Cause deadline’s wait for no fucking man and I had a copy of Frost to turn in that wasn’t yet finished. But that last one on Chuck’s list, it stuck in my head. Don’t open on a character just waking up. It irritated me, ’cause I’ve got
03/07/2014
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This End Not An End Point
Scratchpad: Comic Books, Fiction, Publishing, PoeticsPoetics, Conventions, and Physical Objects No Ellipsis Publishing This End Not An End Point It’s May, 2009. Approximately four years after the release of A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Readers are getting antsy about Martin’s insistence on doing other things: editing books in his Wild Carda universe; writing stories that are not A Dance of Dragons; consulting on the HBO television series made from his work; writing blog posts all of the above, rather than working on the now overdue fifth volume which turns out to be two-and-a-half years away. A phrase rolls across the internet, a little viral moment shared by booklovers: George RR Martin is not your bitch. We know this, because Neil Gaiman told us so, responding to a fans question about what readers are owed when a series is plagued by delays and gaps the Martin’s series is. It’s still another two and a half years before A Dance of Dragons drops in June, 2011. The final two volumes are still forthcoming, nine years after the last release. Adaptations of the series have reached their conclusion, before the source material.
30/04/2020
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CS Pacat on how to rock the Aaron Sorkin approach to dialogue
I was going to show up here and write a long post about dialogue this evening, given that I’m rewriting a story where I’m trying to do things I don’t ordinarily do with dialogue, and that’s seeping into the new story I’m trying to draft. Then I remembered that CS Pacat already has one of the most kick-ass posts about dialogue structures that I’ve seen on the web, so I’m just going to link to her post about manipulating topic patterns instead. Or, as it should be titled, a quick primer on how Aaron Sorkin does all those Aaron Sorkin things in dialogue. Go forth and read, peeps. I’m going back to my story.
28/02/2017
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Simply Designed, and In Great Quantity
There are books that I keep on my bookshelf because they are pleasurable artefacts to have around, even if I’m no great fan of the text that exists inside them. Occasionally, these objects are what you’d expect: leather-bound tomes and special editions, books that look like something out of a movie. More often, they’re smaller books. Paperback novellas or chapbooks whose slim page-count is wrapped in a beautiful, simple design, turning what should be a weakness in the marketplace with regards to page count and paper quality into a strength: I may care very little for Freud’s work, but I love this book. It’s a compact hundred pages long, four essays bundled together in a very pleasing package. Maybe 25,000 words in total, and part of the Great Loves series from Penguin that shares the same design aesthetic while being recognisably related to the longer Penguin Classics line. It’s not designed to take up much room on a shelf as a single volume, but when you line up all twenty books in the series, the aesthetic and packaging quickly combine with the series theme to occupy physical and intellectual space. When I think about my long-term planning for Brain Jar
07/05/2019
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Why I Wrote Exile
It started with an IM from Jenn Brozek at Apocalypse Ink: Have you ever through about adapting the Flotsam series you did for The Edge of Propinquity into novella form? It’s one of those questions you answer carefully when it comes from an editor, particularly one you’ve worked with before who has launched their own small publishing company. Sure, I said, I’ve thought about it. Why do you ask? Jenn explained her reasons for asking. We went back and forth about the details. Somewhere along the line, I signed a contract. On this level, the why behind EXILE is easy: Jenn was interested in working with me, and she offered an advance. When you’re a writer, working freelance, that’s a combo you don’t turn down. But there’s more to EXILE than opportunity and income; there always is, when you set out to write something, even if you convince yourself otherwise. So for the rest of the post I figured I’d tilt my lance at the dreaded not-so-easy answer and try to unpack some of the deeper motivations behind the book. WHY I REALLY WROTE EXILE I’ve had the character of Keith Murphy kicking around my head for a long, long
17/07/2014
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