Never Fall In Love With The Fey

PETERMBALL Eclectic Projects Newsletter

Miriam Aster made a big mistake: she fell in love with the Queen of the Fey.

All this was ten years ago, when Miriam was an up-and-coming homicide detective and fairies were things out of fairy tales. Miriam met the queen of the fey in a bar, felt a rush of attraction, and soon they were head-over-heels in love (or as close to as they fey get).

Then the favours started, trying to keep the fey’s existence a secret.

Could you ignore some details from this case?

Could you take care of this rogue fey?

Hey Miriam, could you stop this unicorn from going on a rampage before people get killed?

Never Fall In Love With The Queen Of The Fey

It ends badly for everyone. Miriam Aster fell in love with the Queen of the Fey, and then her life fell apart. She made mistakes and quit her job. She ignored an order and paid the consequences. She ended up dead, and found herself coming back because the Queen demanded it.

Now Miriam’s an ex-cop, eking out a living as a PI, and she drinks to forget the pain. She has one rule—no fey—and she sticks to it.

Right up until her ex-partner in Homicide calls and asks for her help, and Aster realises the past—just like Aster herself— won’t stay dead on the autopsy table.

Welcome to Unicorns, Fey, & A Hardboiled Dame: The Miriam Aster Omnibus

Three reasons you might love this book

#1. It’s Grimdark Urban Fantasy

I wrote the Aster stories in response to trends I saw in Urban Fantasy, which used a lot of pulp PI tropes without the hardboiled grittiness of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Micky Spillane. The world Miriam passes through is amoral, dark, and violent, and she struggles with her sense of being an honourable person in a dishonourable system.

Among the fey, promises are magic with enormous power. They’re also tools they use to manipulate mortals, and Aster’s promised more than most.

#2. You’ll never look at unicorns the same way again

I wrote the first draft of Horn at a writing workshop, warned the instructor absolutely hated “fantasy stories about unicorns and fourteen-year-old girls” and we should avoid submitting anything in that vein.

“Challenge accepted,” I said to myself, and wrote the meanest, most confronting horror story I could, starting with the autopsy of a young girl whose encounter with a unicorn ended messily.

The result was a unicorn story even avowed unicorn haters could love, and there’s definitely nothing nice about the horned horses in Aster’s universe

#3. They’re Notorious (and Maybe Good?)

When the first Miriam Aster book came out, it spread via a strange word-of-mouth. People would hand it to friends with the warning: “This is seriously fucked up – you’ll love it”

It was also shortlisted for two awards (Best Fantasy Novel and Best Horror Novel) despite not technically being eligible for them as a novella, appeared on the Locus Recommended Reading list for the year, and got an honourable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror. It also got some great reviews:

“It’s possibly the best paranormal fiction I have read all year, possibly ever. It will be confronting, it will take some of you close to edge. But I think Ball crafts a delightfully dark little tale, revealing a more honest portrayal of the Fae, the sex, lust and double edged devious nature.”

“Peter M. Ball has got it right. This book is smart, funny, nasty, and wicked as hell. He gets the noir-ish tone spot on, delivers with action a-plenty, kick-ass characters, intelligent plotting, and good, clean evocative writing. Best of all, he takes a turgidly overused fantasy trope out behind the backyard toilet and puts a dum-dum bullet through its brain, after which he whips out his tackle and pisses all over the steaming corpse.”

Miriam Aster made a big mistake when she fell in love with the Queen of the Fey, and the fallout from that mistake reverberates through the stories in Unicorns, Fey, and a Hardboiled Dame.

These books aren’t for everyone, but the folks who love them really love them.

Happy Caturday! Behind the Scenes for Feb 3 2024

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja
Happy Caturday! Behind the Scenes for Feb 3 2024

Happy Caturday, Patreon Fam! I hope you’ve got some exciting things planned for the weekend. Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Whittingstall would like to hear all about it, if you’re so inclined. 

Another slow week on the writing and posting front, although that’s partially intentional rather than accidental. I sat down and worked out a posting schedule for Eclectic Projects this week, trying to get a feel for when serial projects would end and new ones might begin. It made it clear that Warhol Sleeping and The Shackleton Job are both scheduled to finish a little closer together than I’d hoped, so I’m spacing out the Shackleton releases a little more with the goal of hitting “fully operational Death Star” mode in March.  

The first stream included in there refers to White Harbor War, which launches in two weeks. The pitch is basically:

 “MMA fighter and starship engineer Dana Valkyrie sails around the universe on the Viking Maiden, a ship with a reputation for employing the toughest and best fighters in known space. When they dock on White Harbor for 48 hours of uninterrupted leave for the first time in months, Dana’s main plan is staying out of trouble and enjoying some hard-earned time off.

