Category: News & Upcoming Events

So my latest book, Not Quite The End Of the World Just Yet: Short Stories & Strange Futures, is out now. Use this link to get your copy at the ebook retailer of your choice The twelve stories in this collection touch upon science fiction, horror, and fantasy, but all see people brush against the sublime and discover who they truly are. In “One Saturday Night, With Angel,” a young man staffing a convenience store frets as angels hunt his customers. In “Say Zucchini, and Mean It,” the world is overrun by a plague that robs us of three very important words. In “Clockwork, Patchwork, and Raven,” a clockwork man dreams of a fairy-tale ending while trying to protect those he loves from a dangerous gang of genetically engineered crow boys. In “Dying Young,” the psychic son of a lawman must re-evaluate the deals he makes in order to keep his town safe from cybernetic marauders and a dragon seeking

So I have a new book out there in the world, a collection of essays and blog posts titled You Don’t Want To Be Published (And Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing). It’s available for sale at all good ebook retailers as we speak, but I’m going to suggest you hold off on purchasing it for a moment. Because I don’t want you to buy this book. I want you to subscribe to my newsletter, Notes from the Brain Jar, where I’m giving the book away as a special bonus to all new subscribers. If that sounds like a deal you’re interested in, you can sign up here and you’ll get your copy of the book mailed out all neat-and-easy. If you’re not the newsletter type, you can still purchase the book. Or, if you’re so inclined, read everything for free by copy-pasting the titles into Google and finding the original blog posts or essay publications, almost

So I’d ordinarily show up here and talk up The Birdcage Heart and Other Strange Tales, given that it’s the new kid on the block right now, but we’re heading into the holiday season and ebooks aren’t particularly good presents to give people. On the other hand, I have written some print books and right now the publisher who backed Horn and Bleed is having a sale where you can pick up both novellas for $15 dollarydoos. If your’e still after a copy (or just want to traumatize your loved ones this Christmas), head on over to the Twelfth Planet Press website

So this book I’ve been banging on about is finally out in all it’s digital glory. For those who have just arrived on this blog, or keep losing to goldfish when challenging them to memory games, I’m referring to this book: “Only Peter M. Ball’s fiction makes falling down the rabbit hole feel like flying. Funny and surprising, with moments of extraordinary grace.” Angela Slatter, Author of the World Fantasy Award-winning The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings Click Here To Purchase From Your Preferred Digital Retailer It contains twelve short stories, all in the slipstream/magic realism/fantasy line, all of them written by me. If that’s enough to convince you that it’s a must-have item, you can go ahead and click on the link above to acquire your copy. If you’re still up in the air, I’m going to dedicate the rest of this post to convincing you that The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales is worth parting with your hard-earned

With GenreCon over, I get to turn my attention to the ignored parts of my writing life that I haven’t yet talked about much. One of these is Notes from the Brain Jar, the more-or-less weekly email newsletter I send out every Wednesday that contains process notes, sneak peaks, thoughts inspired  on recent reading, and the occasionally curated series of links to interesting things. You can subscribe, if that sounds like your kind of thing, via the sign-up page or just head over to the sidebar on this here site. You can also check out the archive of previous newsletters. Sometimes I talk about writing or starting a small press. Sometimes I talk about the philosophical problems presented by soup. Sometimes I remind you that I’ve got a new book coming and it would be peachy-keen if you bought it.

I’ve dropped hints about this on Facebook and the mailing list over the last week, but now that the details are up in the major ebook stores it’s time to make it official: my first short story collection, The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales, will be released in ebook on the 30th of November (with a print edition following in 2018). PRE-ORDERS ARE AVAILABLE NOW Rat descends a staircase that never ends, following the rules laid out by his guidebook. Copenhagen is invaded by angry merfolk piloting war-machines crafted from old shipwrecks. A musician with a grudge upsets the delicate balance of a very unusual seaside town. The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales collects twelve weird and unusual fantasy tales from Peter M Ball. Within these pages you’ll meet an executioner tasked with killing a man who cannot be killed, a young man with a birdcage where his year should be, and a frustrated public servant trying to

