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Awesome Things about 2009 (2/15): Horn

When I started chatting to the spokesbear about putting a list of 15 awesome things about 2009 together, the first stipulation Fudge came up with was “do not treat every individual publication as its own awesome thing, because that will be cheating.” “What about Horn,” I said. “Surely it deserves a spot on its own?” And at that the spokesbear pondered and said: “Well, yes, there’s Horn. That was pretty awesome. I suppose that’s okay as an entry on its own.” Which is just as well, because the overall experience of seeing Horn released has easily been the most Awesome thing that happened this year. Seeing the finished book for the first time was awesome. Seeing it get its first few reviews was awsome, especially given its tendency to pop up in places like the Courier Mail, Locus and Jeff VanderMeer’s blog. Getting the news that “BTW, Horn‘s made a profit” was awesome. Getting asked if there were more Miriam Aster stories and if I’d be interested in writing them…well, you get the picture. Horn turned out to be a much bigger deal than I thought it’d be, and I’m still kinda awed by the fact that people are still buying it and e-mailing me about it (heck, there’s a part of me that a little surprised I haven’t been lynched for doing bad things to unicorns). And to leave off, since it’s traditional: Copies of Horn are still available at Twelfth Planet Press (or from Smashwords if you’d prefer an electronic

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Gaming

Awesome Things about 2009 (1/15): Pathfinder RPG

Today PeterMBall.com is a year old. This caught me a little off-guard when I went and looked at the archives, since it seems slightly inconceivable that I’ve only been posting to the website for a year instead of meandering around on livejournal (where, admittedly, this still blog runs a feed and much of the conversation happens). It got even worse when I realised that one of the first posts being made was “Horn has sold to Twelfth Planet Press,” which means we were one day shy of announcing Cold Cases a year exactly after Horn. Spooky. Between this moment of  nostalgia and the Americans celebrating Turkey Day and the vising 80-point-plan of awesomeness, I came up with the following: Awesome Things about 2009 (1/15): Pathfinder RPG Stick with me on this one, because there’s a lot of introspection involved in it making the list. Okay, to start with, this is probably important to know: I’m a big ol’ geek and Roleplaying Games have been a part of my life for about two decades now. That said, there’s only really been three game releases over the last decade that I’ve actually been so excited about that I’ve actually tracked the development and promotional material (that’d be Dungeons and Dragons 3E, Mutants and Masterminds 2E, and Pathfinder). There was something really nice about being able to get in contact with my inner game-geek and anticipate for the first half of the year. Pathfinder had me excited about gaming in a way that 4E didn’t,

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News & Upcoming Events

So, like, officially speaking…

If you haven’t dropped by the Twelfth Planet Press livejournal today, odds are you’ve missed this: Book Announcement: Sequel to Horn, due out April 2010 Twelfth Planet Press is proud to announce the acquisition of the sequel to Horn from Peter M Ball. Under the working title of Cold Cases, Miriam Aster works to solve an old file but her painful past refuses to stay buried. Book 2 in the Aster Series will be launched at Swancon, in April 2010. So it’s all official-like: the follow-up to Horn is on its way and sometime in the New Year I’m going to have to get cracking on Novella 3 in the series.

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Works in Progress

Goal-Setting

Things I’m going to do this week: 1) Write a short story 2) Re-establish my writing routines after letting them fall by the wayside during the march towards the deadline 3) Write some blog posts that don’t involve the word “novella” 4) Work out a series of goals for December that are flexible enough to suddenly transition into “fixing Cold Cases” when needed Things I am not going to do this week: 1) Write five thousand words a day in a desperate binge to complete NaNoWriMo with a 50k manuscript. I thought about this one for a long time over the weekend, because in the back of my head there’s the awareness that five thousand words a day isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Up until Sunday evening I really thought it was going to happen – what was another week of being a work-obsesses shut-in after three weeks of working on Cold Cases – but in the end common sense won out. The salve to the wailing, angry writer-child within that stomps his foot over failing a wordcount goal is this: My regular routine will still get the 50k draft written by mid-December, but it’ll also allow me to stock up a few short stories along the way and leave me a complete burn-out at the end of the process.

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Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

205

For those who may be wondering, allow me to clarify what exactly it is you’re looking at in the accompanying photograph. That, my dear peeps, is a photograph of victory in action. Or a pile of 205 books that are ready to leave my house forever and never return, thus clearing shelf-space and giving me tacit permission to buy new books should I ever find myself in possession of discretionary cash ever gain. The problem, at this point, is that I have no idea how I’m going to get many of these books out of the house. Some I suspect will be claimed by friends (particularly the gaming material and fantasy books) and I expect the rest will go to charity of some kind, although the logistics of carting a box of this size to a salvo bit could be a bit of a problem. Still, the cull is done, and when I originally wrote “get rid of 200 books” on my to-do list I seriously thought it was the thing least likely to get done. Getting rid of books is hard work for me, but I kinda found a rhythm for it at the end. Between this and the submission of the Cold Cases draft, I’ve now completed 11.25% of the 80-point-plan for an Awesome year I wrote back in July, meaning my year has finally stepped into double-digits. I bring this up because I suspect the plan is going to be due for a quick revision over the

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Journal

QWC Blog Tour of Queensland

And lo, I have finished the long march from empty page to submitted manuscript and a copy of Cold Cases is now winging its way to the publishers via the miracle of the internets. And well-timed it is, all things considered, since it gives me a few free moments to take part in the QWC Blog Tour of Queensland and answer some quick questions from the fine folks at the Queensland Writers Centre Where do your words come from? I borrow most of them from the dictionary. For some reason this whole writing lark works better when other people recognise the words you’re using and understand what they mean. Of course, my dictionary’s kind of old, so it’s missing words like D’oh and jiggy. Those I borrow from television shows and trust readers keep up. Where did you grow up and where do you live now? My parents were teachers, so I spent my childhood moving. We basically went between northern Queensland and the Darling Downs before finally settling on the Gold Coast when I was thirteen and stayed put for a long stretch. These days I live in Brisbane, which suits me far better than the Gold Coast ever did. I suspect it’s got something to do with access bookstores. What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work? “The first time the Black Dog showed up I was five.” – From Black Dog: A Biography in the Interfictions 2 anthology. What piece of writing do you wish you had written? Oh,

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Works in Progress

This is what I do in the absence of cats

Still off putting the finishing touches on the Cold Cases draft before I hand it over to Twelfth Planet Press. I should be back on Friday, being my usual blathering self, but until then have a picture of the Spokesbear doing his part: And now I’m back to the manuscript, for the spokesbear is a harsh taskmaster.

