iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hey fellow writers. My coffee mug just gave me a useful reminder. Perhaps it would be useful for you, too?

Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm very much of the opinion that social media doesn't sell books the way most people hope. On the other hand, Threads has sold so many of these mugs over the last three years its fucking embaressing.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I spend a lot of time looking at old pulp era stories and art, whether it's through Facebook groups that provide a steady stream of covers or tracking down any biolgraphy I can find. From a publishing point of view, I find myself fascinated by things like this one.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Apparently I have chosen my distraction for the final four weeks of work before the redundancy kicks in.

Screen shot of a message - Devatubt a stupid horror book title: does Suburban Shodt Shark Massacre sound more B-movie than Suburban Pool Shark Massacre?

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Every time I think I'm talking about my books too much, I get into conversations like the following. Friend who follows me regularly: "I'm really enjoying all those writing posts. You should do more of them. Or do a writing book." Me: "Er... yeah, way ahead of you."

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Happy Friday to all the writers toiling at their dayjobs, waiting for the weekend to arrive so they can get to work on their novel.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

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...

the front cover of Peter M. Ball's What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains, which is a yellow book featuring the silhouette of zombie hordes and the occasional spooky tree.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

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

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

If I say it five times in a week, it becomes a coffee mug. (Unfortunately for my spouse mouse, this is not limited to things I say repeatedly online) The "You'll Have To Repeat That, I Was Thinking About My Book" mug is live at the GenrePunk store. petermball.com/GenrePunkSto...

A white coffee mug with the text "You'll hae to repeat that" in red and "I was thinking about my book" in black.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

My new personal rule is that I've had to say something more than five times on social media in the space of a week, I make a coffee mug about it so there's an image to post instead.

White coffee mug with the text: I've been self-publishing since dinosaurs roamed the earth. I promise you don't need the big river to be an indie.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

Four and a half weeks until the nerdiest (and yet, most useful) book I will ever write hits shelves. petermball.com/GenrePunkSto...

A copy of Peter M. Ball's On Writing Series: Story Poetics and Digital Publishing, resting against a keyboard on a white desktop. The book is blue with minimalist design, relying on white text and a few circular graphic elements.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Nothing says Christmas like putting a Santa hat on a zombie, right? What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains hits shelves on January 21, but I'm shipping from the GenrePunk Books store early. Bleak, terse zombie stories in the styule of Raymond Carver. Details: petermball.com/GenrePunkSto...

The front cover of What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains: The Red Rains Stories, but Peter M. Ball.

Except one of the zombies is wearing a Santa hat at a jaunty angle.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Table of Contents for my big non-fiction book of 2025, based upon my doctoral research into the poetics of series fiction in the age of the internet. Probably the nerdiest thing I will ever release into the world, which is saying something, really...

The Table of Contents for On Writing Series. Includes 5 chapters:

1) Towards a Nuanced Understanding Of Series Fiction: An Introduction
2) Strange Liaisons: Understanding Series Verisimiltude and Serial Connections
3) This IS Not An Ending: Series Temporality and Publishing Contexts
4) Navigating the Elipsis: Story, Character, and Endings In Series Works
5) George RR Martin Is Not Your Bitch: A Conclusion.

A paperback copy of On Writing Series: Series Poetics & Digital Publishing by Peter M. Ball. It's a very plain, blue book with white font and minimal decoration, resting against a red couch.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Robert Silverberg's book, In The Beginning, collects a bunch of his older pulp fiction alognside introductory peices about the pulp era. I read primarily for the industry memoir. That era is wild. Writing to fill page count, as staff writers did, seems foreign to contemporary writing.

Text on Staff Writers from Robert Silverberg's In The Beginning. Reads: Amazing Stories and its companion magazine, Fantastic ADventures, were big, shaggy pulps published by Ziff-Davis of Chicago. They features fast-paced adventures stories aimed at adolescent boys, a group to which I belonged when I started reading them in 1948. I loved nearly everything I read, had fantasies of writing for them some day, and had no idea that the two books were staff-writen by the dozen or so regular contributors whose work was bought without prior editorial reading and who worked mainly under psuedonums that the editor, Ray Palmer, would stick on their material at random. (about fifteen different writers were responsib le over the years for the stories bylined 'Alexander Blade' who was one of my special faovurites when I was about 14.)

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

So I got on a bit of a roll yesterday and put all the first quarter GenrePunk releases up on my webstore for pre-order. Also set up a neat bundle deal for folks who'd like to order all three at once. Details: petermball.com/GenrePunkSto...

a banner showing the first three GenrePunk Book releases for 2025: What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains (coming Jan 21); Unfamiliar Shores: Short Stories (Coming February 25); On Writing Series: Series Poetics & Digital Publishing (Coming March 25).

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

The collected Red Rain stories are now available for pre-order over on the GenrePunk Store. Written for that select group of people who who love zombie stories and Raymond Carver in equal measure. petermball.com/GenrePunkSto...

A print copy of Peter M. Ball's What We Talk ABout When We Talk About Brains: The Red Rain Stories, resting against a gray sheet. It's a very yellow book. It's got zombies and trees on the cover. It's cunningly photographed to disguise the fact it's only 96 pages long.

