Peter M. Ball

JamReads - Making your TBR closer to infinite In JamReads you will find content about books, and why you should read them more. This content may include reviews, interviews and occasionally, some news of the literary world

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...

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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…

Pixerina by Joanne Anderton (Paperback with Signed Bookplate) — Bad Hand Books Something about the old house on the hill has always intrigued Rebecca Bell, but she’s resisted its pull until now. An artist by trade, Rebecca has been blocked and uninspired for three years. Given t...

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 day on a bus since moving house in late December). The version you are reading now didn't actually get finished until the end of January, three weeks after I thought I'd figure out the final draft. Things, my friends, did not go to plan.

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 now, ever since Commander Sheridan quoted it while escaping from an alien prison in a Season 5 episode of Babylon 5 with the power of a lever and sheer, protagonists gumption. But here’s the thing: it’s wrong. The full quote is, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it…

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 writing on notecards during my commute. That proved ineffective because buses are a very different mode of transport to trains. For the next week, I busted out my laptop and brought it along each day. Unfortunately, it didn’t get used.

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...

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? Here’s an interesting statistic in the article: 38% of websites accessible in 2013 were inaccessible ten years later.  The websites get taken down, or restructured in such a way that old links no longer work, or individual pages get deleted. I’m very familiar with this phenomenon. In the years before I launched Brain Jar Press, I worked for the Queensland Writers Centre and spent a good chunk of my days advising writers about how to build their careers.

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?…

Preserving Great Writing Advice From Internet Decay | Peter M. Ball Get more from Peter M. Ball on Patreon

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 apply for a PhD and break them into tangible, completable steps. I basically broke down everything I had to do--and especially the things I didn't know how to do--and laid things out. I wrote this on the 29th of August, 2016. By January of 2017 I was in the program, on scholarship, producing three short books (

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 MrBeast—used to make all his employees read and assimilate. Now let’s be clear: I don’t really get Mr Beast, nor like him. I think his whole schtick is emblematic of a fundamental problem with algorithmic social media, and I’m vaguely baffled he’s a millionaire or famous. I sure as fuck don’t know how he has a line of snacks, let alone an Amazon show.

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 wants to fix Australia’s housing issues – but there’s little hope for those not already on the ladder Without genuine reform, experts predict house prices to ‘climb by 6-10% in 2025’ and the gap between homeowners and those locked out of market to widen

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...

Get Your Free Copy of No Good Deed Angela Slatter’s No Good Deed is a dark fantasy tale of magic, ghosts, and marriage set in her World Fantasy Award-winning Sourdough universe. Isobel assumed her wedding would be the grandest day of h...

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.