Peter M. Ball

Six months ago, I started posting a weekly short story to my Patreon account instead of throwing works in progress up there in a haphazard matter. Dubbed the Saturday Morning Story—a little something for folks to read over their morning coffee on the weekend—I figured it would have a shelf-life of a couple of weeks before I faltered and ran out of drafts.

Twenty-six weeks later, I’m still going. The story for week twenty-seven is on my list of things to redraft over the next few days, and at this point, I’m determined to make a full year.

Mostly, these stories go up as advanced drafts—they’re ultimately the stories that find their way into the Eclectic Projects magazine six months later, and there’s often a redraft and copyedit that takes place as part of that. Sometimes, those rewrites can be extensive—one of my early proto-posts, before I went weekly, went from an 800 vignette to a 4,000 word short story because I needed something very different to balance out the magazine issue (Patreon subscribers also get the magazine issues, if they’re curious to see the changes).

Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve produced as part of this project:

• Sweltering Fruit (Horror): Two travellers kept in quarantine realise the night manager and his minions are feeding on the sick.
• Box Brownie Blues (Fantasy): A portrait photographer with a gift for taking snapshots of the subject’s soul is approached by the son of a recently-deceased former client.
• The Shackleton Job parts 1 – 6 (Pulp): A monthly serial in which a thief is tasked with recovering some very important bottles of scotch, lest they trigger the end of the world.
• Four Mohocks, Sent Abroad (Fantasy): Four members of a notorious historical gang are sent to faerie when it’s clear London’s too hot for them to stay.
• On The Corner of Caxton and Petrie, 12:04 AM (SF): An agent from the time travel authority just wants to enjoy his night off, but then Vikings invade one of Brisbane’s popular nightspots.
• Captain Moo-Vell Takes The Mic (SF): How do you revitalise an ailing pub? Heavy Metal kareoke with cows!
• The Fighter (SF): A boxer who takes on robot opponents ponders when you cross the line from woman to machine.
• Warm Milk and Whisky (SF): A detected teamed with a mad scientist infant son and his crime fighting cybercreche is put in a bad spot.
• The Chap Who Wanted To Be Commander Flag (SF): Comic book fandom and a dedication to superhero cosplay takes on a whole new meaning after aliens invade.
• This Is How You Step Up – A Dust Runner’s Tale (SF): Two couriers take on an ill-fated deliver across the dust-choked, gang-infested landscape of the time-travelling cyber-dinosaur apocalypse.
• One Last Job, And Then Sleep (Weird Western): A Pinkerton agent delivering to a mad scientists manse realises this job isn’t going smooth…
• The Bridesmaids (Horror): The world changes forever once random women transform into bloody, alien-fighting alternate egos whenever they’re at weddings.
• Our Survival, And Other Mysteries (Slipstream): The first in an ongoing series of stories that ponder what Raymond Carver’s sparse realism would look like if he lived in a zombie apocalypse.
• Median Survival Time – an Eleanor Holst short story (SF): Science fiction neo-noir with two enforcers for a crime syndicate on a remote colony.
• Life in the Shadow (SF): What happens when the aliens arrive in their giant space ships, park in front of the city, and just…wait?
• Six Cats Go Camping (Fantasy): Six cats gather around a campfire. One of them tells a ghost story.
• The Bridge Troll’s Upstairs Neighbours (Fantasy): High-density living is hard for Bridge Trolls and their highly acute hearing, but when one moves in below the worst neighbours in the world, things go from hard to catastrophic in very little time.
• Lemosyne Junction (Fantasy): A rock-and-roll star fills with regrets pays to visit the one place where the memory-sapping waters of the Lomosyne touch the mortal plane.
• A Good Thief’s Choices (Fantasy): Malachi’s tasked with stealing the Horrormancer’s pearl, but even the best theif in the world might have second thoughts when faced with it’s arcane defenses.
• The Termagent’s Villanelle (Fantasy): Whoever assembles all the verses of this lost villanelle can bring a new god into the world. Langston needs to make sure Fenwick doesn’t get there first.
• The Fucking-Shitfull-Goddamned-Asshole-Noodlecocked-Motherfucker Has To Die (Fantasy): An evil sorcerer killed Gail’s sorcerous employers and the mundanes who worked alongside he, and she’s got a plan for taking revenge…
• Infection Vectors – A Helix City Story (SF): Two corporate operatives in Downside are in for a really bad night as they track a genetic mutation through the region’s gangs.
• In Season (Slipstream): Every year, the extremely rich gather to hunt unicorns and employ human “hounds” to cut off the horns. Abbie thinks she can handle the job, but this year might be the one where she snaps…
• Breech (Horror): Deacon inlists his partner’s help to cut an otherworldly invader out of his own flesh.

That’s twenty-nine stories or serial entries all-up posted through 2022, plus another horror story—On Meeting An Ex-Girlfriend For Drinks At the Cafe Trio—which appears in the first issue of Eclectic Projects that patrons got early access too. Coming up over the next few months I’ve got a novelette about giant robot races on an ice planet, two new stories in my Raymond Carver Writes During the Zombie Apocalypse remix series, and a few other surprises.

There’s currently two ways to get access to these stories. First, you can pick up the issues of Eclectic Projects as they come out throughout 2022—each issue features at least four stories, one serial entry, and one essay drawn from the Patreon drafts and polishes them into their ultimate form.

Alternatively, you can get access to all those stories, every new story as it’s written, and new issues of the magazine as they’re finalised by choosing one of the subscription tiers over on Patreon.