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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

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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:

Four Writing Lessons from Dan Charnas’ Work Clean

I find myself re-reading and chewing over Dan Charnas Work Clean for the second time this week, despite raving about it just seven days ago. I do this semi-regularly with the books I really love – the first read through is all about the experience, but the second is where I start to process. The re-read is where I slow down and take notes, reworking ideas and responses as I figure out how to make best use of what I’ve learned. And I will admit, this post started with a what-can-learn-that-will-be-useful-as-a-writer post, because most things do, in my head. I gathered up my notes, started putting them in shape. “This’ll be easy,” I thought. “Just find the writing angle.” There are lots of writing angles in Work Clean. It’s a book about understanding time, as much as offering a business process, and it tipped the notion of the most productive thing I can be doing right now on its head. Then I noticed that the stuff I really focused on wasn’t just useful in writing. The mindset seeped over into other parts of my life, and made things like putting together a PhD application, cleaning my apartment, and processing my ridiculous

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Indie Publishing and Business To Business Thinking

A general frustration I’m having with self-publishing/indy publishing circles right now Indies are, by and large, a business-to-business endeavour that primarily exist to provide ebooks to distributors and retailers who then sell them to the customer. Many of those distributors and retailers give an extraordinary level of control to the authors around pricing and promotion, convincing them they’re actually business-to-consumer. It’s become a foundational assumption in the rhetoric around indie publishing, even if it’s not true. So many people’s frustrations stem from this misunderstanding once they’re past the initial learning curve. The idea that you adjust some part of your product to make it appealing *to the business that actually sells it* is frequently met with all kids of denial, particularly when the suggestion involves increasing your prices beyond the just-barely-making-a-profit baseline. Indie authors have been trained to focus on the customer above all else, and have stuck to the strategy that undercutting traditional publishing’s prices is the only viable path to success. Frequently, the argument seems to be, “readers won’t pay that” or “I don’t want to pay that for a book”, despite the fact that traditional publishing has made it clear readers will pay decent money for a

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Trust in the Process

I write rough drafts in my notebooks these days. It gets me away from my perfectionist impulses, lets me embrace the idea of scribbling out a crude and ugly scene that will get fixed up when I type it into the computer. Except I don’t really look at the notebooks when it comes time to sit at the keyboard. I just sit and rewrite the entire story, based on the rough beats I remember from the notebook. Everything else is basically written anew, fleshing out as I go. It feels inefficient. I keep sitting down and wondering if it’s time to go back to the computer for everything, or if its time to try doing rougher sketches in the notebook rather than trying to write full scenes. It feels inefficient, but it’s not. Notebooks are the perfect place to write that messy, ugly zero draft. They’re the perfect place to dump this stuff out there, figure out what the story isn’t so I can start paying attention to the thing that it probably is. And the best chance of figuring out if it really is inefficient isn’t halfway through the draft. It’s when I’m done, and I’m starting a brand new

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Writing Habits

There are two ways to look at my weekend. First, there is the I wrote nothing approach, where I look at the zero in both my word count and time at keyboard columns and curse myself for my lack of forward momentum. Second, there is the I wrote nothing on my current project approach, which takes into account the fact that I wrote about 2,500 words on things that are, essentially, for fun and never going to see the light of day (or have any real financial benefit to doing them). Acknowledging that writing happened, it just wasn’t directed at the place where it was useful ’cause the thing that is useful is hard. Guess which of these options I go with as a default? Fortunately, yesterday’s Sunday Circle got me to actually sit down and think about triggers as they relate to writing and the holidays, which may go a long way towards figuring out why I went down the rabbit hole of non-productive projects and how I can reign it in for the rest of my break. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it involves setting my alarm again. Getting up before 6:00 AM as I do

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Focus on the Mountain, Not the Map

So Neil Gaiman has this speech, a keynote address he delivered in 2012. You may be familiar with it – almost everyone is, at this stage of the internet, ‘cause that shit has been linked to and reprinted more times than the goddamn bible at this stage of its career. Peeps will repeat the words Make Good Art like a goddamn mantra. I don’t mind that. As mantra goes, make good art is pretty bloody aces. But for my money, the most valuable part of the speech isn’t the bits that get repeated over and over. It’s not the catchy phrases about making good art when your cat dies or your wife leaves you It’s not the sequence where he lays out his beliefs that there are no rules in art, which creative types lap up like the fun-loving anarchist spirits we all want to be. The most valuable part of the speech is this: Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes  it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying

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You Track Unfinished Drafts to Make Them Finished Drafts

Today we kick off the 2016 Dancing Monkey series, where I post a series of updates based upon requests from you, the loyal Man vs. Bear audience, about specific topics and themes to cover the fact that I have absconded to parts unknown and have no internet access. We kick off with one of the last topics requested, because it turns out it was the easiest to answer: Elizabeth @ Earl Grey Editing asked me to talk about tracking stories, both finished and unfinished.This is one of those topics that will get split in two, because I have thoughts and opinions and a tendency to write a whole lot of words. YOU NEED TO TRACK (AND FINISH) YOUR UNFINISHED WORK If I’m honest, the system you use doesn’t matter. Notebooks. Excel spreadsheets. Lining up files in a folder on your computer, or a filing cabinet packed to the gills with drafts and finished folder. I’ll talk through my process towards the end of the post, but it comes with the caveat that any approach is going to be highly idiosyncratic and designed to suit my preferences and preferred writing tools. What’s important is this: The ability to quickly see the

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