Category: News & Upcoming Events
News & Upcoming Events

Things I need to do in Adelaide

1) Eat a pie floater. Maybe two, if I survive the first one. 2) Eat a frog cake. Oddly, the pie floater does not fill me with fear, but this little sugared treat does. Insidious looking things, I tell’s ya. Insidious. 3) Launch Horn on Sunday (5pm) 4) Pick up a bunch of Horn pre-orders for family & friends who aren’t attending the con. 5) Remember the names for the beer sizes in SA (you have pints, right guys? right?). Find a pub that has Cooper’s Stout on tap. 6) Slap Jason with a big steel gauntlet of iron resolve until he starts working on his novel. 7) Take part in the Urban Fantasy, High Fantasy, and Magic Realism panel on Saturday morning. If you’re trying to track me down at any point during the con, that’s your rough guide for finding me. All offers to help me go find pies and black beer will be gratefully accepted 🙂

PeterMBall 03/06/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Horn now available for Prepurchase

The latest news out of the Twefth Planet Press camp is that Horn is off to the printers and available for prepurchase – you can now reserve a copy and pick it up at Conjecture in Adelaide or have it posted to you.

PeterMBall 25/05/2009
News & Upcoming Events

In the absence of context, I’m going with “really? Cool!”

So the nominations for the Australian Ditmar Awards have been released after a few weeks of my friends-list being packed with reminders to send in nominations and reminders about the 2008 works that are eligible. Unlike the Aurealis Awards, which I followed for years before I actually started writing SF, the Ditmars are something of a mystery to me – I lack the context to understand how they fit into the wider scheme of Australian fan culture and speculative fiction. I figured I’d get a chance to puzzle that out at while attending Conjecture, since that’s where they’re awarded this year. Then the list came out: Best New Talent ————— Peter M. Ball Felicity Dowker Jason Fischer Gary Kemble Amanda Pillar And you know what? Context for understanding or no, that’s kind of cool. I’m going to stump for the Fisch to win, of course, since he’s both a fine writer and the man who is putting me up during the con, but as

PeterMBall 09/05/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Today’s Post Courtesy of…

Data-Point the First: The latest issue of Apex Magazine is out, which includes my story Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens. Go forth, read, and while you’re there consider picking up some of the fine works of fiction Apex Publishing has out (I’m currently stroking the cover of Open Your Eyes, which showed up in yesterday’s post and gets coveted like a covety thing because I haven’t yet had time to read it). Data-Point the Second: Edits for Horn rolled in last night, which means I’m going to be AWOL for a few days longer (baring posts where I show up and pimp stuff, like this one, but I figure you’ll forgive me my exhibitionist tendencies by now). Data-Point the Third: The blog silence up to this point has been generously provided by a head cold and a mild fever that kept me awake. Avoided the blog because I figured endless posts of I’m sick weren’t that interesting (and I sufficiently grumpy

PeterMBall 06/05/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Horn Launch

I don’t know where you will be on June 7th of this year, around 5 pm or so, but there’s a very good chance that you can find me here. To quote from the Conjecture blog: Horn by Peter M Ball Book 2 in the Twelfth Planet Press Novella Series There’s a dead girl in a dumpster and a unicorn on the loose – and no-one knows how bad that combination can get better than Miriam Aster. What starts as a consulting job for city homicide quickly becomes a tangled knot of unexpected questions, and working out the link between the dead girl and the unicorn will draw Aster back her back into the world of the exiled fey she thought she’d left behind ten years ago. All in all, Miriam Aster isn’t happy. The last time she worked a case like this it cost her a badge, a partner, and her life. This time things are going to get

PeterMBall 30/04/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Cool Things

My parents read my blog. I’m still having trouble adjusting to that thought, as evidenced by the impulse to ring them when cool stuff happens since, in days gone by, they’ve remain unconnected to any of my primary methods of disseminating “check it out, cool stuff* happening” type news. These days they get to find out about it with the rest of you: Cool Thing the First: Apex Magazine has announced the line-up for their forthcoming print anthology, Descended from Darkness I’m in it, apparently. Which is pretty cool given that my story hasn’t yet made it up as a part of the magazine yet (I may show up in May, I suspect, given the trading-around of line-edits and bios we’ve been doing). The rambunctious Jason Fischer is included as well, making this the second time we’ve shared a Table of Contents. Cool Thing the Second: Interstitial Arts Foundation Call for Artists Back when the first interfictions anthology was released the IAF had

PeterMBall 23/04/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Horn update

