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:
What I Learned About Author Platform By Spring-Cleaning My Blog
I’ve spent a significant part of the last twenty-four hours doing a spring-clean of petermball.com, going through a bunch of old posts and cleaning up broken links, adding tags that didn’t previously exist, and generally cleaning up some of the clutter in the category section to make it easier to find old content. This proved to be a considerably weird task. I set out with no real plan when I launched the site in 2008, basing my approach to blogging on my experiences with livejournal and mimicking the style of blog posts used by authors whose platforms I particularly enjoyed. And this worked, for a time, but as with most long-term projects that writers start, it grew more complex and thought-out as I went along. It’s also proved valuable to look at my old blogging habits with the benefit of hindsight, especially since I kicked things off with a very different mindset than I bring to the blog today. Since talking about author platform is one of our things at work (and I’m teaching Year of the Author Platform for QWC this year), I found myself taking notes as I went along. IT ALL STARTED WITH CONNECTION I found myself
18/06/2013
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First Envision, Then Figure Out The Compromise
I’ve got a long history of advising writers to clarify their goals and vision around writing, and a recurring question is often how? It’s too big a question to tackle in blog posts, but something that occasionally gets some clarity during the longer, face-to-face (or email-to-email) conversations that take place with friends. One insight is this: envisioning a career is a two-step process. The first step is envisioning the kind of career you’d like to have—how much you want to write, what kind of work you want to do, what kind of readership you’d like to develop. Looking to benchmarks—writers whose career (not necessarily work) like to emulate in terms of approach and schedule—then doing research to figure out whether their current approach to work represents the way they built their profile up in the early days. No writer comes out of nowhere, and overnight successes are often the product of decades-long effort and build. The second step is figuring out where you’re willing to compromise and the circumstances in which you’ll do so. If your principal goal is “doing good work,” how far are you willing to compromise that to make working at writing full time happen? If your
26/09/2021
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What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard (Part One)
What Writers Ought To Know About…What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard (Part One) What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Two What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Three What Readers Ought To Know About What Writers Ought To Know About Die Hard Normally, when I sit down to write a Trashy Tuesday Writing School post, it’s because I’m trying to redeem some element of sitting down and watching a terrible movie. Films like the Josh Kirby series, which started badly and ended badly and reached a high water mark around number 3, or Speed Racer, which is a triumph of style but a massive failure as a script, or Robot Jox with…well, you get the picture. I should not that trashy isn’t applied to these films as a statement of quality – I adore the Speed Racer film for its ambition, and loathe Josh Kirby for…well, reasons that will require a blog post of their own. Trashy is instead used as an aesthetic judgement, a way of categorizing films that are unified by a sense of pop-cultural kitsch and the ability to seep into the popular consciousness. True, not all trashy films are
06/08/2013
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Anchor, Orient, Reduce, Contrast
Where do ideas come from? It’s the question that you’re not meant to ask writers and other creative people, because the mythology of creativity is so fucking bizarre that providing a real answer is seen as a diminishment of the art produced. Or it’s disregarded because people assume the idea is the important part, rather than the work to flesh it out and build it into something. One of the best answers I’ve ever seen to the question actually comes from the perennially underrated Neil Gaiman novellette The Goldfish Pool & Other Stories, available in his first short story collection Smoke & Mirrors. In it, Gaiman’s novelist-turned-screenwriter protagonist reaches for an answer as he grapples with art and storytelling and the weirdness of Hollywood: People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more works than you’d believe. Except for Sons of Man, and that one pretty much wrote itself. The irritating question they ask — us being writers — is: ‘where do you get your ideas?’ And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!
30/09/2019
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Today I'm feeling 20%
In the early days of my newsletter I posted a link to Maggie Steifvater’s journaling approach, designed to manage uneven energy levels after she contracted a long-term illness that kept her from writing. The original post is gone now—along with the rest of Steifvater’s Tumblr—but the lesson from it has lived with me on-and-off in four bullet journals now. The basic theory is this: before you plan the day, imagine the idealised version of you that’s operating at 100%. The perfect, focused, utterly ready to do all the things version of yourself. Then check in with how you’re feeling right now, and rate your current state as a percentage of that ideal. Or, to put it another way, acknowledge your limits and work with the energy you’ve got, not the energy you wish you had. It’s really easy to resent work when things are off-kilter with your health, whether its physical or mental. Resentment quickly leads to procrastination, which only compounds the problem. It’s so easy to hate yourself for being less than 100% that a 20% day can result in no work at all, instead of the 20% you might have been capable of if you’d framed your to-do
06/02/2020
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Poetics, Conventions, and Physical Objects
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
20/04/2020
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