Pity the local security division, a rival freighter, and her own captain aren’t content to let her do so…”

Hardcore fans of the pulp era might recognise the archetype from Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan series, which I studied for my PhD. As per my plan for the year, the first four chapters will be free to read, after which it will go patron-only (although the book will probably come out three to six months after the serial is done). 

I’m psyched for this one. Not least because all sixteen entries are already scheduled and ready to go live.

Meanwhile, we’ve hit the halfway mark of Warhol Sleeping and started the rush towards the end. It will wrap up at the end of March, giving way to a new serial in the spot. I’m looking at the small mass of projects that will step in, as it’ll become my February writing project once the final Warhol edits are done.

JANUARY IN REVIEW

With January in the rearview, I headed over to RescueTime to look at where I was spending the bulk of my time through the first month of the year. The results do not make me happy. I’d already clicked I’d fallen into a Threads-hole over the course of the month, but spending nearly two whole days on the site when you added all the quick visits and long threads up is a definite warning sign. Especially given I barely cracked 20 hours of writing and editing in the same timeframe. 

I’ve already succeeded I pulling back on the attention I’ve been giving threads, although that didn’t automatically translate into giving more attention to drafting and other work. This shift—coupled with some conversations I’ve been having with the Spouse Mouse—have got me thinking hard about work habits and hours in the coming week.

I’ve long been a fan of having hard edges to your creative career. Since writing is a gig which never really has an end-point, and success isn’t connected to hours invested in your work, it’s really easy to get sucked into the feeling you should work all the time. Similarly, it’s always tempting to give up established work hours to do something else because you can “make it up” down the line.

My goal for the coming week is to create a metaphorical border around my time, focusing all my work between 9 AM and 1:30 PM, then 3:00 PM and 6:00 PM. The ninety-minute break in the middle of the day gives me time to eat lunch, do some chores, and pick up my spouse-mouse from their office when they wrap up for the day. Every second Thursday will have a slightly longer break in the afternoon because I’ll be running workshops in the evening, pushing me past the 6:00 PM finish time. 

Putting the fence up makes the ambiguous “get stuff done” time really concrete. If I’ve only got 37.5 hours every week to get all your writing, editing, and mentoring done, it becomes much clearer what I can say yes to and what needs to go beside the wayside. 

Next week already has 7.5 hours of meetings and workshops to deliver, plus associated planning and admin time. It probably makes catching up with my writer peeps at Write Club unfeasible unless I push some work into the weekend or after-hours. That’s not necessarily a bad trade-off, but I want to be a bit more conscious about choosing to trade off those hours, especially on weeks where I’ve already got something cutting into the post-work “family” time.

The other perk of thinking in term of hard times like this is the ability to project how much an hour needs to be “worth” in the long-term. Personally, I need every hour of work to bring in around $52 Australian (on average) to keep things running and cover both publishing expenses, cost-of-living, and keeping the cats alive. 

Obviously, not everything does that upfront, especially the hours devoted to Patreon projects which have traditionally brought in between $100 and $300 a month, versus freelance work and mentoring which earns between $60 and $150 per hour depending on what I’m being asked to do, whether I’m being contracted through a third party like Spectrum Writing, and how ongoing the contract is.

The difference, of course, is that the stories and serials I write for Patreon are assets rather than paid-by-the-hour gigs, which means they’ll have an additional life as paperbacks and ebooks and other products which keep earning money long after the hours I’ve invested in producing them. Freelance work, in contrast, is typically a “paid once and done” gig, and frequently works out earning less than you’d expect when you factor in the unpaid hours. There are definitely a few gigs on my calendar where I’ve been undercharging from this perspective, and I’m going to have to be firmer about saying yes or no to things. 

Part of the reason I’m pivoting to writing longer works as serials this year, rather than continuing with the weekly short stories alone, is so I can build up the pool of books I’ll be earning ongoing income from in the next few years. 

COMING UP 

Sunday – Warhol Sleeping Bonus Interstitial

A brief glimpse of what the Warhol Sleeping amalgam’s been doing in his streaming content while our hero is running around contemplating jumping ship. 

Monday – The Deal (Short Story)

A stand-alone story about a cop on the case, a remote church, and sniper determined to stop her from getting what she’s after. I wrote an early version of this as an example for a workshop I ran last year, and I wanted to finish it.  

Wednesday – Shackleton Job (On Haitus Until Feb 21)

As noted above, I’m pushing this one back to match the schedule I’d come up with, but i’ll be using the time to ensure it’s done and ready to roll out smoothly from that point.

