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
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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.
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.
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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:
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
28/09/2021
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Do You Know The Origins of Frequently Quoted Advice?
Trace the origins of the “ten thousand steps a day” health advice, and you’ll find a marketing campaign. A Japanese company built a step counter and invented a reason to use it, with the brand name—Manpo-Kei—translating into 10,000 steps. Trace the origins of the oft-repeated writing advice to show, rather than tell, and you’ll find the silent film industry, and writers deciding between conveying information via dialogue card, or putting it into action. Also popular in turn-of-the-century theatre scene of the early 1900s, where “showing” gave actors to display the emotional responses to scenes in ways the writer could not convey. Neither origin makes for terrible advice—ten thousand steps a day is good for your health, and show, don’t tell can be solid advice for a prose writer—but it also gives you wiggle room to escape the tyranny of the ideals presented. Any activity is better than none, when it comes to health, and the health benefits kick in long before you hit a ten thousand step a day goal. Showing is a worthy goal for a scene, but there’s a time in place to just tell the reader something. Not everything needs to be dramatised, and access to the
27/09/2021
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Pick Your Poison: Upcoming Trashy Movie Writing Schools
Every now and then, my flatemate and I argue about whose responsible for the ongoing #TrashyTuesdayMovie phenomenon. I say the blame is entirely his, since he’s the one who maintains the schedule and the associated wiki and generally makes sure that we have copies of the movie. He blames me on account of the fact that I continue to show up and tweet every week, and I keep talking it up among people I know. Also, that people I know keep adding fucking films to the list. I think, with the creation of a banner graphic to accompany this post, I have officially lost the argument. Not that it’s a great banner, nor even likely to be the final version, but I was having a slow evening and felt the need to crack open photoshop. Tonight we’re going to kick off the first of Six goddamn Josh Kirby films, which I gather are actually one long film that’s been broken up into arcs. We both blame Jason Fischer for this, since we didn’t even know Josh Kirby existed until he foisted Quest of the Delta Knights on us, which led to some furious IMDB searching in order to keep ourselves from
28/05/2013
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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
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The Habit Of Faking It
Most days, I’m faking it here on the blog. My mission statement is simple—show up every day and put the most interesting insight I have into the world—but at least half the time I show up searching for something to be interested in or something useful to say. Some days, I’m less interested and more anxious or completely fucking batty or so burnt out it’s crazy. The blog is a mask I wear for a while, a better version of myself that exists for public consumption, discarded the moment I hit post. Some days, the act of posting lets me step into that better version of myself and stay there for the next eight hours. A bad day turns good by the simple virtue of roleplaying a different version of myself. My own personal magic trick, pushing me to get out of my head and engage with the world, after which I’m ready to do more. The value of faking it until you make it isn’t in the persona you project, but the habits you build up in order to become a convincing facsimile of success. Writing a blog post becomes a foundational habit upon which I can stack other
04/10/2021
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Resolving the Word Count Conundrum
So I got caught up in an interesting debate on twitter on the other night, largely revolving around the question of whether or not 50K actually constituted a novel-length work and the difference between answering yes to that question, answering yes, but it may be extraordinarily hard to sell, depending on your genre, and answering no, it’s a goddamn novella. If that sounds like a waste of time…yes. If it sounds like something you have passionate feelings about…yes, it’s that too. Writers get passionate about wordcounts. We get passionate about what they mean and where the arbitrary lines between form may be, and occasionally we spew some truly stupid shit in the name of trying to unravel its mystery. It gets even weirder when you start considering the importance of genre on the discussion. For example, I used to think short stories were around 3,000 words long, largely because that was usually the upper word-count on any short stories we submitted during my writing degree. The one time we actually wrote longer than that, in my undergraduate course, was in a subject devoted to the novella, where we were permitted to break out an 8,000 word story. That sound you hear? It’s the
04/11/2015
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