News & Upcoming Events

Not Quite The End of the World Just Yet is an Aurealis Awards Finalist

The short-lists for the 2018 Aurealis Awards went up yesterday, posting the finalist lists that bring together some of the best Australian sci-fi and fantasy of the year. Not Quite The End of the World Just Yet is one of four finalists in best collection this year, and shares the list with some pretty distinguished company:

BEST COLLECTION

• Not Quite the End of the World Just Yet, Peter M Ball (Brain Jar Press)
• Phantom Limbs, Margo Lanagan (PS Publishing)
• Tales from The Inner City, Shaun Tan (Allen & Unwin)
• Exploring Dark Short Fiction #2: A Primer to Kaaron Warren, Kaaron Warren (Dark Moon Books)

I’m largely off social media these days, so I’ve missed the frenzy of posting that took place yesterday as everyone started with the congratulations. This makes me very, very late in offering my own felicitations to all the finalists, including an incredible number of friends and colleagues who have made the lists.

Broad Release for Winged, With Sharp Teeth

The first release in my Short Fiction Lab series, Winged, with Sharp Teeth, spent three months exclusive to Amazon and available to Unlimited subscribers.

Now that it’s exclusivity period is up, I’ve been uploading it to all the usual ebook vendors outside of the Amazon kingdom: Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and many others. You can find the link to your preferred store via the books2read link, or set Books2Read to automatically route you towards your preferred bookstore when you click.

This also means that you can no longer read the story on Kindle Unlimited, but there’s a few days left in which you can pick up the second, stand-alone Short Fiction Lab release before it finishes its exclusive run next week.

I shall not bury the lede here: you can pick up a copy of Exile for free on Amazon until the end of the month, delivering you a novella’s worth of Gold Coast based urban fantasy for the princely sum of FREE.

They’ve also discounted the ebook of the whole Flotsam omnibus to $3.49 until the books go out of print at the end of April. The omnibus contains all three novellas in the sequence, plus a handful of bonus short stories set in the Flotsam universe.

These are just two of the deals Apocalypse Ink is running on my books, and a bunch of their other authors, in the lead up to their shift in business model. As a reminder, the series will be unavailable after April 30 and I’m still not sure what I’ll be doing with it when the rights revert, so this is your last chance to get copies for a long stretch.

You can find out about the deals they’re offering over on the Apocalypse Ink site.

When I started releasing short fiction through Brain Jar Press, I knew I was going to end the year with a flurry of new releases. It’s inevitable, when you’re a short story writer, that you end up with a bunch of previously published work that’s either hard to find or now out of print. Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called The Band is one of the latter, despite being one of my more recent stories.

This was one of those those stories that surprised me when I first wrote it–it’s a story about bands and belonging and growing-up-in-places-that-are-not-good-for-being-an-artist. It’s also about nostalgia–one of the catalysts was hitting up old university friends of mine to grab memories of the Dog House Bar–and mysterious happenings that involve entire audiences dying off in a single moment.

It may be a horror story, depending on your taste. I largely think of it as weird-ass fantasy, but I think that about pretty much everything I write.

It first appeared in the Speculate ‘zine back in 2017, but the story went offline when Evil Girlfriend Media (who ran Speculate) went dormant to reshape what they published. Now you can pick up a copy from any good ebook store.

Here’s a little taste of what’s going on in the story:

I saw them play The Playroom exactly one week later. They didn’t seem like much, taking to the stage. Just another rock-and-roll four-piece: guitar, drums, bass, and a singer out the front. The bass guitarist was short and feral, with torn stockings and silver eye-shadow. The singer, tall and lean as hunger, had crimson nails and a dirty fringe that hung over his eyes. They were exactly the kind of group that wore their influences on their sleeve: a little bit of David Bowie, a whole lot of Kurt Cobain. 

It was nineteen ninety nine, and that seemed a little naff. 

Selby grabbed my arm, dragged me down to the front of the stage. I went with reluctance and a glass of bourbon, stuck beside her because…well, I was eighteen. 

I was eighteen and Selby was Selby. It wasn’t just the band I was curious about.

But still, they didn’t look like much. Selby sensed that, as I stood there. “Just wait,” she said. “You’ll see.”

They didn’t speak, not really. The drummer shouted “two-three-four,” and they lurched into their first snarling chord. That was how it began, and Selby was right. I saw. Oh shit, I saw.

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called The Band, Available Now