Horn – Page 4 – Peter M. Ball

Works in Progress

The Jams? I have kicked them. Yes, finally.

There has been actual progress on the Claw draft over the last twenty-four hours, alongside more mundane acts of not-sucking such as finishing short stories (two!) and doing the washing up. Hell, I even walked over to the local Indian take-away to pick up dinner in the interests of getting some exercise. Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 2893 Words Done in Prior 24-hour Period: 1,432 (not to shabby, considering this mostly came together around 8 PM last night and I’ve done other stuff today) Deadline: April 30th Reasons to Squee*: Chapter one is done, after a good nine or ten weeks of being unable to figure out who to move from the set-up I wanted to the story I wanted. Plus the fix makes for a logical reason to keep the possessed Russian Blue feline in the narrative for all ten chapters. Reasons to Wail: Still got nine chapters to go, and I seem to have

PeterMBall 16/04/2009

News & Upcoming Events

Horn update

Coming in June 2009 from Twelfth Planet Press Horn by Peter M Ball http://www.twelfthplanetpress.com 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 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. (Via Girliejones. And Angela, who noticed this before me)

PeterMBall 10/04/2009

Works in Progress

Writing Sequels – it’s weird.

So today I resumed work on the novella draft that was once laboured with the working title The Girl Who Loathed Cats* but now has the working title Claw** and is probably better known as the follow-up to Horn which pits our protagonist against a talking cat and evil foetii***. This novella is, officially, the weirdest thing to work on as far as process goes – I’ve never really written a story that follows-up on a character or world I’ve already written, and it seems to involve a lot of time sitting around and wandering what makes a re-appearance and what doesn’t (There’s also a lot of time spent trying to reconcile how the world works, since Horn is all fairies & unicorns while a large chunk of this plot is driven by a magic cat and a deranged fan-boy/scientist). The nice part is that the process is going to be pretty leisurely – I’ve made a self-imposed deadline of March 31st to get this

PeterMBall 06/02/2009

News & Upcoming Events

A good reason to be in Adelaide in June…

Twelfth Planet Press has announced their 2009 Publishing Schedule over on GirlieJones’s livejournal. While there’s a bunch of fine-looking publications on that list (many of which will inevitably be showing up on my bookshelves once launched) there’s one announcement you might be particularly interested in: Horn, by Peter M Ball – the second in our novella series. This book is currently scheduled to be launched at Conjecture: the 2009 Natcon in Adelaide, June 5-8. Horn is a hardboiled urban fantasy detective story which may contain unicorns and a formerly dead person. Read about the conception of this story from the writer himself I am 1) excited by this, 2) slightly terrified that people looking forward to seeing the book, and 3) definitely not getting naked at the launch, no matter how many people call for it (if for no other reason than I’ve been quietly laying away unicorn t-shirts to wear for the entire con).

PeterMBall 30/01/2009

Works in Progress

Today

I’ve done a short guest-post over at Lee Battersby’s blog to kick off a short retrospective about Clarion South 2007. I talk a little bit about what makes clarion great and a lot about the influence one of my classmates had on the first draft of what would eventually become Horn (formerly known around these parts as the untitled Unicorn novella). Go check it out, if you’re so inclined. The rest of the day was pretty busy, by my standards. A trip to the Gold Coast to discuss a subject I start co-teaching in a couple of weeks, a brief fight with the university library about fines for books I’ve already paid fines on, and a trip out to the movies to see The Wrestler. The latter really deserves a post all on its own, since it’s a solid and enjoyable movie (and I say that rarely), but suffice to say that I’d recommend it. Micky Rourke is as good as you’ve

PeterMBall 28/01/2009

Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

It’s a Slow News Day, so you get a Meme

It’s the day after the Aurealis Awards and I’m basically running on fumes at this point (courtesy of an early start for the official recovery breakfast, an industry seminar, lunch, and a reading by Margo Lanagan this afternoon). With that in mind, I’m suspending any pretense of coming up with original content and embracing the ancient art of memeage. The Rules: 1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me!” 2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions. 3. You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal. 4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post. 5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And thus the endless cycle of the meme goes on and on and on and on… Current Interview Questions courtesy of Jason Fischer (If you want to ask

PeterMBall 25/01/2009

News & Upcoming Events

So today it was officially announced…

That Twelfth Planet Press is releasing my novella next year. Nabbed from the announcement: Twelfth Planet Press is pleased to announce that the third novella in our ongoing series will be a hardboiled urban fantasy detective story by Peter M Ball. (Warning: may contain unicorns and a formerly dead person)Peter M Ball is an exciting writer, recently appearing in Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again with his story “The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga” and in Fantasy with “On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves.” His novella will be released by Twelfth Planet Press in the second half of 2009. As you’d expect, I’m pretty damned pleased with the news. As my clarion peep Jess notes, “It may have started life as a dare to write a Very Wrong unicorn story that avowed unicorn-hater and week 2 tutor Lee Battersby would like, but it’s become so much more.”

PeterMBall 28/11/2008

Tag: Horn

The Jams? I have kicked them. Yes, finally.

Horn update

Writing Sequels – it’s weird.

A good reason to be in Adelaide in June…

Today

It’s a Slow News Day, so you get a Meme

So today it was officially announced…

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