Bleed (aka the novella formerly known as Cold Cases)

Bleed available for pre-order

PETERMBALL News & Upcoming Events , , , ,

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.

July Plans

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

And lo, the edits are sent back to the editor and the novella once titled Cold Cases is going through the various transmogrifications it goes through to become a book titled Bleed instead. Various things contribute to the feeling of done-ness – seeing concept sketches for the cover art, finally settling on the new title, hearing that the ISBN-type stuff is being put into motion. There will still be work to go, presumably edits and proofs, but this book has officially evacuated the portion of my brain that requires tinkering and subconscious thought. It’s no longer a project.

Which means it’s time to get started on what comes next: rewriting Black Candy.

And since I’m house-sitting this month, taking care of the cats and chickens that belong to some friends who have dissappeared into the wilds of Europe, I’m going to try and pack the bulk of the rewrite into July. Once more into the breach and all that.

Almost Done

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

I’ve been writing a sequel to Horn, one way or another, since February 6 of 2009. I suspect I’d started even earlier than that with ideas scribbled down in notebooks and such, but Feb 6 is the first time it migrated to a computer file that’s usually the start of my writing process. Since then I’ve voluntarily scrapped an entire novella draft, rewritten the plan for how I thought a series of Miriam Aster books should progress, and written a second novella to fit the new concept that was about 75% longer than projected.

Some days I dispaired that I’d ever actually see the end of the process – what started as twenty-thousand words about Aster and a talking cat ended up in a very different place. Trying to get there scared the shit out of me more than once; I have a comfort zone as a writer, and this was well outside it.

But it appears it’s very close to being done. I came home from my D&D game tonight to an e-mail containing edits from TPP and they contain the phrase “mostly line edits with a few comments.” After months of stressing over plot holes and backstory-wrangling, those words are freakin’ magical. It means at some point in the future I can stop thinking about the novella and it can go off and be a book. The curse of seeing this news at eleven o’clock at night is that there’s no-one to call and say “holy freaking shit, its almost done,” so I’ll say it here instead:

Holy freakin’ shit, it’s almost done.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to drink a glass of scotch and collapse into the most relaxing night of sleep I’ll have had since…I dunno…probably January.