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006: Sometimes The Right Call Is Stepping Back

I’ve ended up taking a short, unscheduled break from writing newsletters over the last fourteen days. Regular GenrePunk Ninja transmissions will resume in October, and some of the ideas in this week’s entry might be expanded out. Mainly, though, if you’re hungry for great advice about writing and publishing, however, I’m going to direct your attention to Cory Doctorow’s recent speech about…

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Bonus Essay: Here Be Dragons - Vanity presses, scams, and publishing in the digital era

Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter, especially if they’re timely to other conversations occurring online. This essay originally appeared in Eclectic Projects issue 2 in 2023.Estimated Reading Time: 30 Minutes | Don’t like reading online? Get an ebook copy here. Here Be Dragons: Vanity…

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004: Unpacking Writing Advice - What's The Philosophy?

This week’s newsletter is the second of a trilogy, dealing with a fundamental challenge of being a writer: not all the advice you’re offered is a great fit for you, even if it worked perfectly for the person offering the advice. Over the years, I’ve routinely found this out the hard way, applying advice indiscriminately and realising too-late that the result it promotes isn’t necessarily a god…

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003: Unpacking Writing Advice–Every Strategy Requires Capital

Writing advice is never a one-size-fits-all thing. Context and philosophy is everything, yet there’s a tendency for both the givers and receivers of advice to assume a bon mot of wisdom applies without questioning the resources, genre, goals, and ideology behind it.  I’ve built a career out of helping writers figure out their craft and their business, and I’ve seen the phenomena over and…

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On Heinlein's Habits & The Rise of the New Pulp Era

Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter. This essay originally appeared in Eclectic Projects issue 1.Estimated Reading Time: 22 Minutes | Don’t like reading online? Get an ebook copy here. On Heinlein’s Habits & The Rise of the New Pulp Era SECRET ORIGINS I first learned Heinlein’s Rules for…

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On Heinlein's Rules and the New Pulp Era

Heinlein’s “Rules” are an oft-repeated piece of advice among fantasy and science fiction writers, but too often we ignore the context in which Heinlein was writing and how good habits should evolve in a changing marketplace. This essay questions whether the pulp-era mindset is really appropriate for the contemporary marketplace, even with the rise of digital publishing and writers taking more…

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002: The Most Expensive Part of Your Book Isn't The Price

I run into writers who think the reason their book isn’t selling is the price. The first question, when a new release isn’t working, revolves around discounting. “Should I make this ebook 99 cents?” or “Should I give this away for free to generate interest?” These are both solid strategies when used the right way, but they’re not magical. I’ve got a reader full of free ebooks I’ve picked up over…

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001: Is The Story You're Telling Yourself About Writing Hurting Your Process?

What is the story of your writing right now? Not the story you are writing, but the story you’re telling yourself about who you are and how you work as a writer.  We all have a sense of who we are as writers, which shapes the projects we take and the way we approach our work. This story makes up part of our self-image, to borrow a phrase from psychology, and it’s more complicated than it…

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The July Zombie Read-A-Thon

I didn’t watch zombie movies as a kid. We lived in a small town with limited TV reception, and the nearest cinema was hundreds of kilometres away. Movies were hard to find, and horror movies were always way down the list of things to see. Particularly after a series of school camps, where my 4th grade teacher scared the bejesus out of us by describing the horror of Halloween and Friday the…

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Red Rain Collection - Ebook Singles

Vicious storms of red rain sweep across Australia, raising the dead as zombies hungry for human flesh. Fortunately, we’ve all seen zombie movies and know what comes next, allowing the locals to band together and live small, desolate, ordinary lives amid the danger. Drawing inspiration from George Romero and Raymond Carver in equal measure, Peter M. Ball presents six dirty realism tales of quiet…

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Out Past The Fence

When the zombies rose, Val and Janice retreated to small farmhouse in the mountains, putting up fences and joining forces with the local militia to keep their community safe. “At least we have each other,” they thought, “everything will be just fine.” It turns out long nights hunting the dead and long days wondering if something has gone wrong will take its toll on every marriage. Trouble is…

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Val Vega makes an epic debut 🚀

It’s almost my birthday here in Australia—a birthday I share, give or take a few time-zones—with an incredible Brooklyn-based sci-fi writer named Ben Fransisco.  I first met Ben at Clarion South back in 2007, where be blew me away with a series of delicate, nuanced short stories that found homes in magazines like the Realms of Fantasy, Shimmer, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Ben’s…

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Clockwork, Patchwork, & Raven

When Randal finds an injured girl, cruelly beaten and cut apart by the genetically modified crow boys, he dreams of rising above his status as a clockwork man and becoming a hero. With the help of his adopted father, Jackson, Randal patches the girl together and nurses her back to health using the same clockwork cybernetics that brought Randal back from death. But grim streets of Downside are no…

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Never Fall In Love With The Fey

Miriam Aster made a big mistake: she fell in love with the Queen of the Fey. All this was ten years ago, when Miriam was an up-and-coming homicide detective and fairies were things out of fairy tales. Miriam met the queen of the fey in a bar, felt a rush of attraction, and soon they were head-over-heels in love (or as close to as they fey get). Then the favours started, trying to keep the fey’s…

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Loose Threads January 2024

What This Book Is and Isn’t: An Introduction Let me stress this at the outset: Loose Threads isn’t a book. That it exists is the result of confluence, and three important things occurring in January 2024 which planted the seeds for this volume. This exists, first and foremost, I submitted my doctoral thesis on the poetics of writing series fiction at the end of 2023. After seven years of thinking…

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Eclectic Projects 1-4 Bundle

Peter’s monthly magazine featuring a blend of science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction, with non-fiction articles about writing and publishing. Issue 1 Two ex-lovers with a bloody, magical secret who reunite in On Meeting An Ex-Girlfriend For Drinks At The Bar Of The Hotel Trio. Young hooligans in trouble with the law get sent to faerie to lie low in Four Mohocks, Sent Abroad. Two…

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Eclectic Projects 005

Eclectic Projects returns after a short hiatus with four original short stories and more from Aurealis and Ditmar award-winning author Peter M. Ball. Dive into this issue to find: A young boy fighting to free his mother from the subterranean prison of the underesea in The Last Stairman.    Friendship and teenage angst put the test beneath hovering alien vessels in Life In The Shadow. A rockstar…