Tag: Booyah

News & Upcoming Events

What I did With My Weekend, and part of the week thereafter

1. So it’s three five-day-old news by now, but Clockwork, Patchwork and Raven won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story and I now have a shiny glass trophy kicking around the flat. The Spokesbear demanded I photograph him with the newly acquired, but it’s remarkably hard to photograph a curved glass trophy with a bear looming over it. Instead I’ll just mention that a hardcopy of the story is available in Apex’s Descended from Darkness anthology and sales of the book go towards keeping Apex Magazine running. The weekend itself was freaking awesome and laden with opportunities to catch up with folks I don’t get to see anywhere near enough (the redoubtable Jason Fischerand Best-Fantasy-Short-Story-Co-Winner Christopher Green among them). 2. Finally sat down and indulged my inner Charlie Kaufman fan by watching Synecdoche New York. It felt rather like someone had cut the last twenty minutes off Adaptation and left us with the confused muddle of stuff,

News & Upcoming Events

Awesome Things About 2009 (3/15): Aurealis Awards Short Listings

The 2009 Aurealis Awards short-list was released over the weekend and it contained a whole mess of good news – Horn secured a berth in the short-list of both the Fantasy and the Horror novel categories, and I made the Science Fiction Short Story list twice with both Clockwork, Pathwork and Ravens and To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament. There’s even more good news on the short-lists in the form of nominations for peeps such as Chris Green* (for both SF, Horror & Fantasy short story), Angela Slatter (Fantasy short story) and Twelfth Planet Press (a seemingly unending parade for various projects – I think every book they released this year is up for something). ‘Course, most of the folks who read this blog have already heard this news from other sources (I was having a slack weekend, internet-wise), so I figure I’d just make a note, say “awesome” and off my congratulations to the other finalists – it’s a shiny list of folks to be

News & Upcoming Events

So, like, officially speaking…

If you haven’t dropped by the Twelfth Planet Press livejournal today, odds are you’ve missed this: Book Announcement: Sequel to Horn, due out April 2010 Twelfth Planet Press is proud to announce the acquisition of the sequel to Horn from Peter M Ball. Under the working title of Cold Cases, Miriam Aster works to solve an old file but her painful past refuses to stay buried. Book 2 in the Aster Series will be launched at Swancon, in April 2010. So it’s all official-like: the follow-up to Horn is on its way and sometime in the New Year I’m going to have to get cracking on Novella 3 in the series.

News & Upcoming Events

To put this in context, I love both Conan and Call of Cthulhu

I sold a story to Weird Tales. If you need me for the rest of the day, I’ll be over in the corner geeking out*. *For bonus points, I discovered that I like the first half of the novella enough that I’m not actually embaressed to let people read it. It’s still flawed, yes, but not *OMGWTF am I doing, this ferking sucks” flawed. As usual, the problem seems to have been cramming in way to much backstory in one go.** **Hell, this day keeps getting better. The Australian Government decided to ignore the shitty recomendation from the productivity commission that we remove Australian territorial copyright. I so thought Australian writers and publishers weren’t going to win that fight, for all that there were dozens of sensible reasons on our side and a handful of really daft ones on the pro-parrallel importation end.

News & Upcoming Events

Work in the Wild

Just passing through, what with the novel draft being perilously close to being done, but I thought I’d mention a little story called On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk that went online at Strange Horizons. Not for any particular reason, mind you, I just thought I’d mention it’s there.

News & Upcoming Events

Horn now available for Prepurchase

The latest news out of the Twefth Planet Press camp is that Horn is off to the printers and available for prepurchase – you can now reserve a copy and pick it up at Conjecture in Adelaide or have it posted to you.

News & Upcoming Events

In the absence of context, I’m going with “really? Cool!”

So the nominations for the Australian Ditmar Awards have been released after a few weeks of my friends-list being packed with reminders to send in nominations and reminders about the 2008 works that are eligible. Unlike the Aurealis Awards, which I followed for years before I actually started writing SF, the Ditmars are something of a mystery to me – I lack the context to understand how they fit into the wider scheme of Australian fan culture and speculative fiction. I figured I’d get a chance to puzzle that out at while attending Conjecture, since that’s where they’re awarded this year. Then the list came out: Best New Talent ————— Peter M. Ball Felicity Dowker Jason Fischer Gary Kemble Amanda Pillar And you know what? Context for understanding or no, that’s kind of cool. I’m going to stump for the Fisch to win, of course, since he’s both a fine writer and the man who is putting me up during the con, but as

News & Upcoming Events

Horn Launch

I don’t know where you will be on June 7th of this year, around 5 pm or so, but there’s a very good chance that you can find me here. To quote from the Conjecture blog: Horn by Peter M Ball Book 2 in the Twelfth Planet Press Novella Series There’s a dead girl in a dumpster and a unicorn on the loose – and no-one knows how bad that combination can get better than Miriam Aster. What starts as a consulting job for city homicide quickly becomes a tangled knot of unexpected questions, and working out the link between the dead girl and the unicorn will draw Aster back her back into the world of the exiled fey she thought she’d left behind ten years ago. All in all, Miriam Aster isn’t happy. The last time she worked a case like this it cost her a badge, a partner, and her life. This time things are going to get

News & Upcoming Events

Cool Things

My parents read my blog. I’m still having trouble adjusting to that thought, as evidenced by the impulse to ring them when cool stuff happens since, in days gone by, they’ve remain unconnected to any of my primary methods of disseminating “check it out, cool stuff* happening” type news. These days they get to find out about it with the rest of you: Cool Thing the First: Apex Magazine has announced the line-up for their forthcoming print anthology, Descended from Darkness I’m in it, apparently. Which is pretty cool given that my story hasn’t yet made it up as a part of the magazine yet (I may show up in May, I suspect, given the trading-around of line-edits and bios we’ve been doing). The rambunctious Jason Fischer is included as well, making this the second time we’ve shared a Table of Contents. Cool Thing the Second: Interstitial Arts Foundation Call for Artists Back when the first interfictions anthology was released the IAF had

News & Upcoming Events

Latest from the wordmines…

Now that the TOC has been made public over on Delia Sherman’s LJ we’ve been told we can go crazy with the blog announcements: I sold my story, Black Dog: A Biography, to Interfictions 2. The complete Table of Contents looks something like this: Jeffrey Ford, “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” M. Rickert, “Beautiful Feast” Will Ludwigsen, “Remembrance is Something Like a House” Cecil Castelucci, “The Long and the Short of Long-Term Memory” Alaya Johnson, “The Score” Ray Vukcevich, “The Two of Me” Carlos Hernandez, “The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria” Lavie Tidhar, “Shoes” B. F. Slattery, “Interviews After the Revolution” Elizabeth Ziemska, “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken” Peter M. Ball, “Black Dog: A Biography” Camilla Bruce, “Berry Moon” Amelia Beamer, “Morton Goes to the Hospital” William Alexander, “After Verona” Alan DeNiro, “(*_*) ~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof” Nin Andrews, “The Marriage” Theodora Goss, “Child-Empress of Mars” Lionel Davoust, “L’Ile Close” (“The Enclosed Island”