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:
Shivering Sands, Warren Ellis, and The Long Tail
Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF edition. Three months later, they’d sold around 700 copies. 664 of them were print editions. As Ellis mentioned in the three-months-on post where he charted the numbers, “now we enter into the long tail.” I missed the book, first time around. I was an Ellis fan, but I was broke as fuck back in 2009. Two years unemployed, scraping by on sales of short stories and loans from family that kept me from sliding off into a world of credit card debt. Yesterday, I bought my copy. Put the effort in to go and buy it from the archaic print on demand service Ellis and co originally used, because the only copy that showed up on Amazon Australia was over a hundred and fifty bucks. And this is what the long tail means, when folks talk about it in relation to publishing. Ellis didn’t promote
21/04/2020
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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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Three Quick and Dirty Time Management Hacks For Writers
I started reading time and project management books a few years back, when it became apparent that my ability to manage my studies was fairly limited. I ramped up my reading in 2011 when I found myself working in an organisation with multiple people for the first time, since I was pretty much used to working on my own or in small groups. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of systems and kept stuff from each of them, but this list collects together three of the quick-and-dirty time management hacks that have been particularly useful to me as a writer. All are part of larger, more complex systems that have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I am pretty ruthless about keeping the things that work for me and searching for new options when something doesn’t. HACK ONE: PRIORITISE THE TASKS THAT UNLOCK OTHER PEOPLE’S CAPACITY TO WORK ON YOUR BEHALF I picked this one up from Dan Charnas incredible book about chefs, time management, and mise-en-place, Work Clean, and it remains the advice I turn to every time I found myself paralysed by indecision about what needs to come next. One of the base-lines of Charnas’ approach is simple:
21/11/2017
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This is a community service announcement
Stop what you’re doing, right now, and go back up your computer. Not just saving your on a zip drive, but actually backing your files up and keeping them somewhere far away from your PC. I usually say this once a year in October to commemorate the computer crash of 06 that complete wiped out about seven years of work, including a bunch of stories and the PhD thesis I’d been working. Like most people, I thought I was safe because everything was backed up on my zip drive. Unfortunately, said zip drive was plugged into my computer at the time, so the power surge that wiped my PC out took the back-ups with me. It was, needless to say, a very bad day. I cried for a while. Eventually I started throwing things. This warning comes early this year because I just lost my second PC in three years. It just went “nope, done with this,” and stopped working while I was in the middle of typing. Fortunately, I learned my lesson last time, so all I lost with this crash was the work I’d done from the last few hours and a bunch of computer game save files
28/08/2009
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2016 Project: A Year of Data About My Writing Practice
2016 is looming, as new years tend to do. I’ve been sorting through the options of big, writing-adjacent goal-setting projects I’d be interested in doing to replace the mad dash of the 600k year. Doing nothing was pretty high on the list, but that’s not in my nature. I like having big meta-projects to focus on that are writing-adjacent, even if they’re basically insane and designed to fail. So I went through the list of things I really enjoyed and found useful in 2015 and came up with three words: word count data. I tracked daily word-count pretty obsessively over the last twelve months. And, when I didn’t track words, I tracked daily pages in a notebook, faithfully switching back-and-forth between different coloured pens so I’d be able to see what was written on which day. I’m still tracking my word-count now, updating my excel file after every writing session. First, because it’s become a habit. Second, because I like data. Data is fricken’ awesome. Data means that when I hit the first week of December and start wondering what the hell has gone wrong with my process, I can go back to previous years and see that December is always a goddamn
09/12/2015
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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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