Friday – Rebel Rebel (Warhol Sleeping 9)

What would it take to convince Warhola to leave Big River and join the Babylon Collective? Friends, we’re about to find out!

Happy Caturday! Behind the Scenes for Jan 27 2024

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

Happy Caturday, Patreon Fam! This week’s cat du jour is Master Librarian Radish Loki Izzar, taking a quick nap between a heavy-duty week of chewing on books, yowling at doors, beating up our venerable elder cat, and being our household chaos gremlin. 

As someone who regularly bullet journals with varying degrees of diligence, Ryder Carroll’s decision to share his yearly reflection for the first time intrigued me and set me thinking about some of my habits. The full post is long, but I’ve quoted the interesting bit below:

…writing for an audience shifts one’s context in a powerful way: you go from journaling to storytelling.

There’s a certain courtesy that an author needs to extend to their audience. A good author has to keep in mind that they’re guiding readers through an unfamiliar world. They have a responsibility to provide the tools and directions necessary to help the reader navigate it.

The question is: why does this matter, and why am I sharing my yearly reflection publicly? The main reasons are:

Communication: I hope that this peek behind the curtain of Bullet Journal creates more transparency about us as company and me as founder. I learn a lot by reading these from other small business owners, so I hope this will serve others the same way.

Sharing: It’s not often that I run across a way of journaling that really shifts my perspective as much as this new (to me) format. I found it very helpful, so I wanted to submit it for your consideration.

Future Proofing: When I journal, it’s for my current self. It’s easy to take shortcuts, leaving out information because I think I will remember…but I can’t remember what I ate for lunch two days ago. When writing for others, I fill in the blanks, and connect the dots in a way that makes the information evergreen. This matters because it will help who I will become over the next three hundred, or three thousand days, look back and clearly see how far he’s come.

I’ve been thinking about these Caturday posts since I started them a few weeks back, trying to figure out where they fit in my overall approach to writing and threads. Were they advertising for the projects I’m writing here (and, if so, why put them behind a paywall?) Are they offering enough behind-the-scenes thinking to count as a patron perk? I kept doing them, primarily, because it forces me to curate and edit the endless pictures of my cats I take every week, but I hadn’t quite figured out where the habit fit.

I’m thinking the final approach might transform my weekly log in the bullet journal into an ongoing narrative, for the reasons Carrol talks about above. There’s been hints of it here and there, in weeks prior, but logging broad themes in the current week and where my thinking is allows us all (including me) to really see what’s going on underneath. Patreon is, after all, another form of social media and I’ve written about the transformative potential of thinking about the narrative you’re building around your life in the past (See We Are All Unintentional Hypersigil Machines over on the blog). 

The Bad Weeks

It’s worth acknowledging up front the tail end of January is traditionally a dreadful fortnight for me. Years of journals and blog posts bear this out, especially during years when I’ve freelanced rather than collecting a weekly paycheck. 

The logic behind it is pretty simple: when you freelance, or write, or publish, there’s usually a lag between when you do something and when you see the financial results. Brain Jar Press is just now being paid for the releases that did spectacularly well back in October, and late January is the point where the financial impact of mentoring and tutoring work drying up in late December finally hits my cash flow. 

January’s also a period where everyone’s back on deck and looking to start projects anew after their holiday break. End result: my bank account dwindles as I eat away at my “for the slow weeks” buffer, yet I’m pulled in a dozen directions by people for jobs and releases that won’t pay for weeks or months down the line. 

Psychologically, it feels like working incredibly hard for no real tangible reward, a state that leaves me grumpy, less focused, and more reactive than I’d prefer to be. Things slip through the cracks, and writing projects which feed the ego rather than the cash flow becomes more attractive. 

(Since my mum reads these posts, and worries the moment I talk about the financial difficulties of the freelance life, I’ll stress here that I’m fine. I’m not starving or unable to pay the mortgage, just adapting to a little more scarcity and a thinner buffer against things going wrong than I’d like).

The cash flow issues aren’t the only things going on, admittedly, but they wear away at my resilience, which amplifies the focus on minor stressors and eats up spoons that would otherwise be spent dealing with the big stuff. 

Threads

Speaking of writing that feeds the ego, my chosen distraction for the last two weeks has been creating threads about writing and publishing. It’s been a bit of a wild ride there—for week I had some insane follower growth (a 500 person jump), and now I seem to be on a slow-and-steady grind as the algorithm switches its attention elsewhere. 

