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:
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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9:55 in the Food Court
Some days it sucks you in, the magic of this writing gig, even when you sit and work in a place patently unsuited to magic. Right now, I’m in the small food court underneath the Queens Plaza mall. It’s not yet ten o’clock and the vendors are still warming up for the day. The girl behind the Red Rooster counter looks bored when I order a coke. The woman at the noodle stand isn’t even at her counter. The whole room is an oval, vendors arrayed around the edge, brightly lit to encourage a swift move through as you circle, looking for something to eat. There’s two young people the next table over, engaged in an animated discussion about language and syllables and people who do not articulate well. They war Doc Martins, hoodies, glasses. Backpacks in army camouflage colours, trading laughter in a way that makes me wonder if they’re flirting. Or, perhaps, not-yet-flirting, just the nervous feeling-out process where they wonder if there’s something there. It’s not just the laughter that makes me think this: it’s the leaning, the smiles, the eagerness. There’s other people working here: a young woman in a nylon sweater, headphones plugged into her
07/06/2018
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Five (Well, Six, Actually) Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Wing Commander (1999)
Our work offices are located in the State Library of Queensland, which means I’ll occasionally walk past signs for upcoming library events on my way into work. Last week, one of those signs advertised the library’s classic movie screening of the German submarine classic Das Boot and I was…well, mildly interested. Unfortunately, the screening was during work hours and I missed it, so I went home and made do with the next best thing – Das Boot in space, AKA the cinematic adaptation of the Wing Commander computer games. Fans of the game hate this film. Like, passionately hate this film. My former flatmate, who reveled in the shittiest of films during our #TrashyTuesdayMovie run, chose not to sit through Wing Commander when it was scheduled. My friends who love the games claim that it fails as an adaptation on multiple levels, but I can’t really speak to that. I never actually played the games, so I was forced to take the film on its own merits (what few there are). And by those standards…well, I’m in a definite minority here, but I actually like the Wing Commander film. It’s not a great piece of cinema by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s a
15/07/2014
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On Taking Processes of Autopilot
A lot of the advice for newer writers involves hacking the basal ganglia in order to make writing easier. All the old favourites about setting a regular schedule, picking a specific place and time where you invite the writing process in, is really about setting up triggers and associated habit loops that help you to overcome the initial resistance to writing (particularly when you know what you’re doing isn’t up to the standard you want). It’s one of the reasons I recommend Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habits as a foundational how-to-write book, even though it has nothing at all specific to the writing process. The thing about setting up new routines, though, is that they’re often the solution to a very particular problem. Those early time/space triggers are great when you’re starting out and desperately trying to carve time out of your busy life to get work done, but they can be far less effective when your career starts to scale up and you find yourself trying to process more mail, or suddenly have to find editing time for your first draft while still attempting to write a new thing. Context matters, when it comes to habit, and automatic activities
28/11/2017
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Planning Quarterly, Rather Than Yearly, Writing Goals
Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative is full of good advice and habits for anyone making their living in a creative industry, but the part that has been most valuable for me is his recommendation to limit forward planning to a three-month quarter instead of a year. Henry recommends this because people (and organisations) have a tendency to develop permanent solutions to long-term problems, but it’s also proven a good timeframe for identifying upcoming disruptions that will impact on your process. There are some disruptions that are easy to predict. My own calendar has recurring disruptions between December and February due to the concentration of holiday events and family birthdays, and used to include regular disruption every September when I worked at QWC due to the surge of writing events and activities around Brisbane Writers Festival. But other disruptions sneak up on you without any particular warning, whether they’re good disruptions like an opportunity you weren’t expecting or shitty ones like a relationship breakdown or major illness. Things that eat up time you weren’t expecting and can’t plan for. Keeping your goals quarterly, with a general idea of where you’d like to go long-term, makes it easy to adapt your process and
05/03/2019
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Automation
Two years ago, when I kicked off Brain Jar Press, I dropped a bunch of cash on tools designed to streamline my processes. It started with a shiny new MacBook Air, breaking years of I-don’t-use-Macs ideology so I could run the mac-only Vellum software. That was something like two grand of expenses right there, coupled with an ongoing Adobe subscription and access to delivery tools like BookFunnel. I knew I’d struggle to earn back that money in the first year, and I was totally fine with that. The point wasn’t making the money back, it was making every project I took on a little cheaper to publish. For instance, there was software that did everything Vellum did, but it was a pay-per-project concern or an ongoing subscription. There are tools that could create covers instead of using Photoshop, but those tools aren’t as advanced or had a steep learning curve. I would be investing time and subscriptions fees to get advanced features, and the net result seemed likely to deliver slightly less than I wanted long-term even if I conquered the learning curve. You can talk people through the process of side-loading ebooks onto their reader, but it takes time
17/12/2019
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