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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 Problems with Word Count

Since starting the 600K Year, I’ve been aiming to write an average of 1,800 words per day. I managed it pretty consistently through the chaos of November, failed pretty consistently during the chaos of December, and carried my December habits through to the first two weeks of January. Which means that I’m now trying to write an average of 2,750 words a day. I’m not quite hitting it – yet – but I’m getting within a hundred words or so. I’ve always been fond of word count as a productivity metric, but I’m conscious that it’s not without it’s problems. The first, somewhat related to Parkinson’s Law which suggests that work expands to fit the time available to complete it, is that your process expands to meet the word count expected of it. Once I know how to reach 1,800 words regularly, I let the cracks start to appear in my process. I’ll stop writing to check a fact on wikipedia, or I’ll duck into twitter for a minute just to see what’s happening. An hour that could have been spent writing 900 words is suddenly spent writing 800, then 700, then 600. Which is fine, ’cause I’m hitting my writing

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Three Quick and Dirty Time Management Hacks For Writers

I started reading time and project management books a few years back, when it became apparent that my ability to manage my studies was fairly limited. I ramped up my reading in 2011 when I found myself working in an organisation with multiple people for the first time, since I was pretty much used to working on my own or in small groups. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of systems and kept stuff from each of them, but this list collects together three of the quick-and-dirty time management hacks that have been particularly useful to me as a writer. All are part of larger, more complex systems that have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I am pretty ruthless about keeping the things that work for me and searching for new options when something doesn’t. HACK ONE: PRIORITISE THE TASKS THAT UNLOCK OTHER PEOPLE’S CAPACITY TO WORK ON YOUR BEHALF I picked this one up from Dan Charnas incredible book about chefs, time management, and mise-en-place, Work Clean, and it remains the advice I turn to every time I found myself paralysed by indecision about what needs to come next. One of the base-lines of Charnas’ approach is simple:

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The Writer’s Mask

I’ve been re-reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. This is one of those things that happens every couple of years. If you don’t understand the appeal of Barthes, go read Matt Ortile’s Why I ended A Perfectly Fine Relationship, which is cogent and gorgeous and perfectly captures the comfort that settles over me every time I read this book. This post is more a half-formed set of thoughts, as tends to happen every time I engage with a text on semiotics and literary theory. Especially this book. But god, I love it. Adore it. And it fucks me up every time I read it. In a good way. And a bad way. Look, it’s complicated. But I dog-ear the fuck out of my copy every time I read the book, tagging new favourite passages, and yet there’s always something new to be drawn from the experience.There is no book I’ve ever come across that quite captures the feeling of infatuation in quite the sam eway, breaking the experience of wanting down into its component parts, the how and why of what is said and done. What fascinates me about Barthes’ breakdown of desire is his precision in recognising the duality

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STEAL THIS IDEA: Zombie Mode Task List!

I’m a big fan of running playbooks to take decision making off the table, especially on low energy days when I don’t have the spoons for self-management. There’s a larger piece in the works on this—part of a series that’s been going through my newsletter of late—but it remains a work-in-progress because there’s a bunch of moving pieces I’m trying to lay out and it’s hard to fit it into self-contained, 1,000 word chunks. Imagine my jealousy when a Software Engineer named Lisa wrote about their “Zombie Mode” list over on the Bullet Journal blog. “Zombie Mode” is what I call the state of being when I do not want to think and just want to be told what to do next. I have two collections to use when I am in this state — one for workdays and one for non-workdays. They both contain lists of tasks to be completed for the day, in order, until I snap out of Zombie Mode or the day ends. Before, when I was in Zombie Mode, I would just waste all that time playing on my phone or trying to motivate myself to choose something to work on. Once I gave myself

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The Three Types of No Every Writer Needs to Master

Writers aren’t fond of the word no. It comes from a career that is built around rejection – we spend so much time getting told “no” by editors and agents that it just because natural to start saying yes to things for the sake of hearing the word. And while there are some phrases where this habitual yes can have all sorts of benefits, there are at least three times when aspiring writers really need to learn how to utilize the word No for their own benefit. NO…I’M NOT AVAILABLE FOR THAT PROJECT When you’re starting out, the thought of saying no to a project seems untenable. You’re spending so much time wanting to be published, sending your work out to slush piles and getting back form responses, that the thought of someone contacting you and offering you a writing gig is vaguely dreamlike. And when you do start publishing and the invitations to write for this anthology or that project come through, you say yes without thinking, eager to be part of the working writer fraternity. This is perfectly natural at the early stages of your career, but eventually you hit a point where you have to start saying

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A Confluence of Time/Money/Success Posts

There are days when the internet feeds you an interesting series of posts, comments, and articles that all seem to weave together in interesting ways. For example, this quartet of things have all showed up on my radar within a twenty-four hour period: Charlotte Nash’a comments about the limits of time on Tuesday’s post about bad systems and newsletters, which I read a few hours before… Kameron Hurley’s Locus essay about burnout, the expectation of productivity, and the reluctance to say “do less” in our culture at the moment. This post by Daphne Huff about writing a novel when you have zero time due to running a family, a full-time job, and a podcast (which seems like madness when read alongside everything else, but the final section about focusing on one aspect of craft/publishing at a time in the final section orients it with in this list). And this highly interesting twitter rant by @GravisLizard about the way we react to the phrase $100 shoes as if it’s a Gold Plated Toilet, rather than a sign that our understanding of money, value, and cost is fucked up and set to the standards of an 1980s economy, and the implications of

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