Eclectic Projects 005: Eclectic Projects, #5

By Peter M. Ball

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 addicted to a magic waterfall which spills into a city street in the slipstream story Lemosyne Junction.
• A showdown between gangsters on a hellish colony planet, in the aftermath of a big mistake, in the first Eleanor Holst story, Median Survival Time. 
• Professional thief Tallulah Wyndham-Pryce battles chronomancy and dinosaurs in the fifty instalment of the The Shackleton Job serial, The First Rule of Evading Carnivores.

Issue 5 also features a non-fiction piece on the muse, publishing, and understanding what truly is within a writer's control, On The Focus and Locus of Creativity. 

 

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: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781922479709

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

ECLECTIC PROJECTS

ISSUE 005

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 © 2024 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: Demonic presence underground dark shadowed inferno © Shift Space/Shutterstock.

ISBN: 978-1-922479-70-9 (Ebook) | 978-1-922479-71-6 (Chapbook)

CONTENTS

Thank You!

An Unexpected Hiatus

The Last Stairman

Life in the Shadow

Lemosyne Junction

Median Survival Time

The First Rule of Evading Carnivores

On Focus And The Locus Of Creativity

About the Author

Also By Peter M. Ball

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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

Jennifer White

Maggie Slater

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Dave Versace

Mark Webb

Kathleen Jennings

Lois Spangler

Thank you all!

AN UNEXPECTED HIATUS

AN INTRODUCTION

The last issue of Eclectic Projects, number 4, came out in April 2023. Right after it released, I got news I could still finish my oh-God, I-thought-they’d-kicked-me-out-and-I’d-screws-this-up-forever doctoral thesis. The rest of my year gave way to a mad scramble to hit a series of tight doctoral deadlines, with the threat of being asked to leave if I failed hovering above me if I failed.

With luck, by the time you read this I’ll have my thesis wrapped up and submitted, but I’m writing to you from October of 2023 rather than January 2024 and the future is hard to predict. When I wrote the introduction to issue 1, on this same date in 2022, I thought my coming year would run very differently.

What I do know is this: I have a finished thesis draft, but there’s still a few months of editing and revision ahead of me, to say nothing of the final assessment process. This ensures I have I have writing time again, having finished drafting 100,000 words of thesis and accompanying writing projects in the space of five months, and I’ve been eager to get this issue out since the moment the thesis ate my life back in May.

I also knew I didn’t want to start releasing issues again until I was sure I could maintain a steady pace of stories and non-fiction once more. At this stage, I’ve got half of 2024 covered and three months left to fill the gaps in the remaining issues, so we’re kicking things into gear and starting over again.

Thanks to everyone who stuck with me, or kept checking in when the issue stopped. In particular, thanks to my Patrons who endured a lot of false starts on the Eclectic Projects Patreon as I figured out how to navigate my time anew.

I hope the coming year is worth the wait.

—Peter M. Ball

October 10, 2023

Brisbane, Australia

THE LAST STAIRMAN

The water of the Undersea: black; endless; warm as blood. Mist rises off the surface, forming rough eddies around The Black Toad’s prow. High above, beyond the limits of the ship’s meager lanterns, it condenses against the cavern roof and drips into the dark mass of the still ocean waters. Mother, in one of her weaker moments, gathers Barnaby to her chest and tells him about rain. Water, she says, falling from the sky. Seas that churn and move of their volition, chaotic and dangerous and ever so wild. Oh Barnaby, she says, and her eyes are wet with tears. Oh Barnaby, my darling boy, one day you will see these things.

She clings to these stories. Holds them tight, repeats them so often Barnaby could repeat the tale of rain from memory, if she’d but give him a chance to do so. He could recite every word, verbatim, although he doubts he could achieve Mother’s wistful tone. Rain is a thing from above, like many of Mother’s stories, and Barnaby knows nothing but the Undersea and the cavernous port towns when they put ashore.

The Black Toad moves slowly, her sails furled and her oars sweeping through the water, advancing the boat with every stroke. They’ve been on the move now for an eight-mark or more, long enough for Barnaby to learn the rhythms of the boat and her crew. There are twelve men on The Black Toad; pale, hard men of the Undersea with chorded muscle and damp skin, bare-chested despite the cool nip in the air and the high-collared coats they wear to keep the condensation off. Their leader, Captain Raws, stands vigil, one foot against the bowsprit, the narrow beam of a bullseye lantern cutting through the gathering mist as he scours the water for rocks and other hidden obstacles.

Hard port, the captain calls, and the crew burst into action, poles splashing into the water as they rush to obey. The Toad lurches sideways and Barnaby curls against his mother’s flank, shivering beneath the canvas cover they use to avoid the constant damp. Mother pulls Barnaby closer, kisses his head.

It’s okay, she whispers. These men are good men.

Barnaby whimpers and buries his head against her, world shrinking away to nothing as he closes his eyes tight. Raws makes another call, voice gurgling through the mist, and Barnaby hears the heavy tread of the crew’s bare feet against the deck, the soft splash of guide-poles hitting water to fend off the rocks. The ocean laps The Black Toad’s hull, the wood creaking as they attempt a rapid change of course. Fear seeps into the mist-shrouded air, congealing beneath Barnaby’s waterlogged skin as he listens to the crew return the Captain’s call.

Wood grinds against submerged rocks, the deep scrape like a moan of agony from the aging ship. Captain Raws calls