Booyah

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

PETERMBALL News & Upcoming Events ,

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 nomination lists go that’s a pretty nice one to be on 🙂

Horn Launch

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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_coverHorn
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 much, much worse.

(Launching Sunday, 7th of June at 5pm).

Cool Things

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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 an fund-raising auction featuring artwork/music/interstitial art based upon some of the stories within the anthology. Now they’re putting out a call to artists/musicians/etc to participate in a second one. Their Call for Artists page features fragments from all the stories in the Interfictions II anthology (including mine), plus the opportunity to grab a sneak peak at one of the stories. I tend to think this is the stuff of coolness, myself, but I’ve got a fairly obvious bias here.

*and in difference to the fact that my parents are reading, I just totally edited out the word I originally used there.