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:
GenreCon, Thank-yous, and Networking Redux
Yesterday’s post was written pre-conference. Today, I’m writing from the other end, at home, on my couch, half-asleep and vaguely unsettled because my nerves are still dancing the GenreCon fandango. I’m tempted to be all false modesty here, but every indication from twitter comments and in-person discussions seems to indicate that the conference was great. We’ll send out feedback forms to all the attendees in a few days and we’ll no-doubt learn about the things we didn’t do so well, but the vast majority of the people seemed to have gotten a lot out of the conference. The comments on the program have been great, with guests and panellists just knocking it out of the park in session after session. I sent out a lot of thanks in the closing ceremony of the conference. I’d like to do so again here, in shorter form: I get an awful lot of love for running GenreCon, largely because I’m the name at the bottom of the emails people get, but I cannot overstate the importance of the team of people who come together and make it happen. From the writers and editors who are part of the program to the QWC staff
02/11/2015
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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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The Sleep Thing, Blogging, And Writing Without a Net
The sleep thing. The apnea. The bad habit my body has developed of asphyxiating me a couple of dozen times an hour, while my body drifts into a REM state. I’ve called it all sorts of things over the last nine months, but it always opens up a quiet moment of panic inside me. It lies at the heart of a very specific debate I have, regarding social media and being a writer. Because I do not know where the line is, when it comes to discussing it. It came up a few times, over the weekend, and figuring out when I’d crossed over into the territory where I’d become the guy banging on about something everyone else was done with got difficult even when the non-verbal queues were present. I do, after all, have a tendency to bang on about things when I’m trying to figure them out. Usually, long after everyone else is wishing I’d shut up. And that presents some issues when it comes to blogging. This post is…well, not necessarily soliciting feedback, but it’s definitely thinking out loud. A large chunk of my Melbourne trip was spent pondering the blog, and why I’m doing it, and
17/11/2015
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The End of the Streak
I broke my writing streak last week. After 171 consecutive days of writing – including a five days where I held onto to streak by the skin of my teeth while on Holidays at the Adelaide Fringe Festival – it was eventually killed off on the final day of holidays by Cyclone Marcia, writing a two-day workshop, and the uncertainty of knowing whether or not we’d be able to fly home. Of course, February was a pretty rough month for writing even before I lost my thread. February always is. I’m going to finish the month well short of the 50k I need to reach my 600k goal for the year, but I’ve planned for that, and March will be a month of catching up and getting stuff finished. So what did 171 days of writing get me? More than I thought. Since I started tracking the writing streak, I’ve achieved the following: Finished Crusade (aka Flotsam #3), a novella of about 40k words in first draft. Finished Valiant, the first novella in a werewolf PI series, at about 32k Put together about 20,000 words of short fiction drafts I need to go back and finish Produced 10,000 words on the two
25/02/2015
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The World’s Worst Story Opening (And How To Do It So It Works)
Back in May, Chuck Wendig did this post about breaking rules. I like Chuck. He’s a smart guy. Knows his shit when he talks about writing, too, which is why we flew him out as a guest for last year’s GenreCon. But I’ve gotta admit, when he put up his post saying, well, fuck the rules, and included the following list of rules worth fucking, it kinda made my testicles crawl into my body and seek refuge from the terror he’d unleashed upon the world: Don’t open on weather. Don’t open with a character looking in a mirror. Don’t open on a character just waking up. (Wendig, IN FICTION, NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED) Oh, Jesus, I thought. Why in hell would you tell people that? Don’t you realise what you’re unleashing on the world? Those poor fucking editors. Hell, those poor writers. DAMMIT, WENDIG, WHY ARE YOU USING YOUR POWERS FOR EVIL? Then I got distracted. ‘Cause deadline’s wait for no fucking man and I had a copy of Frost to turn in that wasn’t yet finished. But that last one on Chuck’s list, it stuck in my head. Don’t open on a character just waking up. It irritated me, ’cause I’ve got
03/07/2014
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The Sweet, Seductive Song of October Productivity
I have spent the last few weeks agreeing to do things, comfortable in the knowledge that time when I would actually have to do said things was comfortably distant in the future. Except now the future is almost here, and this will be my last week where all my writing time is actually devoted to writing-related tasks. I tend to forget that October is a good writing month. The weather is pleasant and there is a kind of lull in the yearly commitments, a quietness between the festival chaos of September and the beginning of the end-of-year chaos that comes in November. Every year October comes around and I do a whole bunch of work and I think, well, this is nice, it would be great if this was all year round. And then I start making plans, because everything seems so achievable. Then November reminds me that those plans are foolish, and December derails them entirely. It doesn’t stop me from making plans. Two years ago, around this time, I got it into my head to try and write 600,000 words in the space of the year. I largely did it to prove a point to a friend of
27/10/2016
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