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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:

The Choke Points in the Entertainment Business (and Wrestling)

One of the recurring refrains in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative is the importance of unnecessary creating or back-burner creating. The creative work that you do that’s not on spec or on demand, but something that’s done because you’re curious, refining new skills, or simply interested in the subject. My accidental creating often revolves pro-wrestling, where I’ve done the occasional fanfic project for the Total Extreme Wrestling game and take deep dives into the mechanics and business of wrestling storytelling. This has often spawned insights here on the blog, the occasional paid writing gig, and countless ideas that have informed my practice as both an author and a publisher. This week, I listened to one of my favourite wrestling storytellers, Paul Heyman, being interviewed by the 90s pro-wrestling cultural phenomenon known as Stone Cold Steve Austin. A huge part of the interview revolved around why Heyman’s 90s wrestling project, Extreme Championship Wrestling, ultimately folded and got bought out by the industry leviathan WWE, and Heyman broke down not just the wrestling industry, but the whole damn entertainment industry, into a three-chokepoint system where a failure at any single point will doom your enterprise. For Heyman, a successful entertainment company needs

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When in Doubt, Maslow the Fuck Out of Your Creative Process

ONE: MASLOW THE FUCK OUT OF IT My friend Laura Goodin has a saying: Maslow the fuck out of it. Actually, that could be a lie. She has something similar to this, but I can’t remember if I’m inserting the profanity or the profanity was there when she deployed it in our most recent conversations.  If I’m wrong, the intent was definitely something close, and I will owe Laura a beer and an apology. Life would be much easier if I actually copied down the interesting things my friends said, exactly, on the basis that I will one day want to write a blog post around their adages. But for our purposes, lets go with this. Laura Goodin has this saying: Maslow the fuck out of it. Near as I can gather, the saying come from her years working with emergency services, where she would train new recruits in the best way to respond to a crisis. When in doubt, work your way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Take care of the biological needs, then the safety needs, then the social needs. Much as those of us on the internet would disagree, providing a populace with food and a safe place to

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Searching for the Sweet Spot in Daily Word Count

My favourite function in Scrivener isn’t any of the fancy layout options, the scratch-pad that exists for eery scene, nor the ability to set up a useful list of metadata attached to any particular slice of a story. I make use of many of those things, but the thing that keeps me coming back to the program is the function that tracks the daily word count needed to reach a particular deadline (and automatically re-calculates it, when a day goes better or worse than expected). Which means, most mornings, I boot up my computer and load two trackers: one for my thesis, and one for the current creative project. Generally, speaking, whatever number is on the session target is what needs to get written in order to tick off my “have written” log on a given day. My actual target is usually slightly higher, because I crave consistency in the hard-edges to my process: generally speaking, the first time I look up from my thesis and I’ve written over a hundred words, it’s time to stop working on it for the day. The same is true on a fiction project once my progress has cleared 1,666 words. Both numbers are

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Things I would do if I were planning on becoming an indie publisher…

The title of this post is actually a little disingenuous: I already self-published back in 2005, when I first started self-publishing ebooks for roleplaying games, and I kept at it until 2007 or so when, for various reasons related to edition wars and the level of misogyny among gamers, writing fiction started to look more appealing. The interesting thing about the RPG field is that it went through it’s teething problems with ebooks a little earlier than the rest of the world, which means I frequently find myself frustrated when I get involved in conversations about indie publishing ’cause there’s a certain level of been-there-done-that-made-all-the-stupid-mistakes-already. I’d been around epublishing for a while before that, though, so I’m naturally interested in the ebook/indie publisher explosion that’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s only gotten worse since I started working for a forward-thinking writers centre with an electronic publishing think-tank attached to it. It also means that common phrases like I’m going to experiment with ebooks drive me crazy, since most of these experiments revolve around things RPG ebooks did six or seven years back. So after a couple of frustrating conversations, I sat down and put some serious thought into what I’d do if I were planning

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Poetics, Conventions, and Physical Objects

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Scratchpad: Comic Books, Fiction, Publishing, Poetics

Scratchpad: Comic Books, Fiction, Publishing, PoeticsPoetics, Conventions, and Physical Objects No Ellipsis Publishing This End Not An End Point The poetics of comic book narratives are indelibly bound to the page. Each issue of a 24 page comic will contain twenty-four pages of narrative, give or take a few spaces for advertising. Which means a smart comic book writer is always thinking about layout and using pages to generate effect–pitch this sequence across two pages that open together so it reads a particular way, pitch this reveal for the end of an odd-numbered page and the start of a new scene when the reader flips over. I’m using the word writer loosely here, as befits a collaborative medium where an artist will bring scripts to fruition, but it’s not exclusively the artists deal. Go read interviews where the folks who script comics talk process, and the obsession with pages is there. Neil Gaiman hassled DC editorial because he wanted to know where the advertising sat in upcoming Sandman issues, because he knew they’d affect the way the story was consumed. Alan Moore put forth a theory he learned from an editor: comic book characters are limited to twenty-five words of

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500 words

So it appears that I finished a story draft this week. It’s not a good story, not yet, but it started the week with a 200 word opening and by Wednesday night I declared the draft zero complete around 2,500 words. It will need some rewriting – that’s what this weekend is for – and it’ll need some fleshing out in order to make the story bits actually resemble a story, but it’s a draft and it’s finished and it’s broken a somewhat long drought. Many droughts, actually, in that I have a) finished a story draft, b) that’s shorter than 7,000 words, and c) actually started the next story more-or-less right away. The pattern I’m aiming for is 500 words a day, every day, and a finished story every two weeks. My instinct is to scoff at that pace, to write it off as easy to accomplish, because my instincts were forged in the days when I taught session classes at university and worked about ten hours a week. It’s easy to be a writer when you’ve got that much free time to waste. These days I find myself looking back and wondering why the fuck I didn’t do

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