Val Vega makes an epic debut 🚀
17/03/2024
No Comments
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
No Comments
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
No Comments
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 Reasons I’m Excited To See What Happens With Series Fiction Over The Next Ten Years
I started a new story this week, the first in a series of novelettes featuring dinosaurs, time rifts, orangutans, and a ’77 Holden Monaro that has definitely seen better days. It’s the first time in ages that I’ve attempted to write a story without planning it, and the guiding words for the story are “short, fast, pulp, wahoo!” because I’m tyring to focus on establishing tone and structure above all else. When stuck on the plot point, I break out Lester Dent’s pulp formula. Or send a velociraptor through the door with a shotgun. Here is what I know about this story, beyond those details: not a goddamn thing. Except that’s not entirely true, because that’s not how writing works. There are structures to the way that stories develop, a rhythm that has built up over centuries of people telling us stories and shaping our expectations. We know that tension escalates. We know that characters attempt to resolve problems. We know there are specific beats that mark the end of the first act. Knowing these things is not exactly the same as having a detail, meticulous map, but it does give you a pretty good idea of how the terrain
23/11/2017
1 Comment
Taking a Look at Hoth and the Transition to the Second Act
Last year, my friend Kevin opened a can of worms a while back when he started a Facebook thread about the Rebel’s retreat from Hoth in Empire Strikes Back, suggesting it should be thought of as a win. The rebels were beaten, he argued, but they’re a guerrilla force up against a considerably larger and more well-equipped army – in this context, fleeing in an orderly fashion and getting the bulk of their forces away counts was textbook planning for a guerrilla army in that position. Lots of people argued it was a loss: the rebels were routed, barely escaped, and were largely scattered. I kept out of the thread initially because what I know about military strategy was learned by playing Command and Conquer, but someone else brought up the the fact that the narrative demanded a defeat at the beginning of the second act and suddenly, lo, I knew things. I hadn’t ever taken a close look at the narrative structure of Empire, but when I did I was surprised by how well it actually sets up that transition within the larger structure of the movie. HERE’S THE THING ABOUT TRANSITIONS INTO THE SECOND ACT In narrative terms, defeat
17/08/2018
No Comments
Three Things Writers Can Learn About Villains from Daredevil’s Wilson Fisk
It’s been a long time since I watched a TV show at the same time it entered into the cultural Zeitgeist, but the combination of Netflix coming to Australia and the recent release of Daredevil, Season 1, means that I’ve inhaled thirteen episodes of comic-book awesomeness at the same time as everyone else is watching it. For those who are wondering: Daredevil is good. Very good. Very dark, at times, but Daredevil was always the character to do that with. For all that Batman has a reputation for being grimdark these days, largely courtesy of the Nolan films, Daredevil is the original hard-luck film-noir superhero. Nothing good happens to him in the comics. Like, seriously, nothing. You need both hands just to count the dead girlfriends, you know? Or the times he’s been driven crazy and started to think of himself as an actual devil. Or the times he’s actually been possessed and turned into a devil. Well, you get the picture. Good as the series is – and it’s very good – my favourite part has been Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance as the antagonist, Wilson Fisk. D’Onofrio’s one of those actors who is excellent with the right director and script, and
14/04/2015
1 Comment
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
19/08/2009
6 Comments
December Makes Me Crazy (But Not The Way You’d Think)
The great thing about being a writer: everything is the basis for a story, one way or another. It’s also the worst thing about being a writer. In fact, it kinda sucks. The tendency to extrapolate a narrative out of isolated incidents means that your head will be filled with chaos, especially once you move away from the page and try to live your life. Things happen and your subconscious starts playing what if, and because all writers are sadists at heart, those what if‘s are not pleasant. I’ve got a month away from the day-job coming up. It starts Friday. I hate taking time off, especially at this end of the year, because it does stupid shit to my brain. What starts with yay, holidays! becomes but what if something goes wrong while I’m away, which becomes but what if it was something I could prevent, and it wasn’t there, which becomes what if the job isn’t there when I get back, which becomes what happens if I’m unemployed and stuck with my mortgage, which becomes oh, shit, my life is over accompanied by a side-order of I fuckin’ suck. A great process to go through, while plotting, but its a terrible way to live your life (especially this year, working in the arts sector,
17/12/2015
No Comments
Pantser
I never really got the knack of outlining books, but I keep trying to do it. Notebooks are filled with rough sketches and scene ideas, documents pile up on my hard drive. I’ll boot up scrivener and diligently create file cards that work out my plot, step by step, along with the details about what will happen in the scene. The logic of outlining makes sense to me, and I have the kind of obsession with story structure that makes the planning and deconstruction fun, but it isn’t the way my story brain works. I blame it on too many years of running RPGs, where your approach to narrative is 30% replicating the feel of big, iconic genre moments and 70% responding to the immediate input of player choices that complicate things. I work better when I’m in the middle of things, looking for hooks to latch onto and take things in a new direction. And yet, it’s time to start writing a new novella, and I’m sitting down to plan. Filling notebooks, sketching out ideas, figuring it out as I go along. The goal is to be done by the end of July, ’cause I want to compress some
07/07/2017
1 Comment
© 2024 All Rights Reserved.