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Works in Progress

Watch out for the Deadlines, they move when you’re not looking

Had an e-mail conversation with the publisher which basically amounted to “I’m going to be busy this week, so you might as well take a few extra days if you want them.” To which I replied “well, yeah, okay,” and promptly fell asleep for much of Sunday instead of rushing to get the edits finalised. On the plus side, I woke up after all that and said “Oh, yeah, that’s why that scene isn’t working.” Space from a manuscript is a wonderful thing. Apart from that, it looks like there’s another couple of days between me and sanity, and I’m about to abscond to the Gold Coast for a few days where I can cajole my parents into proofreading the manuscript for me 🙂 See you on the other side 🙂

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News & Upcoming Events

To put this in context, I love both Conan and Call of Cthulhu

I sold a story to Weird Tales. If you need me for the rest of the day, I’ll be over in the corner geeking out*. *For bonus points, I discovered that I like the first half of the novella enough that I’m not actually embaressed to let people read it. It’s still flawed, yes, but not *OMGWTF am I doing, this ferking sucks” flawed. As usual, the problem seems to have been cramming in way to much backstory in one go.** **Hell, this day keeps getting better. The Australian Government decided to ignore the shitty recomendation from the productivity commission that we remove Australian territorial copyright. I so thought Australian writers and publishers weren’t going to win that fight, for all that there were dozens of sensible reasons on our side and a handful of really daft ones on the pro-parrallel importation end.

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Works in Progress

IAF Auctions/Interfictions 2

Alongside the release of Interfictions II comes the Interstatial Arts Foundation Auction featuring art pieces, jewelry and other works based upon the stories in the two Interfiction’s anthologies. A full list of the pieces is being rolled out on the IAF Auctions blog over the coming month, but allow me to call attention to Item 4 on the list, Mia Nutick’s Black Dog Forever, which is based on my story in IF2: http://iafauctions.com/interfictions-2-auction-4/… I don’t know about you, but I file this under “cool.” Go forth and peruse the other awesomeness on offer, for all sales go towards the IAF. Hell, let me just quote for this bit: “The Interfictions auctions have become a major aspect of the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s fundraising efforts, allowing the organization to fund other interstitial arts projects, including future Interfictions anthologies. Please join us in celebrating the anthology and support the Interstitial Arts Foundation by bidding and spreading the word.” Interfictions II has also racked up its first review courtesy of Charles Tan’s Bibliophile Stalker blog if you’re still wondering about the book itself. And with that, dear internet peeps, I disappear back into the morass of the Cold Cases manuscript draft in an attempt to kill the damn thing off before it *eats my goddamn brain*. For if I don’t, the spokesbear get’s angry, and the bears got paws, man. Don’t be fooled by the apparent fuzziness and the styrofoam bean filling, the bear’s got paws.

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Works in Progress

Words, words, words (With bonus Angela Slatter Interview)

Before I begin, let me direct you to this: Marshal Payne’s Super-Sekrit Clubhouse has a new interview with my Write Club peep Angela Slatter, which should give you a pretty good insight into why I usually use words like “awesome” and “inimitable” when discussing both her and her writing. Angela remains one of those folks who fuses talent, hardworking dilligance and bucket-loads of smarts in her approach to writing (although she’ll refute the latter with Simpson’s referenes, giving half a chance). She speaks wisdom and her writing is good – so go read about her now, while she’s still an ’emerging writer’, and then  you can join me in the nodding and looking smug when people start talking about how this awesome new ’emerged’ writer in the years to come. And if you don’t, well, I’ll mock you -with a very mocking mock – because that’s the kind of guy I am. Okay, back to the entry. Or, to put it another way, a Cold Cases update It appears that if you past your writing progress in the forms of Lord of the Rings references they become a lot more palatable in this newfangled world of social interactivity, so allow me to adapt from one of yesterday’s twitters/facebook updates and say this: I walk, I walk some more, there is a swampy bit, and I keep reminding myself that if I keep walking I should be hitting Mordor in the near future and tossing the deadly weight of the unending draft of

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News & Upcoming Events

Interfictions Two is out…now

‘Tis true, the Interfictions Two anthology has been released like a releasy thing (sorry, hard morning at the keyboard and I’m all out of simile). You can pick it up in hardcopy or DRM free PDF depending on your preferences. You can read the story by me, should you really want to, but personally I’m diving straight for the contributions by folks like Jeffrey Ford, Ray Vukcevich, Lavie Tidhar, Theadora Goss, and Brian Francis Slattery*. The anthology’s alreadybeen named as one of Amazon ‘s Top Ten Fantasy and Science Fiction books of 2009. And if you’re still left scratching your heads as to what an interfiction actually is, head over to the Interfictions Annex and peruse some of the awesome free fiction on offer as a warm-up. *And then, just quietly, I’m going to go have a cup of tea and a quiet lie down while I recover. My inner reader is a little geeked out after perusing the TOC.

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