"The front room of Dante’s Inferno is busy, the narrow aisles choked with geeks and nerds eager to purchase comic books..." First line of Blunt Object, a new crime story posted to my Patreon earlier today: www.patreon.com/posts/blunt-...

A Forest, Darkly, (pub by @titanbooks.bsky.social) is another excellent Gothic fantasy novel written by @angelaslatter.bsky.social; a perfect choice if you are looking for a novel defying female stereotypes, especially regarding age roles. Full thoughts: jamreads.com/reviews/a-fo... 💙📚

What Moving House Reminded Me About Getting My Writing Done I’ve been banging on about writing and infrastructure for a while on this journal, but I’ve recently found a fantastic metaphor for the importance of your set-up.  As I’ve mentioned a few times, we recently moved house, trading our tiny…

John Howard brought in a tax policy that delivers 59% of the benefit to the richest 1%. It truly is time to ditch the Capital Gains Tax 50% discount www.theguardian.com/business/gro...

Peter M. Ball Tip Jar

You Don’t Need Social Media To Sell Books The marketing plan for many new writers — including me, way back when — seems to be a weird extension of the Field of Dreams philosophy: if we publish it, readers will come. Good books find their audience.  Readers believe this too, although they rarely…

Enjoy 20% PIXERINA (a Haunting) by @joanneanderton.bsky.social when you shop our FLASH SALE through Sunday. Illustrated by @tomsbrown.bsky.social. Can a person haunt a ghost? badhandbooks.com/purchasedire...

I Am Not A Fully Operational Death Star To the shock of absolutely no-one, I was considerably less productive on the writing front than expected over the holidays. I last wrote on my last full day at work two weeks ago, and I’m picking this draft up on the 5th of January (coincidentally, my first…

Leverage Needs A Fulcrum: How Do You Build Certainty Into Your Writing Practice? “Give me a lever long enough and I will move the earth.” This quote from Archimedes bounces around the internet from time to time, highlighting the power of leverage. It’s been stuck in my head for over two decades…

Solve One Problem At A Time I’m writing today’s entry from a cramped bus seat on my way to work, grabbing fifteen minutes of writing time out of the otherwise dreary stretch between my house and the office. It’s taken me a few weeks to get to this point. For the first week, I tried my old trick of…

Hello, lovelies. Here's the glorious cover for the Sourdough Compendium (Sourdough, Bitterwood Bible, Tallow-Wife). The pre-order links are here titanbooks.com/72850-the-so... but not all work yet due to circumstances beyond my control, but B&N, Waterstones and the 'zon do have preorder pages.

And some other books by me!

HONEYEATER, a haunted subtropical tale, is now out! Order through your favourite bookstore or: USA: torpublishinggroup.com/honeyeater/ Australia: panmacmillan.com.au/9781761562303/

Boost Your Fiction: The Power of Objects and Objectives What's the difference between a messy story and a great one? Often, it comes down to having clear objects that represent a character's goals...

When The Algorithm Doesn’t Love You Anymore Here’s a dirty secret I rarely say out loud as a writer: I don’t want you to friend me on Facebook. I don’t want you to follow me on Threads or Twitter or Instagram. I sure as fuck don’t give a shit if you’re following me on TikTok.  I’m on all these…

Preserving Great Writing Advice From Internet Decay A 2024 article about the slow decay of the internet has been making the rounds of social media recently. In it, S.E. Smith charts the speed at which old websites and links become inaccessible and asks what happens when the internet disappears?…

Peter Ball on the internet, lost knowledge, @brainjarpress.bsky.social Writer Chaps series preserving writing advice from blog heydeys, and more (free access) www.patreon.com/posts/preser...

The Most Valuable Page Of Notes I’ve Ever Written I've been re-reading old bullet journal this morning and found this page, from 2016, which led to the most important writing gig I've ever had: I produced this on my friend Meg's back deck, trying to sort through the complicated steps required to…

The Theory Of Constraints The theory of constraints is a business management philosophy popularised in Eli Goldratt’s 1984 book, The Goal, although it builds upon work by earlier thinkers, including Germany’s Wolfgang Mewes. These days, The Goal is better known as a book Jimmy Donaldson—aka…

How I Got From Hemmingway And Space Marines to Carver and Zombies The assignment was to rescue a colony that had been overrun by xenomorphs. There were eight of us, nine if you counted the android, but he had malfunctioned after being hacked by separatists and could not support us as he had when I…

Happy Book Birthday to Lisa L. Hannett's The Fortunate Isles, coming out in ebook and paperback today! Available everywhere good books are sold, but we always have a special love for folks who buy from Brain Jar Press directly :) Details: www.brainjarpress.com/product/the-...

I've joined forces with a bunch of fellow horror authors to do a little May Giveaway of stories and novels. Details here: books.bookfunnel.com/horrorreader...

Once you've read slush, it's pretty clear the greatest "secret" in writing is finding the writer's guidelines and following them the letter. The second greatest secret is "don't send abusive responses to rejection letters".

