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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. 

The front cover of Eclectic Projects 005, depicting a staircase winding up through a hellish underworld.

About Peter M. Ball

PETER M. BALL is an author, publisher, and RPG gamer whose love of speculative fiction emerged after exposure to The HobbitStar 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

Notebook Mojo

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

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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:

Focus on the Mountain, Not the Map

So Neil Gaiman has this speech, a keynote address he delivered in 2012. You may be familiar with it – almost everyone is, at this stage of the internet, ‘cause that shit has been linked to and reprinted more times than the goddamn bible at this stage of its career. Peeps will repeat the words Make Good Art like a goddamn mantra. I don’t mind that. As mantra goes, make good art is pretty bloody aces. But for my money, the most valuable part of the speech isn’t the bits that get repeated over and over. It’s not the catchy phrases about making good art when your cat dies or your wife leaves you It’s not the sequence where he lays out his beliefs that there are no rules in art, which creative types lap up like the fun-loving anarchist spirits we all want to be. The most valuable part of the speech is this: Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes  it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying

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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

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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

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Routine Hacking and Emotional Triggers

When my life goes astray, my first port of call is always walking through my morning routines and figuring out where to make changes. Inevitably, I can track a minor thing that’s throwing my whole day off, which usually sees a flurry of experimentation as I find a work-around. Back in January, mornings were a struggle, and I slowly worked through the stuff that’s changed to find solutions. At first, I blamed the issues on new medication that left me groggy and prone to dozing off in the mornings (aided, in part, by the addition of a daily Wordle). Going to bed earlier and shifting the Wordle check-in until after 8 AM has helped, but it didn’t quite get me back into a writing frame of mind. So I started tracking where else my day was going astray and quickly realized a common point: sitting down to work on my desktop right after I drink my coffee. The desktop in question is new, and basically a beast of a computer compared to my other devices. A massive upgrade, given I’ve primarily worked off laptops for a few years. I love writing on a desktop, and miss having a space where

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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

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By The Numbers

I plan my year thirteen weeks a time, marking out the quarter and setting goals based upon pre-existing commitments and what needs to be done. It seems like an endless expanse of hours, when you sit down to start logging everything you’d like to do, but the speed with which time vanishes is startling to watch. Thirteen weeks, five work days a week. Four hundred and eighty-seven hours. Except one day a week will be lost to admin, teaching, and similar activities. That’s ninety eight hours gone. The four days a week that are left get divided between three major projects: thesis; novel draft; story drafts. One hundred and twenty-nine hours a piece, spread across thirteen weeks. To finish the first novel draft in that time assumes I’ll write 620 words, on average, across the 129 hours allocated to the task. To get a finished draft means working faster, packing in more words. To devote time to planning means working faster still – every hour spent planning needs to make another hour two or three times more productive. 30,000 words of PhD work means a much slower pace, per hour. Except that 232 words per hour pace needs research to

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