Author: PeterMBall

Works in Progress

Morning.

There is a very peculiar quality to the light outside my study window today. Very white, a little too midday for this early morning hour, and it leaves the view (such as it is) a little bleached out. And although it’s cool and pleasant in my house there’s a very nifty heat-haze rising up off the corrugated iron roof of the neighbor’s place. Soon the cloud cover will shift a little and it’ll all disappear, but right now I’m amusing myself with looking out the window and taking notes. Junked the Black Candy draft last night after long hours of debating its various merits against its various elements of wrongness. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom for new novel writers and will probably come back to haunt me in the near future, but I’m more-or-less convinced it was the right call – I have a novella that shows my love of The Big Sleep already, I don’t actually

Works in Progress

It was not an exciting day at the word mines…

Word tells me I’ve added about 800 words to the Queen of the Winter Sea today, along with miscellaneous tinkering and cutting, so it should be counted as productive by any reasonable metric. Unfortunately my head still hasn’t got with the program and continues to tell me that I’m making no discernible forward progress – I’m blaming the fact that there seems to be a conflict between my thematic plan and the subtext that’s coming up during the writing process, which largely means that it all feels muddleheaded instead of clicking into place. Solution: call this a draft, let it sit fallow for a few days, and start a new draft over the weekend while working on other stuff. I’ve got enough of a draft down that there’s a shape, so I figure I can give the writer-brain a few days to dwell upon it and trust in its ability to deliver something worthwhile, thematically, that will amuse me as much

Works in Progress

This is not a reason to panic…

Earlier this week I put together my writing-based to-do list that covers all the stuff I’d like to achieve between now and the end of February. It basically consists of a novel draft, an exegesis draft, a novella draft, and a dozen stories that either need to be written or re-written. It’s the kind of workload that seems reasonable inside my head, but experience says that real life will not let it run as smoothly as I expect. Especially since the work breakdown says I should have a story draft done by this Sunday, as well as a small chunk of novel and a 3500 word outline for the exegesis. My brain is refusing to do any of it and demanding to watch Predator 2 instead (No, I don’t know why Predator 2 has become the topic of fixation, but apparently my subconscious is convinced it’s a reasonable facsimile for work). I’m not panicking about this, which is my usual

News & Upcoming Events

Year’s Best Australian SF & Fantasy

My internet access is  wonky at the moment, so I’ll be making this brief and hoping it goes through before the modem crashes again. The page for Mirrordanse Book’s Year’s Best Australian SF and Fantasy 4 has gone up along with a copy of the recommended reading 2007 list from the very back of the back. 2007 wasn’t really a big year for me, publications wise – I was still finding my feet post-Clarion and the stuff I did get published was mostly flash – so I was kinda surprised to spot my little SF Flash “Avenue D: The Tankboy’s Ride” among the list. Admittedly it wasn’t a surprise I got today – I picked up a copy of the book while I was down at Conflux – but one calls attention to good stuff when the opportunity presents itself. It’s a damn good read by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s one of the three Year’s Best collections I now pick

Works in Progress

More Last Short Story

Another mention from Last Short Story today, this time from GirlieJones: “The strongest story for me in Fantasy this year was Peter M Ball’s “On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves”, which was also when I perked up my ears and hopped on the Peter M Ball train. It’s tender and odd and sad and bittersweet. And beautifully beautifully written. I’m looking forward to reading what Ball does next. “

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Last Short Story

If you’re a fan of the speculative fiction short story, you really do owe it to yourself to be following the Last Short Story blog. It’s maintained by a small group of dedicated readers committed to reading every short story published in the field over the course of a year and making note of their favourites. I was a big fan during the blogs first year, 2007, when it directed me towards some outstanding anthologies I would have otherwise missed – New Space Opera & Interfictions – and directed me towards what would become one of my favourite stories of the year, Garth Nix’s Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go To War Again. Being such a fan of the blog, it’s been kind of neat to watch some of the nice things they’ve said about two pieces of my fiction over the last couple of months. About The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga in Dreaming Again   – BenPayne: “… tells

News & Upcoming Events

So today it was officially announced…

That Twelfth Planet Press is releasing my novella next year. Nabbed from the announcement: Twelfth Planet Press is pleased to announce that the third novella in our ongoing series will be a hardboiled urban fantasy detective story by Peter M Ball. (Warning: may contain unicorns and a formerly dead person)Peter M Ball is an exciting writer, recently appearing in Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again with his story “The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga” and in Fantasy with “On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves.” His novella will be released by Twelfth Planet Press in the second half of 2009. As you’d expect, I’m pretty damned pleased with the news. As my clarion peep Jess notes, “It may have started life as a dare to write a Very Wrong unicorn story that avowed unicorn-hater and week 2 tutor Lee Battersby would like, but it’s become so much more.”

A close-up of a typewriter page with the word "Writing" typed on it.
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Talking Dirty: Why Writers Should Focus on Being a Business

Over the weekend I headed out to a Professional Writing Seminar held by Marianne de Pierres which covered the terrain that’s common at such things, but also hit a few key points that I hadn’t come across before. Part of what she talked about during the seminar was taking responsible for your own professional development (and, well, your career), and as someone who has done a lot of development (as a student) and developing (as a tutor, and a lecturer) it got me thinking about the gaps in my skill set. I’ve done a lot of stuff to develop my skills as a writer – undergraduate and post-graduate writing programs, workshops, six-week courses like Clarion South – but more and more I’m feeling like I’ve got the writing part down (kinda) but still need to work on the day-to-day business side of things: dealing with page-proofs, handling contracts, and taking care of what little money I make via writing. We

News & Upcoming Events

The Ground Floor

So here’s the short-version: My names Peter M. Ball and I’m writer of speculative fiction, a gamer, a lover of good food, and a wrestling fan. I talk about my works in progress, use public word counts, and pimp my publications (and those of my friends, and those I just plain like a lot) with moderate enthusiasm. Throw in some references to popular culture, an undercurrent of arts-theory, a deep love of gothic films/literature and punk rock, and you’ve probably got a good idea of where the blog is going to go from here on in. Right now you have stumbled over this site while we’re in set-up mode (or you’re in the future and you’ve backtracked here to see the beginning, in which case you may be interested in the livejournal that served as my web-presence prior to December 2008). At its heart, this website is about promoting my writing. A partial list of what I’ve done in the past