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:
Behind The Scenes On A Cover Redesign
Last year I did a new cover for Alan Baxter’s Shadow Bites: A Horror Sampler, a free bundle of stories and novel excerpts for folks who’d like to get a taste of Alan’s work. It’s a project from a longer conversation Al and I were having about title development, the stuff we’ve both been doing in the indie publishing space, and the difference between the titles where development has been nigh perfect (The Roo) and the stuff that could do with a little spruce. Here’s the original and the refresh side-by-side for context. Original is on the left, my revamp is on the right. I won’t comment too much on the original, as it’s not my work and wasn’t specifically design with Al’s book in mind, but I will break down some of the reasons I pushed Alan to consider making a change. Mostly, these reasons have nothing to do with the cover design, and everything to do with a mismatch between the books goals and the design. For me, the starting point for covers isn’t “is this a good/pretty cover?” but “does this cover fit the title development for the title?”, which is a slightly knottier question that benefits
02/02/2022
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Making First Moves
This morning I’m pondering the right first move to bed into my daily routine. Right now, I have about four first moves that will kick of my day, depending on which groove I’m in: Getting up and journaling to park ideas; Getting up and writing directly into the computer; Getting up and doing the day’s Worlde, then posting it to my family chat; Getting up and brain dumping my top-of-mind thoughts into an Omnifocus inbox, then doing a project review and building my diary for the day. Of the four, Wordle is the worst option. Logging in to finish a Worlde puzzle only takes about three minutes, but it puts me in a social mindset because the next step is going into chat, and from there it’s a short skip to spending the entire morning answering email and tooling around on social media. Journaling is probably my favourite kick-off, but the chain of events that follow that meditative writing often means I’m slow to build up steam for the rest of the day. It’s harder to transition into day job work (or, at least, it was harder to transition into my old day job work), and harder to actually launch
08/06/2022
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Jim Butcher on Scenes and Sequels
So I’ve been doing this writing thing for a while now. Eighteen years, more or less, once you factor in the time spent working on poetry, scripts, gaming stuff, an unfinished thesis, and stories as a collective whole. I still go out and learn to do stuff. And I still read stuff where I am thoroughly fucking schooled and have the way I think about writing turned on its head. Case in point: this one-two combination from 2006 or so where Jim Butcher talks about Scenes (which is stuff I know) and Sequels to Scenes (which blew my writer-brain in no uncertain terms). The sequel stuff feels like someone just sat down and wrote a short essay that basically says, “hey, you, short story writer, this is why you struggle with novels.” Go forth and read it.
31/01/2014
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Chapbook 1 of 52: Briar Day
As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m attempting to publish 52 chapbooks throughout 2022. You can read a little more about it here. Today, let’s talk a little about the first cab off the rank: Available in ebook from all great bookstores right now and in print next week, but you can get it as a patron bonus if you sign up for my Eclectic Projects Patreon. Now, for those who like such things, a peek behind the scenes. Stress Testing An Idea Following up on yesterday’s thoughts on “Just In Case” publishing, I thought it might be useful to peek below the surface and look at what monetising a project like this really looks like (while also stress testing some of the assumptions in Dean Wesley Smith’s challenge, which provoked this challenge) From my perspective, there’s three core costs associated with a publishing project: The cost of actually writing and editing the work. The cost of getting the book to market. The cost of keeping the book for sale and marketing it to readers. WRITING AND EDITING COSTS My writing and editing cost are pretty much negligible, since this is a reprint of an existing story I produced back in
14/01/2022
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The First Rule of Write Club is Talk About Write Club; The Second Rule is Talk About The Things You Learned At Write Club
Five years ago, more or less, I was having coffee with my friend Angela Slatter and listening to her complain about the slow progress she was making on her latest draft. Shoot, I said, there’s an easy fix for that. At Clarion Kelly Link mentioned she and Holly Black get together in a coffee shop once a week, then yell at each other write until they run out of words. We could just do something similar and it’d get your work kick-started right quick. And since Angela allowed that this idea may have merit, we started meeting up once a week to talk about writing, eat ridiculous amounts of junk food, and write up a storm. Thus began Write Club, possibly the smartest idea I ever ripped off from another, far more successful writer and applied to my own life. Write Club’s evolved a bit over the years. We eat less junk-food these days. We meet up during the daylight hours, instead of the Friday evenings we once favoured. There was a short hiatus in 2011, when we both foolishly worked a full-time schedule for a couple of months. Angela now writes full-time, after starting out as a part-time writer/part-time QWC
09/07/2014
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Things You Want to Tell New Writers
There are things you want to sit every new writer down and tell them, right at the start. Things you’d like them to understand, because they’re things you didn’t understand back when you were starting out and they would have been useful to know. Or things you don’t understand now, even though you’ve been at this for a while, and it would be nice to spare them that particular slice of pain. You want to tell them its going to take work, and when they nod like they understand, you want to grab them by the arm and really make them comprehend what you’re saying. “No,” you want to hiss at them, “it’s going to take work. You think you know what you’re getting into, but your head is full of dreams and lies and myths that are fucking with you. It’s going to take so much more work than you’re thinking, and none of it is as fun as you’re thinking.” You wan to tell them that it starts hard and gets harder. You want to tell them it will take time. No, more time than you’re thinking. No, more time than that. You want to tell them they’re going
29/08/2016
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