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:
Some More Thoughts on Writer and Business Models: No Plan Survives Contact with the Enemy or Reality
Last Monday, I talked about the need for writers to develop a business model. It’s not the first time I’ve said this and I doubt it will be the last, but it was the first time I’ve said this here on the blog and in such am easily sharable form. That meant people started giving me feedback, which largely came in two camps: How, exactly, do I do this business model thing? GIVE US DETAILS; or Dude, I’ve got a business model, but it’s not working the way I want. I’ll address both of those eventually, but given that I’m Melbourne today (and I’ve gone three days without medication and CPAP, thanks to poor packing on my part) I’m going to hold off on answering the first. Mostly because I started and it got very, very long. As for the second: well, I’ve worked for a bunch of small businesses where exactly this has happened. This is the nature of running a small business, particularly one where you’re dealing primarily with other businesses who act as middle men, as most traditionally published authors do. Many of those small businesses I worked for had plans, but their plans were…flawed. Based on wild
12/09/2016
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A Few More Ideas About Ideas
You know what’s handy when you pre-write a bunch of blog posts and set them to post while you’re away? Actually remembering to set them to post. Seems I forgot to hit the all-important Publish button in my rush to get ready for the Adelaide trip last week, which means we’re starting the dancing monkey series a little later than expected. If there’s a topic you’d like to throw into the mix, you can still do so by pitching it here. A Few More Ideas About Ideas A few years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the often-maligned question of where do your ideas come from. I wrote it ’cause I didn’t like the way most writers behaved when they were asked that question, and ’cause I kind of like understanding my process. Plus, as a guy whose occasionally asked to teach people how to write, it’s a useful thing to be able to talk about process without pulling all that form a little shop in Schenectady bullshit on students who are paying good money to learn things. I haven’t changed my approach much since I wrote that original post, but since then I’ve had a lot
15/08/2012
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This End Not An End Point
Scratchpad: Comic Books, Fiction, Publishing, PoeticsPoetics, Conventions, and Physical Objects No Ellipsis Publishing This End Not An End Point It’s May, 2009. Approximately four years after the release of A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Readers are getting antsy about Martin’s insistence on doing other things: editing books in his Wild Carda universe; writing stories that are not A Dance of Dragons; consulting on the HBO television series made from his work; writing blog posts all of the above, rather than working on the now overdue fifth volume which turns out to be two-and-a-half years away. A phrase rolls across the internet, a little viral moment shared by booklovers: George RR Martin is not your bitch. We know this, because Neil Gaiman told us so, responding to a fans question about what readers are owed when a series is plagued by delays and gaps the Martin’s series is. It’s still another two and a half years before A Dance of Dragons drops in June, 2011. The final two volumes are still forthcoming, nine years after the last release. Adaptations of the series have reached their conclusion, before the source material.
30/04/2020
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The Back Cover Synopsis in the Backlist-driven world
We used to sell books by telling you how exceptional the story was. The whole back cover synopsis pushing you to invest in the character journey and atmosphere of the story contained within. Selling you on the author was a secondary concern, because the author was an invisible presence nine times out of ten. Your primary relationship was with the book, the bookseller, and the story, not the person who wrote it. Then blogs came along, and then Facebook, and then Twitter. YouTube and TikTok and Tumblr and Snapchat and Patreon and gods know how many others that I’m ignoring in that list. Find an author and like their work? Odds are you’ll be following them on one platform or another, the first step in a long-term relationship. Which raises an interesting question for marketing books: do we now sell readers on the author and the contents of the book? Make them sound like the kind of author that needs to be followed and engaged with beyond this one story? Inviting a long-term commitment from a reader might not sell the current book as efficiently as the traditional conventions around the back cover synopsis, but the long-term relationship sells books
16/02/2022
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Playing it Smart and Calm
One question I keep coming back to right now is “what does it mean to approach the pandemic in a calm way, as an artist? How do we play it smart?” Because calm is going to be a valuable commodity for the next few months, as writers and artists of every stripe pivot and adapt. Everyone seemed to launch sales at the start of the pandemic, a knee jerk response to try and stimulate interest in the face of everyone getting hit with financial anxiety at the same time. But sales are a tactic, not a strategy, and they’ll only last so long. Especially when the sales are pitched as “the ass has just dropped out of our industry, so support us if you want this all to continue,” which is largely speaking to a) your existing fans who, b) want you to continue, and c) are likely to be motivated by a discounted price. The really interesting responses to the pandemic will start emerging in the next few weeks, as folks lean into what gets them interested in writing to start with and how it can be hacked to fit the state of the world. Interesting case study, on
11/04/2020
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How Do You Know When It’s Been a Good Day at the Word Mines?
The title is not a rhetorical question – as I track my writing hours and achievements over the course of 2016, the question of what constitutes a good day is starting to become intriguing. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week. When I started this year, I had a rough goal I wanted to hit: six new pages in the notebook a day, on average, so I would have time to do other things. Some of those things were writing related – redrafting, managing email, blogging here – and some just in terms of having a life. Doing my laundry regularly would be a welcome change. Six pages a day, on average. It might not sound like much, but it adds up to nine notebooks worth of writing a year, which in turns adds up to four novel drafts and change. I was happy with that goal in January. Forty-six days later, it has fallen by the wayside. Not because I’m having trouble hitting the six pages, but because I am suffering from scope creep. I spent last week trying to hit ten pages every day, on average. Ten pages, because if I can manage that, I will finish off the notebook I’m
15/02/2016
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