Day: July 14, 2014
News & Upcoming Events

Exile: Now Available

“They found me in the Hard Rock. Thursday night, a little after ten. A good crowd for a Thursday, all things considered. Lots of girls with inscrutable, backpacker accents clustered around the bar. Plenty more heading up the stairs, attracted by the cover band’s caterwaul. Blondes, natural and peroxide; a Gold Coast epidemic. Exposed skin, despite the cool nip in the air. Twenty-dollar cocktails named after natural disasters: Typhoons; Tsunamis; rum-soaked Hurricanes…” That’s how we first meet Keith Murphy: a hit-man who specialises in a very particular kind of target. He’s back on the Gold Coast for the first time in sixteen years, running from a cult who really want their leader back, and he’s about to negotiate with the king-shit local demon who may be holding a grudge against Murphy for things that were done in his past. It’ll all be okay, so long as they don’t find the bullet he swallowed. The one with the soul of his last victim

PeterMBall 14/07/2014
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

You Don’t Want to Be Published

You don’t want to be published. And, yes, I know you disagree. You’re an aspiring writer. You’ve worked hard at your craft. You’ve been getting rejection letter after rejection letter since you started sending your work out. All you want, more than anything in the world, is to get published. It’s the focus of everything you’re doing. But the truth is, you’re wrong. You don’t want to be published; you’re just using those words as a short-hand for a goal that you aren’t willing or able to articulate yet. I work in a writer’s centre four days out of every five. My job is literally answering the questions new writers ask about how to get published. I’ve done it on the phone, in seminars, in person, and via magazine articles. Now I’m doing it here, and I’m sharing the one truth I’ve learned after three years at the centre and nearly a decade of teaching creative writing classes before that. You

PeterMBall 14/07/2014