News & Upcoming Events

The latest news regarding my writing, work with the Australian Writer’s Marketplace, and any upcoming events or workshops I’m involved in.

Bleed available for pre-order

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So yesterday the various forms of mail brought in my contributor copies of the new Horn layout, my ninth rejection of the year, and the following news:

Bleed by Peter M Ball
Cover art by Dion Hamill, design by Amanda

For ten years ex-cop Miriam Aster has been living with her one big mistake – agreeing to kill three men for the exiled Queen of Faerie. But when an old case comes back to haunt her it brings a spectre of the past with it, forcing Aster to ally herself with a stunt-woman and a magic cat in order to rescue a kidnapped TV star from the land of Faerie and stop the half-breed sorcerer who needs Aster’s blood.

Ten years ago Miriam Aster learnt a simple lesson: when a faerie asks you to kill someone, the worst thing you can say is sure. Today she’s about to learn that worse things can happen when the past refuses to stay behind you.

Bleed will be available at Aussiecon 4 in Melbourne, September 2010 and is now available for preorder.

It’s an Aster kind of day.

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First, a public service announcement re-posted from the livejournal of my illustrious publisher:

(The reprint of) Horn failed to be delivered today but I have rescheduled for tomorrow and they should then be out in the post to the preorders in tomorrow evening’s mail.

If you’ve been holding off buying your copy of Horn til they were back in stock, as of tomorrow they will be and you can buy your copy here. Again, whilst stocks last – I expect to have copies for sale at Worldcon but there were quite a few reservations for this second printing as well.

Which seems like as good a segue as we’re going to get to talk about the current state of the second Miriam Aster novella, Cold Cases.

Today I was full of virtue. I rose early, I took my daily dose of penicillin, then I settled down at the computer with a cup of coffee and a Bob Dylan CD and vowed to remain there until the problem of not having a finished version of Cold Cases  was finally solved. I have convinced myself this is doable by promising that a finished draft today means I can take tomorrow off and prepare my next D&D game before we play on Thursday.

That was about seven hours ago, and since then I’ve heard Bob sing Everybody Must Get Stoned about twelve times. It appears to be working too, but I suspect seven hours of Bob Dylan is my limit.

The upside is that I’m finally tackling the pacing problems at the end of the novella, which is a very stop-start process where I build a scene and then figure out what still needs to be done to connect it to the finale. I figure that gives at least a 60% chance of hitting the end some time tonight (the end, of course, being an arbitry stopping point where I look for beta-readers who can point out where I’ve done stupid things that need fixing).

My Stuff Online This Week

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Part One: Tubers in the Moonlight

Ben Payne has launched his online zine, Moonlight Tuber, and the first issue (subtitled A Handsome Laundrette, A Box of Lovers, and Two Dozen Happy Sea Cows) is completely free and available for download. Somewhere within its virtual covers, said issue contains my story, The Peanut Guy, which is the tail end of the Warhol Sleeping/Avenue D vignette that started with one of my first publications, The Normal Guy, in Antipodean SF 102 back in 2006.

The rest of the series, should you wish to track them down, appeared in Antipodean SF 107, Antipodean SF 117, Dog Versus Sandwich, Dark Recesses 8 (not available online anymore, but I’ve posted a copy here), and Dog Versus Sandwich again. Some of this is old work, and the very fact that it’s split up into various vignettes largely shows my discomfort when it comes to figuring out how prose worked prior to Clarion (these days, I’d probably write this as a single novella, albeit still fragmented in its approach). It’s also somewhat spooky tracking the changes in my bio notes as these things progressed (there’s a part of me that looks at my bio for 2006 and thinks I had a fiancee? Really?, because it seems a vaguely absurd when looking at my life four years in the future*).

 Part Two: The Twelfth Planet Press Podcast

Twelfth Planet Press has launched a podcast featuring work from upcoming releases, and they’re kicking off with my story One Saturday Night, With Angel, from their Sprawl anthology getting launched in September. It’s shiny, downloadable, and free.

*Incidentally, this isn’t intended as a slight on my former fiancee, who is still a friend and a lovely person who simply happened to be happened someone I was incompatible with when it came to extending our long-term relationship . My surprise at discovering we’d intended on trying probably goes a long way towards explaining why we broke up instead.