Eclectic Projects 004: Eclectic Projects, #4

By Peter M. Ball

The fourth issue of Eclectic Projects features four original short stories and more from Aurealis and Ditmar award-winning author Peter M. Ball. Dive into this issue to find: 

• Teenage friendships tested amid mecha racing on a frost-covered planet in The Last Season.  
• Lethal and disturbing magic girls defending humanity against an alien invasion in The Bridesmaids.
• An unlikely partnership between a desperate detective and hyper-intelligent baby partner foisted upon him in Warm Milk & Whisky.
• Racing across a post-apocalyptic landscape filled with cyborg dinosaurs and cannibalistic gangs in This Is How You Step Up: A Dust Runner's Tale.
• Professional thief Tallulah Wyndham-Pryce searches for an illusive chronomancer and evades angry thugs in part four of The Shackleton Job serial, On The Street, With Teeth.

Issue 4 also features a short non-fiction piece on stress, writing, and caffeine in Cortisol, Coffee, and the Anxious Writer.

 

Long regarded as one of Australia's weirder speculative fiction authors, Peter M. Ball now brings you original fiction each month in his own magazine, Eclectic Projects. Peter is also the author of the novellas Horn, Bleed, Exile, Frost, and Crusade, and his prior short fiction has been collected in The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales, Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet, and These Strange & Magic Things. He's the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press and lives in Brisbane with his spouse and a very demanding cat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eclectic Projects
• Release date: Apr 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781922479532

Peter M. Ball

Peter M Ball is the author of more than fifty short stories and six novellas, along with essays, RPG material, articles, and poetry. His short stories and non-fiction have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Dragon Magazine, Writing Queensland, and Apex Magazine, and has been included in several Year’s Best anthologies. He’s previously taught creative writing at Griffith University and the Queensland Writers Centre, spent five years as the manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace, and convenes the biennial GenreCon writing conference in Brisbane, Australia.

Book preview

Eclectic Projects 004

ECLECTIC PROJECTS 004

PETER M. BALL

Eclectic Projects

Eclectic Projects (an imprint of Brain Jar Press)

PO Box 6687

Upper Mt Gravatt, QLD, 4122

Australia

Eclectic Projects: www.PeterMBall.com

Brain Jar Press: www.BrainJarPress.com

All stories Copyright © 2023 by Peter M. Ball.

The moral right of Peter M. Ball to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover Images: Space marine ranger looking at to giant robot is in hangar © Simple B/Shutterstock.

ISBN: 978-1-922479-53-2 (Ebook) | 978-1-922479-54-9 (Chapbook)

CONTENTS

Thank You!

Placing A Bet

The Final Season

The Bridesmaids

Warm Milk & Whiskey

This Is How You Step Up

On The Street, With Teeth

Cortisol, Coffee, and the Anxious Writer

About the Author

Join the Eclectic Projects Patreon

THANK YOU!

I’d like to extend my thanks to the following incredible people who supported Eclectic Projects via Patreon. Their support is a big reason this book—and these stories—exists.

Margaret Ball

Jodi

Nicole Strickland

Meg Vann

Sally Ball

Jennifer White

Maggie Slater

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Dave Versace

Mark Webb

Catherine Caine

Kathleen Jennings

Lois Spangler

PLACING A BET

AN INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Eclectic Projects 004!

If I may engage in a little hubris here, I feel like this project is hitting its stride in this issue. The earliest seeds of this magazine stretch back over a year, when I started writing vignettes for my Patreon readers to keep myself from going stir crazy in a particularly aggressive day job. I’d taken my inspiration from James Clear’s Atomic Habits, figuring that even a weekly stream of terrible flash fictions would help reshape my identity away from someone who doesn’t have time to write and towards a writer who finishes things.

If I’m honest, I didn’t think it would work. It caught me by surprise when I realized, twelve weeks into the process, that my stories were growing longer and far more ambitious than short vignettes. Even when my day job went absolutely bonkers, consuming twelve to sixteen hours of my time, I kept posting stories at a regular weekly pace.

I’m writing this introduction ten months after I posting the first weekly story for my patrons, and it’s astonishing how much has changed. I got to quit my full-time job and split my focus between writing and freelancing. I’ve written a new short story or serial entry for 43 straight weeks—more fiction than you can find in my first three short story collections combined—and gotten back into the swing of putting books out into the world.

The lead story in this issue, The Last Season, is a novelette exploring a frost-covered space colony where local miners race giant mecha across a treacherous landscape—a story idea I’ve had kicking around since joking with a co-worker about a story crossing Pacific Rim and The Fast and the Furious franchise.

The Bridesmaids is an odd duck of a story—a little bit slipstream, a little bit horror—which took an odd turn when the Queen of England died half a day after I scribbled down the opening scene where a bloody bridesmaid disrupts the wedding of an American president.

Warm Milk and Whisky is one of the last stories I wrote on my morning commute, spawned by a very off-kilter writing prompt, and This Is How You Step Up was meant to be a short, 500 word vignette that quietly grew into a very different story as I added tropes from a half-dozen beloved B-Grade sci-fi films from the 80s.

Seemingly immortal thief Tallulah Wyndham-Pryce returns in the latest instalment of The Shackleton Job, and this issue’s non-fiction explores an important lesson I learned about stress, cortisol, anxiety management, and coffee.

With that, I hand you on to this month’s issue. I hope you enjoy it, and always remember, if you don’t want to wait for a new issue to drop every month you can read the stories as they’re written over on www.patreon.com/PeterMBall.

Peter M. Ball

April 1, 2023

Brisbane, Australia

THE FINAL SEASON

Peeling off her gloves for extra traction, Maya glared at the Cee-Bee’s mechanical leg and the stubborn lug nut that refused to move. She grabbed the wrench as long as her arm and leveraged it into place, threw her weight against it and pushed with all she had. Nothing. Well, almost nothing. Spending the day on hydraulics and servos instead of software hardly felt like one of her smarter decisions. Her bare hands ached with the cold of the garage, even with the heat lamps running. The pain mingled with the stew of frustration of anger that chased her in here, and she realized there’d be no solace in getting the big mech up and running again. Cee-Bee was a hunk of junk salvage job, mismatched parts cobbled together using parts from the scrapyard on the far side of Sinclair’s Landing. Most days, working on him provided Maya with an escape from her father’s lets-terraform-Javal bullshit, but those days didn’t start with the news he’d hocked her mom’s guitar in order to fund the next campaign.

Fucker, Maya said, and it helped a little. She drew a long breath and tried to rein in the roiling emotions in her chest. She tapped the wrench against the stubborn leg, putting a little force behind it. Hitting something helped almost as much as swearing. The anger blasted forth, hot as a reactor link. Frost-damned-idiot-fucking-useless-snow-blind-asshole-mother—

Hey! Strong hands grabbed the wrench and muscled her away from Cee-Bee’s leg. Maya attempted to kick free, half-blind with the rush of anger, but strong arms held her tight until the anger ebbed away. Worse, the tears leaked out anyway. Dammit.

It’s okay, she said. I’m okay.

Alexander O’Day cinched the hug tighter. Sure, you’ve having a great day.

Sarcasm. Close to a good sign—it meant Alex was worried, but wasn’t concerned about tipping Maya over the edge by saying the wrong thing. Maya sucked in a calming breath. You can let me go, Alexander. It’s done.

Alex released her grip and retreated a few short steps, concern writ across face. Maya met that concern with a frustrated scowl, her jaw hard and her whole body tensed for a