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. 

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

Read More »

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:

Pens: Mightier than the Sword, Prone to Running Out Much Faster

I went back to writing first drafts on the computer, then came back to notebooks after Christmas. The computer didn’t work for me the way it once did. It’s become the place for editing work, for doing the day-to-day stuff. It divides focus in a way that the notebooks don’t. My natural inclination is to write in short bursts: four minutes, then a pause. Five minutes, then a pause. On a computer there are more words in each burst, but longer pauses. On a notebook, I’ll frequently stop to contemplate the next step, and I’ll be back at work within a minute. I can write faster and harder on a computer, but I’ll get two or three bursts into a one-hour block. I can write for longer, on a notebook. The stops are shorter, my brain less prone to wondering. This is the effect of tracking different data, getting things more fine-tuned. Though I burn through pens like nobodies business. The graveyard of dead pens, stacking up on my coffee table, is starting to look slightly ominous. And the process of editing/rewriting the finished drafts is evil, given my previous habits.

Read More »

Suggested Reading For Writers – August 2014 Edition

I’m off to nurse my throat infection today, spending some quality time drinking tea and staying warm. With that in mind, I figured I’d throw out a grab-bag of recommended reading for writers from elsewhere on the internet. Two of the links below are on the list of things I wish every writer read before they started their career, while the other two are interesting ideas that really change the way you approach either the craft or the community of writing. A Definition of Author Platform (Jane Friedman) The internet irreversibly changed the nature of writing and, as a result, the nature of writing advice.It became truly noticeable about five years ago, where suddenly new writers would ask as many questions about blogging and promoting their work as they would getting their work published, with Author Platform replacing the publishing deal as the thing every writer was chasing. Jane Friedman breaks down the idea of Author Platform into its component parts and really looks at what it is and why it’s useful. Along the way, it actually serves as one of the most useful advice columns about Platform that I’ve come across, in addition to providing an effective definition. For my money, this

Read More »

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

Read More »

Fear and the Art of Submitting Short Fiction

Back when I taught short story writing, people would often ask the trick for getting past the inevitable flow or rejections. My answer was always simple: it comes down to volume. When you have a single short story that you’re sending out, every rejection feels like you’ve been thwarted. When you’re sending out a dozen stories, with more projects in the hopper, a rejection usually means oh, thank the gods, that’s where X goes next. The sting of rejection really boils down to fear—and often the social fear of something secret and hidden about yourself being revealed and found wanting—and that fear magnifies in relation to the perceived importance. If you’ve spent your life hungry to be a writer, immersed in a cultural narrative that says successful writers are either geniuses or hacks, then that first work holds a lot of weight and expectations. It’s the point where you prove you’ve got what it takes to be the kind of writer you want to be, and those first rejections sting harder because you’ve mustered up your courage to defy society’s messaging that creating art is not for you in order to get the submission out there, and now you’re forced

Read More »

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard (Part One)

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series What Writers Ought To Know About...

What Writers Ought To Know About…What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard (Part One) What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Two What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Three What Readers Ought To Know About What Writers Ought To Know About Die Hard Normally, when I sit down to write a Trashy Tuesday Writing School post, it’s because I’m trying to redeem some element of sitting down and watching a terrible movie. Films like the Josh Kirby series, which started badly and ended badly and reached a high water mark around number 3, or Speed Racer, which is a triumph of style but a massive failure as a script, or Robot Jox with…well, you get the picture. I should not that trashy isn’t applied to these films as a statement of quality – I adore the Speed Racer film for its ambition, and loathe Josh Kirby for…well, reasons that will require a blog post of their own. Trashy is instead used as an aesthetic judgement, a way of categorizing films that are unified by a sense of pop-cultural kitsch and the ability to seep into the popular consciousness. True, not all trashy films are

Read More »

Links and Things

1) Chris Green Distills the Clarion Wisdom I went to Clarion South with Chris two and a half years ago. He’s a smart man, very interested in things, and on something of a roll of late as far as publications and sales go. Over the last week Chris started distilling some of the major lessons we learned during the workshop into a series of very short, controlled blog posts. Given his terse nature, these are short and easy to digest, and they’re basically the high points of the workshop in collected form (and since he doesn’t believing in tagging posts, I’ll send you straight to the first entry and let you follow along from there). 2) Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book This amuses me in its accuracy. 3) Reviewage andPimpage – My comrade-in-writing Ben Francisco – and the first man to tell me “this should be a novella” – engages in some Horn Pimpage on my behalf – The Fix diggs my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens which appeared in Apex Magazine back in May – The Internet Review of Science Fiction describes On the Destruction of Copenhage… as “mundane surrealism.” 4) Rewriting as an Animated Giff A very short-but-interesting post from Elizabeth Bear

Read More »

© 2024 All Rights Reserved.