There’s very little tangible benefit to doing these posts—although I sold a few writing-oriented mugs off the back of the rapid-growth week—but the intangibles are definitely the same as running a blog about writing back in the day. 

Framing ideas about writing/publishing for public consumption means I’ve got a deep catalogue of stuff I can dig into while mentoring or teaching workshops, and making it public means I’m top-of-mind when folks need a writer or they’re looking for a mentor. Occasionally, work you give away for free will lead to reprints or freelance gigs. 

The challenge is weighing the cost-to-benefit of spending time there. I spent thirteen hours on threads last week, and it was frequently a gateway to wasting more time on social media.   Those were hours I usually spent writing, or prepping posts here on Patreon, and the lack of attention caught up with me this week.

I’m familiar with this dynamic (see Who Gets To Monetise Your Spare Minutes of Attention), and noting it here is the first step in curtailing the habit of making Threads my default activity when there’s a gap. Threads still holds some value to me because it’s new enough to still be finding readers, but I suspect there’s a better way of getting what I want from the platform without being suckered into the attention sink.

Writing

Sustained writing never really got off the ground this week. Every day where I’d set aside time for writing got blasted off-course by something unexpected and urgent, from problems with my PhD submission (now resolved) to clients having printer issues.

We’re also working on a new routine in our household. My spouse is working longer hours, and starting earlier than they did, which means our morning routine is now very different than it was two weeks ago. The hour I used to have to get some writing done before making coffee is now gone, and I counted heavily on that sixty-minute burst at the start of the day to set my intentions and connect me with the project. 

Further complicating matters is the question of marketing. For the last three years, I’ve not really put much focus on my writing. The bulk of my time and marketing attention went on Brain Jar Press books, and while I put new work into the world, it was very much doing the bare minimum to retain my sanity.

2024 is a year where I’m trying to reclaim my status as a writer, rather than a publisher. This is one reason I’m putting  more focus on the serials, which in turn will become full-length books down the line (easier to sell to unfamiliar readers than short stories or magazines, and generally drawing in more per sale). My newsletter is reactivated, and I’m on the socials once more. I’m trying to fit more tasks into my writing time, rather than less, and on weeks where I’m not on top of the ball I’m definitely paying the price. 

To borrow a term from chefs, I’m definitely in the weeds this week. Lots of things to get done with increasingly urgent deadlines, and no firm routine to support me. I’ll be breaking out the pomodoro timer for the first few days of the week, with the goal of knocking over thirty writing pomodoros (or 15 hours) focused on pure hands-on-keyboard writing. With luck, that should get me one chapter ahead on The Shackleton Job, clear up the last bit of writing for Eclectic Projects 6, and start work on a freelance article. 

Workshoppery 

With February on the horizon, I’ll be resuming my fortnightly workshops for the folks at Spectrum Writing. We’re kicking off with a request this year–a 90 minute workshop focused on the “Ordinary World/Status Quo” section of the three-act structure and how to build in conflict before the real conflict of the story kicks off. 

I’m scheduled to deliver 20 of these workshops accross the year, and did a similar number last year, so there’s quite a suite of topics I’ve built up. I’ve been debating whether to run them for folks outside the Spectrum cohort, either as a paid Patreon tier or a subject folks can order from my site. The infrastructure is largely there, and it would generate recordings folks could revisit, but I can’t decide whether the time-to-return ratio is going to work out.

I suspect I’ll need to think up an Ooch to gather the data I need to make a firmer decision, but if there’s general interest semi-regular workshops, shout out in the comments. 

COMING UP NEXT WEEK

I’m still badgering away at my goal of getting this Patreon to “fully operational Death Star” status by the end of March, but we’re on the verge of returning to the three-posts-a-week structure with new stories on Monday and serial entries appearing on Wednesday and Friday.

Ideally, I’d like to have at least one more project on the boil, but I’ve got to be at least a month ahead on all the projects before I allow myself to add a new thread.

This week still has two posts scheduled to go live:

Wednesday – Bif, Bam, Kapow (Shackleton Job 9)

We jump from the islands of the Pacific to the streets of San Diego when Talulah and Doc hit up a comic book store searching for the seer, Jack Glastonbury. They’re searching for answers to a few important questions, but Glastonbury is not a simple man to pin down..and the comic book store is not what it seems. 

Friday – Laneway Pastural (Warhol Sleeping 8)

Babylon’s recruiter, Pandora Wylde, makes her pitch to the human half of the Warhol-Sleeping gestalt. They head to Happy Pastures Lane, a Babylon project that just might be the most serene public place in Helix City, and offers a vision of what art could be if he parts ways with Jude and Big River.