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:
Three Ways to Break Through the Not-Writing Habit
I have sixty minutes to write and edit this blog post. Fifty-nine minutes and twenty-seconds now. Even less, by the time you hit this sentence. I have sixty minutes because today is unexpected clear of distractions. The farewell I was meant to be attending this evening has been rescheduled. My usual Friday write-club buddy is currently interstate. I am on my own, in my apartment, trying to get shit done with no distractions, and that is bad for me. If there’s one thing I’m generally pretty good at, it’s getting shit done around other obligations. Give me an eight hour work day followed by three hours of gaming at a friend’s place, and I will bust out my minimum daily pages in record time then squeeze in a blog post for good measure. Give me twelve uninterrupted hours, and I will binge-watch shit on Netflix and watch interviews with wrestlers on Youtube. I can hold to schedules built around social obligation, but I am terrible at the obligations where the only person I can disappoint is myself or a professional colleague. And so, the stopwatch is running. Fifty-five minutes and eleven seconds to go. When it’s done, I get a one-hour break,
01/04/2016
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Six Things I Wish I’d Known as an Aspiring Teenage Writer
Last Friday I went out to do a presentation at a local school, talking to kids aged ten to seventeen about becoming a science-fiction and fantasy writer. I’m not usually the guy who gets asked to talk to school-age writers, as evidenced by the notes at the top of my presentation – don’t swear, and don’t mention Horn – and I was actually pretty impressed when I succeeded in obeying one of those edicts. Talking to kids about writing is kinda weird. See,on the surface, almost all writing advice boils down to three basic tenets: read a lot, write a lot, submit your work. The rest is really a matter of nuance and how to apply that knowledge, neither of which was a strength of mine way back when I was eleven or twelve. Mostly what I ended up thinking about, in terms of the presentation, was the difference between the advice I heard that was actually useful, and the stuff that did actually help me figure out how writing worked. ONE: LEARN TO TOUCH-TYPE WHILE YOU’RE YOUNG When I was thirteen and first faced with the possibility of selecting my own study topics at high school, my mother sat me
28/07/2014
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Exercise, Writing, Momentum, and Control
I’m often fascinated by the psychology behind the way we do things, usually because there are all sorts of parallels between other things and writing. Case in point: I was recently pointed towards Gretchen Reynold’s article about exercise while perusing Lifehacker, and was immediately struck by the similarities between the way she talked about regular exercise routines and the way I think about submitting short stories. Endurance…fades if you skip exercising for too many days in a row. The same is true, sadly, with motivation. In study after study, researchers have found that one of the primary reasons people continue exercising is that they enjoyed yesterday’s exercise or the exertions of the day before; they felt healthier and more physically masterful afterward and wish to relive that sensation. Longer periods between exercise sessions potentially could dull that enthusiasm. Ask Well: How Often to Exercise, The New York Times Now one look at my somewhat portly figure should tell you everything you need to know about the relationship between me and exercise, but that’s not why I latched onto this quote. ‘Cause it articulates something I’ve never really been able to nail down. See, ever since I started submitting stories again,
04/07/2013
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The Writers Dilemma
Some weeks, everything works smoothly. You stick to your routine, your projects progress smoothly, your business runs like clockwork and delivers, just as it should. Some weeks, everything is chaos. Work demands sudden and necessary stretches of overtime that throw your routine into chaos, just as deadlines come due on other projects, and your support team disappears because of personal tragedy, injury, or illness. You set your default expectation of “how much writing I can do” by one of these two situations, but it will serve you poorly when the other situation is in play. There is something to be said for surveying the landscape and resetting your expectations based on the now, rather than the normal.
27/04/2022
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The Problems with Word Count
Since starting the 600K Year, I’ve been aiming to write an average of 1,800 words per day. I managed it pretty consistently through the chaos of November, failed pretty consistently during the chaos of December, and carried my December habits through to the first two weeks of January. Which means that I’m now trying to write an average of 2,750 words a day. I’m not quite hitting it – yet – but I’m getting within a hundred words or so. I’ve always been fond of word count as a productivity metric, but I’m conscious that it’s not without it’s problems. The first, somewhat related to Parkinson’s Law which suggests that work expands to fit the time available to complete it, is that your process expands to meet the word count expected of it. Once I know how to reach 1,800 words regularly, I let the cracks start to appear in my process. I’ll stop writing to check a fact on wikipedia, or I’ll duck into twitter for a minute just to see what’s happening. An hour that could have been spent writing 900 words is suddenly spent writing 800, then 700, then 600. Which is fine, ’cause I’m hitting my writing
16/01/2015
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Jim Butcher on Scenes and Sequels
So I’ve been doing this writing thing for a while now. Eighteen years, more or less, once you factor in the time spent working on poetry, scripts, gaming stuff, an unfinished thesis, and stories as a collective whole. I still go out and learn to do stuff. And I still read stuff where I am thoroughly fucking schooled and have the way I think about writing turned on its head. Case in point: this one-two combination from 2006 or so where Jim Butcher talks about Scenes (which is stuff I know) and Sequels to Scenes (which blew my writer-brain in no uncertain terms). The sequel stuff feels like someone just sat down and wrote a short essay that basically says, “hey, you, short story writer, this is why you struggle with novels.” Go forth and read it.
31/01/2014
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