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:
Judging Books By Covers
It’s been just over a year since my second short story collection came out, and it did pretty well for itself. It made the shortlist for Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards, and had some pretty strong sales for one of my ebooks in a year when my attention was mostly on other things. At the same time, it’s lagged behind my first collection in a lot of milestones. Most notably, getting a print edition together, and attempting to refine the messaging and branding. Last week I started to change that: taking a bunch of newly acquired skills from some dedicated research into making better book covers, plus a workflow that is better suited to going from ebook cover to print, I made the revamped cover you can see above (and, if you want, contrast against the old cover to the right). They’re small changes, but just repositioning things and strengthening font choices has a big impact in setting reader expectations about genre and content. The original cover left the image to tell the story of what’s coming; the new version says it with the whole cover. More importantly, it was easy to import the design into a print book
09/12/2019
No Comments
The Other Question Pro Wrestling Taught Me To Ask About Every Writing Preject
So yesterday I talked about where is the money? – the big question I’ve learned to ask of every writing project, courtesy of a shoot interview with former WCW booker Kevin Sullivan. It’s a simple question, and it’s remarkably useful for cutting through to the heart of what needs to happen in your story, novel, or blog post. Today I’m going to talk about the other big question I learned from paying attention to wrestling bookers, although this one comes from a bloke whose insights into wrestling have already taught me an awful lot about writing – the inimitable Al Snow. The question he taught me to ask is this: HOW DO I MAKE THIS GUY? In wrestling, “making” a wrestler means figuring out what you want the audience to believe and convincing them to buy into it. You can’t just send two guys out there and have them fight if everyone knows the ending is pre-determined – there’s no drama in it. And wrestling leans heavily on drama to make money. So what do you do when a fresh, unknown face debuts on your show? To borrow words from Al Snow: If you’re a new talent, we’ve got to make you. Make
24/08/2016
No Comments
Playing it Smart and Calm
One question I keep coming back to right now is “what does it mean to approach the pandemic in a calm way, as an artist? How do we play it smart?” Because calm is going to be a valuable commodity for the next few months, as writers and artists of every stripe pivot and adapt. Everyone seemed to launch sales at the start of the pandemic, a knee jerk response to try and stimulate interest in the face of everyone getting hit with financial anxiety at the same time. But sales are a tactic, not a strategy, and they’ll only last so long. Especially when the sales are pitched as “the ass has just dropped out of our industry, so support us if you want this all to continue,” which is largely speaking to a) your existing fans who, b) want you to continue, and c) are likely to be motivated by a discounted price. The really interesting responses to the pandemic will start emerging in the next few weeks, as folks lean into what gets them interested in writing to start with and how it can be hacked to fit the state of the world. Interesting case study, on
11/04/2020
1 Comment
Why I’m Taking My Process Back to Basics This Week
I’m going back to basics this week, focusing on my routine and getting back into the habit of getting shit done. This means being in bed by ten o’clock each night. It means getting by 6:15 every morning, making sure I’m at the keyboard and working before 7:00. It means easing back my words-per-day goal to something easily achievable, probably about 750 words, then scaling things up as the week progresses. It means taking a few minutes to back-up my work and settle my thoughts before leaving the house, rather than going to work with a head full of story. It means making my damn bed every morning. ROUTINES MATTER There are writers who can work without routines. I’ve known a couple of them. I’ve pretended to be one myself, from time to time, but I’ve discovered that only works when I’ve been working a dayjob one or two days a week. For me, not having a routine is a luxury that’s only possible when I’ve got an abundance of free time, allowing me to put stuff off and put stuff off, and yet still have enough hours to panic-write at the end. We talk a lot of bullshit about routine
11/08/2014
No Comments
Wordcount Escalation Woes
Elizabeth Bear wrote a fantastic newsletter about creativity and bad habits last week. You can read it online, if you’re not a subscriber, but subscriptions are a magical thing. The really useful take-away, meditating on the internet and productivity and the psychology of creativity: Measuring one’s self against the internet rarely turns out well. Unless you’re reading dub one-star reviews of your favorite book to make yourself feel better about the dumb one-star reviews of your own book, because obviously some people failed reading comprehension and don’t know it. (This works until you start getting angry on behalf of Watership Down, because it deserves so much better than “There are no boating accidents in this novel, if I could give it zero stars I would.**) The thing is, a thousand good words a day is a pretty good rate. But it’s hard to remember that when everybody around you is engaged in wordcount escalation, or the deadlines and the sewer bill are looming. And the worse we feel about our work, the more likely we are to avoid it. Or to throw ourselves into it in long, compulsive bursts that don’t actually increase your productivity: they just exhaust us and don’t leave
26/06/2019
No Comments
Blogging
So I’m going to be polishing off the rest of the Dancing Monkey topics over the next week or so, ’cause I have partially completed costs about most of them and ’cause people asked for interesting topics that I actually enjoy blogging. With that in mind, I’m hitting up the next topic on the list, which came from the inimitable Steve D. What about a locum or an apprentice? On that topic, you could blog about what being a professional blogger is like, as a job, and where it leads, and who should consider it. Let’s set aside the first part of the question, since I’m assuming it was largely a suggestion based on the impetus of the Dancing Monkey posts – wanting to keep the blog active while I was travelling. In hindsight I can look at this and say, well, yes, that would have been a smart idea, but on the whole I rather like the idea of my blog staying my blog, and the idea of taking on an apprentice/guest poster just seems weird. At the dayjob, I have no such compunctions. Part of my dayjob is providing content for the Australian Writer’s Marketplace Speakeasy blog (in
19/09/2012
No Comments
© 2024 All Rights Reserved.
