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:
The Unenviable Hell of a Bad Breakfast
The Dancing Monkey 2016 request continues, with a topic that is near and dear to my heart: THE UNENVIABLE HELL OF A BAD BREAKFAST I am old enough to remember a time when Australia wasn’t a breakfast culture. ‘Course, I am old enough to remember a time when the arrival of McDonalds upon our shores was a big deal, and a time when a cappuccino was a fancy-ass coffee. We’ve grown up, in the last thirty years or so, and somewhere along the line we became the folks who are all about our goddamn breakfast. Try to get a group of friends together for dinner, in Australia, and you will have an endless array of maybes and alternate dates, everyone hedging their bets. Break out: “Meet me for breaky somewhere?” BOOM. Everyone is all fucking in. It helps that our cafes got really good at breakfast and coffee over the last twenty years. I can think of three cafes within walking distance of my house that will provide a kick-ass breakfast, and I don’t live in a particularly cafe-rich suburb of Brisbane. These are places that take goddamn pride in their breakfast menu. Places for whom simple staples like bacon and eggs or
03/03/2016
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What do my days look like now?
Yesterday was my final day at my blogging gig with Queensland Health, and I am not yet contracted for my GenreCon gig or have the details of my PhD scholarship set in place. I am, technically, unemployed and bereft of income until the two latter things get sorted in the coming week. Even after those are resolved, I will be a student who has a day-a-week contract gig. I do not know what my days look like now that I do not have to work around a day-job. Lots of people dream of quitting their job to write or read, but that often fails to take into account there is something comfortable about work that you don’t realise when it’s there. Even if you hate your job, there are decisions that do not need to be made: where will you be on a given day? What will you do? Who are you going to see? Your obligations as an employee provide an anchor to the rest of your activities, something that can be planned around. It provides context to otherwise arbitrary designations: Saturday ceases to be a day and becomes the first day of the weekend; Monday becomes the start
28/01/2017
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STEAL THIS IDEA: Zombie Mode Task List!
I’m a big fan of running playbooks to take decision making off the table, especially on low energy days when I don’t have the spoons for self-management. There’s a larger piece in the works on this—part of a series that’s been going through my newsletter of late—but it remains a work-in-progress because there’s a bunch of moving pieces I’m trying to lay out and it’s hard to fit it into self-contained, 1,000 word chunks. Imagine my jealousy when a Software Engineer named Lisa wrote about their “Zombie Mode” list over on the Bullet Journal blog. “Zombie Mode” is what I call the state of being when I do not want to think and just want to be told what to do next. I have two collections to use when I am in this state — one for workdays and one for non-workdays. They both contain lists of tasks to be completed for the day, in order, until I snap out of Zombie Mode or the day ends. Before, when I was in Zombie Mode, I would just waste all that time playing on my phone or trying to motivate myself to choose something to work on. Once I gave myself
28/09/2021
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Writing, Budgeting, and Shame
My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the moment of parity between the Australian dollar and the US*. In fact, I’m not really leaving the house much for anything, really. All of this takes considerable mental energy on my part, because the impulse is there to do all of them and in some cases (say, Locus) I can even partially justify why I should do them. Such are the realities of paying off credit card debt in my current circumstances – I’ve trimmed my budget to focus as much as possible on paying off the accumulated debt of the last year, and even then the realities of credit interest meant I’m only dropping the debt by $5-$20 a month. Eventually that will change – the payments will knock down the debt, the not-using-the-credit-card will keep new debt from accumulating, and thus there will be less interest as the months go by – but that
19/10/2010
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600k Year: A Conclusion, More or Less
Warning: word-count neepery associated with the 600k challenge follows. You can skip today’s post if that’s not your thing. Right. So yesterday, at Write Club, I did this Which means I’ve now written nine of the ten chapters I had planned for the novel I’m working on and there’s just one more to go. Probably about 65,000 to 72,000 words, depending on how accurate my words-per-page assumptions are, with another eight to ten thousand words left to chase down before I hit the end. It…may not be done by GenreCon. Which hurts to admit, since I was confident I’d get able to do so until about Monday, but we’re starting to hit the point where the conference stops having things that need to be done and starts to have minor disasters that will eat hours of your time as you fix them. Since I’m the only person whose disappointed if this book doesn’t get done in time, and there’s about 180 writers counting on me to get GenreCon right at present, it’s becomes one of those needs of the many situations. SOME STATS ON MY FAILURES Since my deadline for the 600k year dare coincides with the GenreCon banquet, I think it’s safe
23/10/2015
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How to pick up a free story and support this humble author
As promised in the last post, you can pick up a copy of Winged, With Sharp Teeth for free this week. Just follow the links here to claim your copy: Amazon US | Amazon Australia | Amazon UK And here’s a little taste of what you’re getting if you follow the link. The rain draped over Brisbane like a wet sheet, bringing with it a chill and sharp gusts of wind. Not the kind of weather you hoped for when planning a first date, but Steve wasn’t complaining. They were huddled together in the Siam Palace on Sandgate Road, seated beneath the watchful eye of a giant golden Buddha. They ate Pad Thai, traded stories about their lives: the events of the week, where they worked, what they studied at university. Wait staff hustled between the tables, delivering drinks and plates of fragrant curry. The wind chased new patrons through the front door, setting the candle flames on every table dancing. Their own lanky, blond waitress brought a fresh beer as Duke finished telling Steve about the crocodile. “I know it’s not the sort of thing you confess right up,” Duke said. “It’s just…look, it’s been a thing, with other
22/11/2018
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