I’ve spent the last few months preparing for my major project in 2018: launching Brain Jar Press and getting its first book ready for release. I did my first stint with indie publishing back in 2005. It’s strange, looking back, because indie publishing hadn’t really taken hold in fiction publishing yet and I was still a few years away from writing fiction anyway. I focused on short, useful products for the D20 system, the open-sourced rules for the edition of Dungeons and Dragons that was in vogue way back then. It taught me a lot about the difference between writing and publishing, and it shaped the way I thought about everything I did in writing after that. 2005 is another world, given the pace publishing moves at these days. We didn’t call it indie publishing back then – I set out to be a micropress, producing content by me and a small group of other people, and in the space

Next Friday I’m doing an In Conversation with the writer behind The Captive Prince series, CS Pacat. Details and tickets can still be acquired up until 6:00 PM on the 28th. This is one of my rare public appearances in 2017, because I have been steadily saying no to teaching and presenting gigs for a little over a year now. I would have turned down this one as well, it not for two things: First, I’m there as a representative of the GenreCon Ninja team, and I will always make an exception when it comes to flying the GenreCon flag. Second, CS Pacat is incredibly fucking smart about genre and writing, and I would be an idiot to turn down the opportunity to pick her brain. Spend enough time around writers and you’ll quickly realise that a number of them are incredibly smart when it comes to matters of craft and business. The trick, once you’ve been around long enough, is

My latest story, Counting Down, went live at Daily Science Fiction on Friday. There are all sorts of reasons to write a short story. Sometimes you write them because you have something you want to say, or because you’re trying to chip away at a problem that you can’t seem to tackle any other way. Sometimes you write them because you want to entertain one of your friends, and you think there’s a good chance that you can write something you think they’ll like. Sometimes you listen to Release the Bats on repeat, and after the fiftieth time you’ve shrieked HORROR, VAMPIRE, BAT BITE! you start getting nostalgic for the time you were stuck in Brisbane, overnight and without a place to stay, because the DJ dropped the Birthday Party at a goth club you were at and you decided that dancing to Release the Bats was more important than catching the last train back to the Gold Coast. There were four or

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Other Things We Called the Band is probably the longest title I’ve ever used for a short story, and it’s still shorter than the working title I used all through the first draft. The finished version is currently published at Speculate, the short-story series hosted by Evil Girlfriend Media. The title for this one is a pretty direct homage to REM, who used the name Hornets Attack Victor Mature to book a secret gig in their home town back in the 80s. It’s the sort of thing one picks up when one is seventeen and obsessively reading band biographies, and it stuck in my head for twenty-two years before I finally started building a story out of it to justify the mental bandwidth it’s taken up over the years.

So, let’s just rip this band-aid off: I’m leaving my job at Queensland Writers Centre at the end of next week. *Takes a deep breath* *Exhales meaningfully* *Gets a little misty-eyed* It doesn’t seem that long ago that I started with QWC, coming aboard to work on a arts project on a six month contract. I thought I would finish up at the end of 2011, pack up my stuff and head off to Melbourne for the next phase of my life. Instead, I kept signing new contracts and getting new gigs. Managing the Australian Writers Marketplace. Convening the GenreCon writers conference and shepherding it through its first three years. Going out and talking to writers, new and established, about business and craft and networking and all the other things I’m passionate about when it comes to writer’s careers. I got to meet and befriend an incredible number of talented writers, publishers, and agents. I got to give people advice in

JESSICA JONES I stayed up and watched all of Jessica Jones in one hit on Friday night.Turns out, and I’m still paying for that – no matter how many times all-nighters kick me in the arse, I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that they’re no longer an option. Still, totally worth it. I regret nothing. The Netflix/Marvel shows are…well, not really shows. They’re more like thirteen hour movies and this is far more prevalent with Jessica Jones than it was in Daredevil. The arc here is distinct and heavily focused – where Daredevil‘s arc genuflected in the direction of episodic television, taking its time building up to the revelation of a big-bad being behind everything, Jessica Jones goes straight for the throat. When it comes to bad guys, it’s all David Tennant, all the time, and the story is driven by Jessica’s reaction to his arrival. Let me just say: the plotting in this is exquisite. Little, throw-away