My D&D origins story: In middle school, I was so nerdy that I had no friends and knew no one who played D&D, so I read my Monster Manual like an encyclopedia. In high school, I yearned to date a long-haired poet nerd, and when I finally found one, he was sorely lacking. Insecure, awkward. But.. 1/

The fact that the supposedly leading newsletter platform (cite needed) stays afloat by subsidizing Nazi content seems like a thing to mention if we're talking about what "we" pay for newsletters but it's the NYT so

The weirdest part of designing your own book covers is how quickly you find yourself ammassing a collection of images under tags like "19th century wallpaper" or "grunge concrete textures" or "waterdamaged paper" or "cracked leather" that will be used more often than any peice of art.

Labor's housing policies will probably hurt affordability; SQM forecasts to rise 6-10% in 2025 www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Got back from vacation to find that Val Vega: Secret Ambassador of Earth had gotten this lovely 5-star review from Readers' Favorite! "Populated with a dazzling cast of humans and aliens alike, Francisco’s story is witty, moving, and impossible to put down." readersfavorite.com/book-review/...

Yesterday, I passed the halfway point on the draft of a new Red Rain sequence, which largely means there will be a sequel to WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT BRAINS at some point in the future. Until then, you can grab a copy of the first collection here: petermball.com/GenrePunkSto...

We've been all about the new books this week, so now is a good moment to remind folks they can read Angela Slatter's NO GOOD DEED chapbook absolute free. Check it out if you love gothic fantasy with folklore vibes, or you dig the Sourdough universe. Details: offers.brainjarpress.com/nogooddeed

Started today with six ininterupted hours to catch up on writing and publishing projects. Took less than an hour to end up with a pointless-but-ticks-a-box-that-allows-useful-things-to-continue 90 minute meeting in the middle of my free day.

We're extraordinarily pleased to open pre-orders on paperback and ebook editions of Lisa L. Hannett's The Fortunate Isles, out from Brain Jar Press on May 27. Read a Sample: read.bookfunnel.com/read/em32gw5... Pre-Order the Book: www.brainjarpress.com/product/the-...

Dutton: we must cut public sector jobs Voters of Dickson: ok Dutton: OH NO

hook it to my veins #AusVotes

Fuck, I needed this overwhelming sense of schadenfreude at Dutton taking the entire ship down with him #auspol

Sneak peek at the next @BrainJarPress book just went out via the newsletter. Formal announcement next week, after the public holidays are done in Australia. Today is a pretty good day.

Haha! Returned from write club to find this glorious thing waiting! Thanks @brainjarpress for this @kirstyn_mcdermott brilliance. 💜💜💜

The official release is May 6, but print copies of Never Afters are now shipping from the Brain Jar Press store if you enjoy getting your books earlier than everyone else! Get your copy here: www.brainjarpress.com/product/neve...

So yesterday I took delivery of a print run I ordered a few weeks back, which was something like eleven days overdue courtesy of the public holidays in Australia at this time of year. I've been freaking out, because in my head today was release day and I like to get books out early.

Don't know what has gone sideways with shipping in Australia at the moment, but I'm growing weary of messages that start with "it'll be there tomorrow!" then end up with "it'll be there sometime in the next three months."

Yesterday was a horrible writing day, a worse publishing day, and a pretty good RPG gaming day. Today has three meetings and a big list of stuff I need to get caught up on...

So I’ve been quitting writing/publishing groups, communities, and newsletters when one or more of the organisers come out as pro AI in some way and… yeah, there not many writing spaces left two months after implementing this policy.

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs. (“Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, or LOTR) This is, honestly, a far geekier choice than it first appears...

So today I spent about four hours looking for a book I was sure I had drafted, but didn't see to exist on any of my drives. Eventually found it sitting in the Apple drive I used for about three and a half minutes, back in 2023, writen in a completely different program than I remembered.

Delighted!! The augmented BLACK-WINGED ANGELS is up for pre-order from @pspublishinguk Silhouettes by multi award-winning @tanaudel, fairy tales by multi award-winning me, new tale “The Mer-Pearl” & critical essays. In paperback & hardcover limited edition. pspublishing.co.uk/black-winged...

Me: “I should write a bunch of solid 4000 word stories and get back into the swing of submitting again.” Also me: starts writing a weird-ass 12000 word novelette that will be hard to sell anywhere.

The point where I start wondering "am I going too Queensland in this story" starts when I start trying to explain the history of XXXX lager in the narrative so it doesn't sound like porn and look up other names ffor bindy-eyes so I can potentially explain the term to copyeditors...

Did four hours of mentorship meetings with a fifteen minute break today, and I feel ready for an asprin and a lie down. How in hell did I teach twelve straight hours of classes in a row back in the day?

A new installment of my writing and publishing newsletter went out today, inspired by the looming cyclone about to hit Brisbane in twenty-four hours. If you missed the latest GenrePunk Ninja, you can catch it here: petermball.com/two-writing-...

New issue of GenrePunk Ninja, my writing and publishing newsletter, is now live. First in a series on author platform and social media in 2025. Subscriptions and previous issues at Genrepunk.ninja