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:
Working with Time I Actually Have, Not the Time I’d Like To Have
It’s seven fifteen in the morning and I’m in the Wintergarden food-court, writing. My phone is counting down the minutes, my pomodoro app ticking softly to mark each passing second. I’m seated amid the empty tables, notebooks splayed out in front of me. There is weirdness on the walls, interior design done with light and shadow instead of wallpaper or paint. In an hour and a half, I head off to the day job. There are one hour and fifteen minutes of usable writing time between now and then, and I’ve got a list of things that need to get done today. A) This blog post. B) The next scene in my current work in progress. In the five minutes between writing bursts, I get to tweet or check Facebook or contemplate this question: what is the best use of my writing time right now? What is the opportunity cost of focusing on A, instead of B? HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU REALLY HAVE FOR WRITING EACH WEEK? There is a recurring obsession with time, when it comes to writing advice. You hear it over and over: set down an hour a day and write, guard it like a lioness
12/10/2016
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What d20 Publishing Taught Me About My Next Fiction Project
Earlier today, I added about 3,500 words of new content to the Warhol Sleeping draft, finishing up the scenes that needed fleshing out and adding in the interstitial content and “deleted scenes” content that will get added to the final product. The novella draft is officially done. Now the real work begins, exporting it from Scrivener and starting the process of doing real editorial work instead of patching up the weaker scenes. Setting up the cover and the marketing copy, working out some pre-release promo, then working out whether the date I’ve earmarked for release is actually a feasible timeframe to get everything done. It should be. I dedicated the first year of Brain Jar to short story collections, largely so I could get an idea of how the various systems and tools I’d need were going to work. Now I’ve got them down, which means I can start playing a little more. And Warhol Sleeping is very much a project where I’m playing, a project that’s being done for the hell of it. Many years ago, when I still wrote RPG products, my record for producing a finished product from scratch was something within the region of 24 hours.
31/10/2018
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Sneaky Writer Tricks: Estrangement and Disruption
So two lads with cellos do a pretty kick-ass cover of Guns’n’Roses Welcome to the Jungle in this youtube clip. As a fan of string instruments and the Gunners, I encourage you to check it out before we move on, ’cause it’s going to be relevant: Let me be completely honest here: this kind of thing rocks my world, and it kind of demonstrates one of the sneaky writer tricks I often mention to people in writing workshops: try to find a way to make the familiar strange. Everyone has their own definition of what makes great art, but mine has a lot in common with a Russian theorist named Victor Shklovsky who basically said that the role of art was estrangement – taking something familiar and making it alien so that the viewer is forced to re-examine it in a conscious way. Shklovsky essentially argues against the automatism of perception – the process where something has become so familiar that we no longer after actually think about it – and uses art as a disruptive force against it (if you’re interested, I wrote a longer post about this back in 2009, and you can find Shklovsky’s original essay reprinted online in
13/05/2015
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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
25/05/2022
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The Dailies
A few weeks back, I started picking up an old habit I’d left behind. It goes like this: every morning, I tend to wake up and work my way through a three-page planning document designed to help me frame my to-do list. It started out as a bunch of notes from Todd Henry’s Die Empty, then gradually evolved to include little bits and pieces from other routines I’d trialed (such as this one at the bottom of of Tobias Buckell‘s bullet journal post). It’s a useful document that walks me through four major areas of focus with dot point prompts to guide my planning: what’s important to me today? What am I trying to change or progress? Who will I talk to and what do I value about them? What are the things that need to be done, and the things I may have forgotten? It makes for a nice little ritual to work through over coffee, and generally gives me about two pages of detail to guide my activities for the next twenty-four hours. I set it aside when I left office work behind and my focus narrowed, but as I move into the tail end of my PhD,
06/06/2019
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Twenty-Five Random Thoughts About Writing
Right what is says on the tin – it got inspired by a facebook meme but my natural love of verbage meant it raged out of control. Anyway, this is actually a pretty good summary of what the interior of my head looks like when the subject of writing comes up. Some are me-specific, some a general, and most were written down fast in order to see what the first twenty-five thoughts that came to mind actually were. I take no responsibility for accidents caused if you follow any of these hastily constructed thoughts and give the usual warnings of upcoming writer-angst (it’s been that kind of week): 1) There is no “one true way to write,” but there are several commonly touted pieces of advice that both make sense to me and largely represent an decent list of “things worth doing unless you’ve got a good reason not to.” 2) This list is not one of them. 3) There is nothing I can achieve as a writer that will silence that little voice in the back of my head urging me to do more. I will never do enough and I can always do things better. This probably isn’t a
09/09/2009
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