Coming in June 2009 from Twelfth Planet Press Horn by Peter M Ball http://www.twelfthplanetpress.com There’s a dead girl in a dumpster and a unicorn on the loose – and no-one knows how bad that combination can get better than Miriam Aster. What starts as a consulting job for city homicide quickly becomes a tangled knot of unexpected questions, and working out the link between the dead girl and the unicorn will draw Aster back into the world of the exiled fey she thought she’d left behind ten years ago. All in all, Miriam Aster isn’t happy. The last time she worked a case like this it cost her a badge, a partner, and her life. This time things are going to get much, much worse. (Via Girliejones. And Angela, who noticed this before me)

PeterMBall 10/04/2009
News & Upcoming Events

It still feels weird when people mention stuff like this…

Jack Dann gets interviewed for Flycon and says a bunch of useful things about being a writer. He also names a list of writers to watch in 2009 which includes such oft-mentioned to peeps as Angela Slatter and Jason Fischer as well as, well, me. Which is both cool and moderately terrifying and a great reminder about how much of this year is being swallowed up by things that are not writing. One of these days I’ll get around to writing a full post about how odd it is to think that stuff I’ve written is read by strangers (or distant acquaintances, or even people I only know through writer-type activities), but suffice to say that it’s still something that comes as a nice surprise when stuff like this happens.

PeterMBall 16/03/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Latest from the wordmines…

Now that the TOC has been made public over on Delia Sherman’s LJ we’ve been told we can go crazy with the blog announcements: I sold my story, Black Dog: A Biography, to Interfictions 2. The complete Table of Contents looks something like this: Jeffrey Ford, “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” M. Rickert, “Beautiful Feast” Will Ludwigsen, “Remembrance is Something Like a House” Cecil Castelucci, “The Long and the Short of Long-Term Memory” Alaya Johnson, “The Score” Ray Vukcevich, “The Two of Me” Carlos Hernandez, “The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria” Lavie Tidhar, “Shoes” B. F. Slattery, “Interviews After the Revolution” Elizabeth Ziemska, “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken” Peter M. Ball, “Black Dog: A Biography” Camilla Bruce, “Berry Moon” Amelia Beamer, “Morton Goes to the Hospital” William Alexander, “After Verona” Alan DeNiro, “(*_*) ~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof” Nin Andrews, “The Marriage” Theodora Goss, “Child-Empress of Mars” Lionel Davoust, “L’Ile Close” (“The Enclosed Island”

PeterMBall 12/02/2009
News & Upcoming Events

A good reason to be in Adelaide in June…

Twelfth Planet Press has announced their 2009 Publishing Schedule over on GirlieJones’s livejournal. While there’s a bunch of fine-looking publications on that list (many of which will inevitably be showing up on my bookshelves once launched) there’s one announcement you might be particularly interested in: Horn, by Peter M Ball – the second in our novella series. This book is currently scheduled to be launched at Conjecture: the 2009 Natcon in Adelaide, June 5-8. Horn is a hardboiled urban fantasy detective story which may contain unicorns and a formerly dead person. Read about the conception of this story from the writer himself I am 1) excited by this, 2) slightly terrified that people looking forward to seeing the book, and 3) definitely not getting naked at the launch, no matter how many people call for it (if for no other reason than I’ve been quietly laying away unicorn t-shirts to wear for the entire con).

PeterMBall 30/01/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Not a meme-post.

With the Aurealis Awards announced and the big surreal weekend of Brisbane being full o’ writers over, the AA judges have released their reports over on the Aurealis Awards website.  Among the notes for the Fantasy Short Story I spotted the following: Review of Honourable Mentions Peter M. Ball, ‘The Last Great House Of Isla Tortuga’ ‘The Last Great House Of Isla Tortuga’ is a thoroughly engaging story with crisp and enjoyable prose and vividly three dimensional characters. The reader becomes completely lost in the world described by the author. Which is pretty cool, all up, ’cause I didn’t even know that the AA’s had honorable mentions.

PeterMBall 27/01/2009
News & Upcoming Events

Best Fantasy-Magazine Story of 2008 Poll and Contest

We interrupt my obsession with the thesis to remember, for just a moment, that occasionally I write fiction. To whit: Fantasy Magazine are running a reader-poll and contest to discover the best Fantasy story of 2008; one of the stories they published in 2008 was On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves, which I’m kind of fond of for obvious reasons. Logically I should be here asking you to head on over and log a vote for me, since there’s chocolate at stake for the winner as well as bragging rights, but I’ll be honest – Fantasy publishes good work and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read there this year. Just go and have a poke around and then vote; it’ll be worth it. And, if you’re so inclined, leave a few comments – they’re giving away an Amazon voucher to a random reader who leaves comments. Voting details and complete 2008 story listing.

PeterMBall 08/01/2009