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:
Six Things Writers Can Learn From Hackers (1995)
I’ve always had a lot of time for Hackers – it’s one of the few #TrashyTuesdayMovies I was actually looking forward to seeing. It may be an uneven movie, but it’s one of the first major films that came out and tackled the developing paranoia about the internet that swept through the 90s, taking the fear of out of the realm of science fiction and planting it in the present day. On the list of vaguely disappointing cyberpunk movies that came out of the era , it actually nails the feel of William Gibson’s novels and short-stories far better than the genre works. It’s also hard to think of a more iconic nineties movie than Hackers. It’s one of those terrible movies that defines a generation – if you were in your late teens or early twenties in 1995, when the film came out, then there’s pretty good odds you remember this film as the thing that killed of Johnny Lee Miller’s career after Trainspotting (along with Plunket and McClain) and launched the career of Angelina Jolie (unless you’re willing to argue that Cyborg II did that). It’s also one of those movies that I end up watching once or
29/07/2014
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The First Rule of Write Club is Talk About Write Club; The Second Rule is Talk About The Things You Learned At Write Club
Five years ago, more or less, I was having coffee with my friend Angela Slatter and listening to her complain about the slow progress she was making on her latest draft. Shoot, I said, there’s an easy fix for that. At Clarion Kelly Link mentioned she and Holly Black get together in a coffee shop once a week, then yell at each other write until they run out of words. We could just do something similar and it’d get your work kick-started right quick. And since Angela allowed that this idea may have merit, we started meeting up once a week to talk about writing, eat ridiculous amounts of junk food, and write up a storm. Thus began Write Club, possibly the smartest idea I ever ripped off from another, far more successful writer and applied to my own life. Write Club’s evolved a bit over the years. We eat less junk-food these days. We meet up during the daylight hours, instead of the Friday evenings we once favoured. There was a short hiatus in 2011, when we both foolishly worked a full-time schedule for a couple of months. Angela now writes full-time, after starting out as a part-time writer/part-time QWC
09/07/2014
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On Algorithms, Authors, and How You Can Help
There is this meme that pops up on Facebook from time to time. It usually runs something like this: Authors do not earn a lot of money, really. If you’d like to help your favourite author, post a review on Amazon. Given enough reviews on Amazon, MAGIC THINGS WILL START TO HAPPEN IN THE AMAZON ALGORITHM. And every time I see it, I cringe a little. Don’t get me wrong – I like reviews. I would like more reviews of my work out there. But the focus here isn’t necessarily on reviews, it’s on manipulating the Amazon algorithms. The numbers change, as do the MAGIC THING, but the gist remains the same: get 50 reviews, and the book will start appearing in the recommendation algorithm; get 20 reviews, and you’ll be included in the “others like this book footer.” Amazon reviews = good things for your favourite book. I am not against Amazon. They are exceptionally good at what they do, and their recommendation algorithm is fucking awesome at predicting my reading taste. Amazon has their shit together, in the retail space. But part of that relies upon them being right. They’re like Google, in that their cache and market dominance
19/04/2016
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Four Writing Lessons from Dan Charnas’ Work Clean
I find myself re-reading and chewing over Dan Charnas Work Clean for the second time this week, despite raving about it just seven days ago. I do this semi-regularly with the books I really love – the first read through is all about the experience, but the second is where I start to process. The re-read is where I slow down and take notes, reworking ideas and responses as I figure out how to make best use of what I’ve learned. And I will admit, this post started with a what-can-learn-that-will-be-useful-as-a-writer post, because most things do, in my head. I gathered up my notes, started putting them in shape. “This’ll be easy,” I thought. “Just find the writing angle.” There are lots of writing angles in Work Clean. It’s a book about understanding time, as much as offering a business process, and it tipped the notion of the most productive thing I can be doing right now on its head. Then I noticed that the stuff I really focused on wasn’t just useful in writing. The mindset seeped over into other parts of my life, and made things like putting together a PhD application, cleaning my apartment, and processing my ridiculous
07/09/2016
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Hanging at the Book of Face for a Stretch
For the past few years, I’ve largely left my Facebook Author Page as a secondary concern. It was a place to re-post links to blog posts after Facebook ceased allowing these to go to a personal feed, and occasionally served as the site for announcements of new covers or books. This was partially a function of time—I invest a lot of energy in not being online, most days—and partially a function of a mindset where I wanted to keep processes controllable and focus as much energy at possible on writing new things. As I’m getting some bandwidth back, this week, I’ve started trying to change that a little. Facebook is getting its own little stream of content rather than repeating things that appeared here or over on twitter. Basically, there’s now a version of me that’s increasingly Facebook Specific. A professional version of me, that gets a moderate amount of attention, as opposed to my increasingly diminishing personal presence on the book of face. One of the intriguing exercises, leading up to this, has involved sitting down and figuring out a plan for the kinds of content I want the page to focus on. My first version ran something like
12/12/2019
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Things I would do if I were planning on becoming an indie publisher…
The title of this post is actually a little disingenuous: I already self-published back in 2005, when I first started self-publishing ebooks for roleplaying games, and I kept at it until 2007 or so when, for various reasons related to edition wars and the level of misogyny among gamers, writing fiction started to look more appealing. The interesting thing about the RPG field is that it went through it’s teething problems with ebooks a little earlier than the rest of the world, which means I frequently find myself frustrated when I get involved in conversations about indie publishing ’cause there’s a certain level of been-there-done-that-made-all-the-stupid-mistakes-already. I’d been around epublishing for a while before that, though, so I’m naturally interested in the ebook/indie publisher explosion that’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s only gotten worse since I started working for a forward-thinking writers centre with an electronic publishing think-tank attached to it. It also means that common phrases like I’m going to experiment with ebooks drive me crazy, since most of these experiments revolve around things RPG ebooks did six or seven years back. So after a couple of frustrating conversations, I sat down and put some serious thought into what I’d do if I were planning
10/10/2012
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