But it is only 96 pages long, and the disguise is most accidental.

Peter is a better writer than a photographer.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

"Get in, loser. We're reading small press speculative fiction and horror."

Still image of the "Get In, Loser" beat from the 2004 comedy drama Mean Girls (which was a good film, don't get me wrong, but a movie where I'm slightly baffled by it's longetivity in 2024).

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

The senior feline editorial assistant has some very firm ideas about my suggestion we add reading slush to her duties around the office. The junior feline editorial assistant buggered to chase feathers across the bedroom.

A close-up of a very fluffy cat with brown fur and an unimpressed expression.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 07/09/2024

My favourite thing I've come across in my reading this week: Alfred Bester’s empiric equation for his science fiction writing (via Hell’s Cartographers: Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers) I'm pretty sure, based on context, that what he's dubbed hysteria would get called flow today.

A mathematical equation that sees Concept + (Discipline, Experiment, Experience, Pattern Sense, Drama Sense, preparation, IMagination, Extrapolation, Historia) = Story <arrow pointing back and forth> Statement.

And, look, that is almost certainly going to read incorrectly without the visual because Bester is marginally insane here and I'm dragging up knowledge of mathmatical symbols I last saw thirty-odd years ago in school.

And I almost certainly wasn't paying attention in that class at the best of times.

Sorry.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 05/09/2024

You've been kidnapped. The characters from the last tv show you watched are trying to rescue you. Who is coming to save you? Even with the plethora of supernatural powers on offer, I think I'm fucked.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 05/07/2024

I've been getting analogue with project planning and logging over the last week, working with a new pen that leaves little dot-point ink stains on the recto page and smudges the text. Slowly hacking away at the overlong list of unfinished things that have been building up over the last year.

Page from a grid page bullet journal with a pattern of dotted ink stains from writing on the opposite page.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 30/05/2024

So over the last year I've written a series of stories which basically ask, "What would Raymond Carver's stories look like if he wrote during a zombie apocalypse?" Terse, dirty literary realism is way more fun when everybody thinks the walking dead will eat them. petermball.com/product-cate...

A series of book covers from the Red Rain short story collection against a backdrop of a zombie-filled wood.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 09/05/2024

Jason Nahrung's Cruel Nights launches in 11 days. The first print run has arrived in the office. Short pitch: what if 90s vampire fiction continued the stories into the 2000s, with full awareness of how the world changed?

Copies of Jason Nahrung's Cruel Nights fresh from the printer as we open the box in the Brain Jar Press office.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 20/04/2024

Reskeet with a banger picture of your cat.

A fluffy chocolate-coloured cat staring out a window with a pensive expression.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 04/03/2024

Fresh from the printer and so much prettier than I’d hoped.

Three copies of Peter M. Ball’s Eclectic Projects 006 resting on a cardboard box.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 03/03/2024

Happy Publisher Dance! "Slatter is one of the best short fiction writers out there, and this collection will hit the mark with her fans while also being a perfect introduction to her work for those who haven't read it yet. Don't miss it." —Locus Magazine on The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings

A woman in a black dress holding a copy of Angela Slatter's The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings.

The cover of Angela Slatter's The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings with advice that we're now shipping copies at www.brainjarpress.com.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 02/03/2024

Reviewing old posts reminded me of Kate Beaton's Sexy Batman issue of Hark, A Vagrant, which is a very pleasant thing to return to on a Sunday morning. Worth revisiting: www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id...

Three panels from Kate Beaton's Sexy Batman cartoon.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 01/03/2024

What if Raymond Carver lived through the zombie apocalypse? What kind of stories would he write? Eclectic Projects magazine is the place where I put all my weird story ideas. The stuff I’d never write to submit to a magazine editor, because there would be more “sensible” ideas to follow.

A tablet with a copy of Eclectic Projects displayed rests on a touch, right next to a worried cat.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 23/02/2024

Hello form of social media I frequently forget! I mostly kick around doing weird little publishing experiments on my Patreon these days, and frequently forget to tell folks about it. The latest project is going an 80 page monthly collection of short fiction and non-fiction. Issue 6 is out Tuesday.

A copy of Eclectic Projects Magazine, Issue 6, on a tablet resting against a hardwood table. The reader's arms are visible, wearing a long sleeved woolen sweater while holding a pen for taking notes and a cup of tea.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 11/10/2023

Today my Patreon memebers will be getting another original story, "Beneath These Trees, The Dead," months in advance of its official release as part of an upcoming Eclectic projects issue. Story features: zombies! Angst! Making fun of Raymond Carver! You in? www.patreon.com/PeterMBall

Yellow card with the silhouette of trees in one corenr and a sarm of others in the end. Text reads: Beneath These Trees, The Dead. A Red Rain Story.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 20/09/2023

Crazy excited to be releasing Helen Marshall's non-fiction collection, TOMORROW'S LANGUAGE, through Brain Jar Press in October (Mostly because Helen Marshall is a mad genius whose non-fiction is somehow weirder and twistier than her fiction). Pre-Orders: www.brainjarpress.com/product/tomo...

The front cover of Helen Marshall's non-fiction collection, Tomorrow's Language, coming out October 17 from Brain Jar Press.

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