News & Upcoming Events

Some *Really* blatant blatant self promotion

Data Point the First: There’s about seven days left of Twelfth Planet Press’s Silly Season Stocking Stuffer Sale, whereby Australians can pick up a copy of my novella Horn with free shipping (and everyone else in the world gets a massively discounted postage). Given Horn’s cover price of $10, that’s a pretty sweet deal. Data Point the Second: As of about six minutes ago, there were only 9 copies of Horn left in Twelfth Planet’s inventory. Data Point the Third: The free shipping on Horn is a total “while stocks last” kind of deal (and there are plenty of other awesome books included in the sale. Now I’m not mentioning this to suggest you should go buy a copy of the book right away. Nope, not at all. This is the silly season after all, and folks are generally watching their budgets in order to ensure maximum goodwill and festive cheer for those they love. I’m not even saying “get

PeterMBall 17/12/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Announcing the first Apex Magazine Story of the Year award–They need your vote!

I’m just going to snurch this one straight from the Apex blog: To celebrate the end of our first year of becoming a professional level digital magazine, I’m pleased to announce that we will be presenting an award to the best original fiction published by Apex Magazine. The award will be voted on by the fans, meaning you! Voting starts tonight and will continue through January 30th. The story receiving the most votes will be announced on February 1st. The author of the Apex Magazine Story of the Year will receive a trophy and the unique distinction of being the best Apex had to offer during 2009. Presented below are the twenty-two original stories published during 2009: “59 Beads”(4300) by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz “Overclocking”(2600) by James L. Sutter “After the Fire”(2900) by Aliette De Bodard “Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys”(2100) by Nir Yaniv “A Poor Man’s Roses”(2400) by Alethea Kontis “To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament” (5500) by Peter M. Ball

PeterMBall 17/12/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Awesome Things About 2009: Hail to the Peeps edition

Among the many things to be thankful about in 2009 is the fact that it’s been a very good year to a lot of my friends who also toil in the wordmines. There’s nothing quite so awesome as being part of a community full of folks doing cool stuff, and it seems like virtually everyone I know has spent the last twelve months firing on all cylinders. Among the highlights are Ben Francisco‘s story Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts in Realms of Fantasy, seeing photographs from the set where one of Angela Slatter‘s stories being transformed into a short film, and the news that Chris Lynch will be launching his publishing company’s first anthology before the year is out. Basically, lots of folks have done lot of cool things this year.  And given the time you can bet that I’d loudly and assertively celebrate the awesomeness of every single one of them until you too became a fan of what

PeterMBall 16/12/2009
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Awesome Things About 2009 (6/15): Write Club

I keep saying it, I know, but write club is awesome (For those wondering what the hell I’m talking about, I recommend this post and this post on Angela Slatter’s blog*). Turns out it’s a remarkably popular idea too – I’ve had a couple of conversations where people wondered how Write Club worked, and it seems Angela gets asked about it as well, so I figured I’d share my** thoughts on why write club works for those who may be curious. Reason 1) Angela Slatter is Fricken’  Awesome Granted, I say this quite a bit on this blog as well, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that it’s true. Even if you ignore the fact that she’s a superb writer whose keen critical eye has stopped me from looking like a goose a couple of times this year, and the fact that she’s generous with both her time and connections, she’s one of the people I enjoy catching up with once a week.  If you’re

PeterMBall 11/12/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Awesome Things about 2009 Fiction Edition

2009 is totally going down as the year that I rediscovered how much I enjoy reading for pleasure. It’s one of those habits that eluded me a while back, which was kind of unfortunate given that my book-buying habit didn’t exactly die off at the same rate. And it’s not that I stopped reading, exactly; I just fell into the trap of rereading old favourites with the occasional new work creeping in. By the end of June I’d made the decision that this should be rectified and promptly started ploughing my way through the seemingly endless array of novels and non-fiction that fill my too-read bookcase. Since then I’ve managed a fairly steady pace of two books a week. I’ve barely made a dent on the unread book read pile of doom, but it’s still exposed me to a lot of kick-ass fiction. To whit, I give you the fourth and fifth instalment of Awesome Things about 2009:  The City

PeterMBall 09/12/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Stocking Stuffers and Clockwork Jungles

Twelfth Planet Press Stocking Stuffer Sale In celebration of the release of the Aurealis Awards shortlist, Twelfth Planet Press is having a Silly Season Sale! All through December they’re offering Shipping deals on all orders of their books that earned a spot in the short-list (that’d be Horn, the New Ceres Nights anthology, Deborah Biancotti’s Book of Endings collection, and the Sirenbeat/Roadkill double). Right now, that means you can pick up Horn for $10. And it’s just about the right size to fit into a stocking (if, say, you knew someone who really deserved a noir tale about evil unicorns and snuff films for Christmas). Shimmer: Clockwork Jungle Book Issue Shimmer Magazine just released its Clockwork Junglebook theme issue, chock-full of steampunk animal fables for your reading pleasure (including mine – The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi). The website has short teasers of all the stories, links to author interviews (me included), and order details if funky steampunk is

PeterMBall 08/12/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Awesome Things About 2009 (3/15): Aurealis Awards Short Listings

The 2009 Aurealis Awards short-list was released over the weekend and it contained a whole mess of good news – Horn secured a berth in the short-list of both the Fantasy and the Horror novel categories, and I made the Science Fiction Short Story list twice with both Clockwork, Pathwork and Ravens and To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament. There’s even more good news on the short-lists in the form of nominations for peeps such as Chris Green* (for both SF, Horror & Fantasy short story), Angela Slatter (Fantasy short story) and Twelfth Planet Press (a seemingly unending parade for various projects – I think every book they released this year is up for something). ‘Course, most of the folks who read this blog have already heard this news from other sources (I was having a slack weekend, internet-wise), so I figure I’d just make a note, say “awesome” and off my congratulations to the other finalists – it’s a shiny list of folks to be

PeterMBall 07/12/2009
News & Upcoming Events

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

PeterMBall 02/12/2009
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

PeterMBall 27/11/2009
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.

PeterMBall 26/11/2009
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

PeterMBall 23/11/2009
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”

PeterMBall 21/11/2009