Eclectic Projects: Eclectic Projects, #6

By Peter M. Ball

Eclectic Projects 006 features more original fiction and non-fiction from Aurealis and Ditamar-award winning author Peter M. Ball.

Dive into this issue to find:

• Two lovers trying to balance their own survival and the needs of their community amid the zombie apocalypse in the latest Red Rain story, Out Past The Fence.
• Two adventurers compete to finish a poem that will summon a new god into existence in The Termagant's Villanelle.
• The idle rich hunt genetically engineered unicorns using human hounds to fetch and finish the beasts, with dangerous consequences for all, in the stand-alone short In Season.
• Two partners hunt a virus across the lawless freezone full of genetically engineered gangs in the latest Helix City story, Infection Vectors.
• Professional thief Talulah Wyndham-Pryce gets some important information about who holds the world's most dangerous bottles of scotch in part six of The Shackleton Job, The Anachronism Strain.

Issue 6 also features two short non-fiction essays. On Bookshops, Scenes, And The Big Sleep pulls apart one of film noir's most iconic scenes, laying bare the tools used to make it so effective so other writers can replicate it. Practical Publishing Advice: Know Limits lays out the importance of creating boundaries for yourself when you work outside the standard employer-employee dynamic (as so many writers and publishers do).

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: Feb 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781922479723

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 006

PETER M. BALL

Eclectic Projects

CONTENTS

Sooner or Later, There’s Always Zombies

Out Past The Fence

A Red Rain Story

The Termagant’s Villanelle

In Season

Infection Vectors

A Helix City Story

The Anachronism Strain

The Shackleton Job - Part six

On Bookshops, Scenes, And The Big Sleep

Practical Publishing Advice: Know Limits

Thank You!

About the Author

Also By Peter M. Ball

Newsletter Sign-Up

Join the Eclectic Projects Patreon

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: crowd of hungry zombies in the woods.

© Pavel Talashov/Shutterstock.

ISBN: 978-1-922479-72-3 (Ebook) | 978-1-922479-73-0 (Paperback)

SOONER OR LATER, THERE’S ALWAYS ZOMBIES

AN INTRODUCTION

I’ve been reading Robert Silverberg’s In The Beginning collection recently, delving into some of the best work Silverberg produced while writing for pulp magazines in the late 1950s. The stories are great fun, if you dig the old pulp writing style, but equally valuable are Silverberg’s introductory vignettes about building a career in the heyday of the pulps. Aspects of his production are virtually unrecognisable to a writer starting their career in the post-pulp landscape, including his time as a staff writer for various magazines who would buy work—unseen and unread—for as long as Silverberg maintained a level of quality that engaged their readership.

I discussed the notion of hungry markets—now non-existent in the fiction space— back in issue 1 of Eclectic Projects. What intrigues me now is replicating what those markets offered using new tools.

Publishing theorist Craig Mod has referred to patronage and membership programs as enduring and implicit permission machines, a way of diffusing the economic and cultural support for a project between many tiny stakeholders instead of finding one big stakeholder willing to fund its creation. It’s a way of readers saying we like your stuff, do more of it that also frees the writer from the concerns of whether they’re writing something that will sell in the general fiction marketplace.

In short, writers get to produce stories they’d otherwise ignore because they aren’t commercial enough to justify the effort.

The folks who back Eclectic Projects in general—and this magazine in particular—are a small-but-mighty collective who give me permission to follow my creative process down some mighty weird rabbit holes. Recently I launched an Patreon-exclusive serial, a short novel which consists of short, cyberpunk vignettes written in second person and arranged as a kind of narrative patchwork. It’s conscientiously the least commercial book I could imagine, interesting to handful of people. Fortunately, some of those folks are backing the Patreon and give me permission to do things because they’re interesting other than commercials sound.

The same is true of the stories featured in this issue. This month’s cover story, Out Past The Fence, is a new instalment in my Red Rain series. These stories emerge from a thought experiment: what would the stories of noted domestic realist writers like Raymond Carver look like if they lived through the Zombie Apocalypse? There is absolutely no way these stories would exist outside of the Patreon, as the crossover between zombie lovers and Raymond Carver fans is simply too small to justify writing one, let alone an entire series.

The same is true of the other stories in this month’s issue. The Termagant’s Villanelle emerged from a writing prompt which provided the title and I needed a story to hit the Patreon deadline. In Season—possibly one of my favourite stories I’ve done for Eclectic Projects—is something I would have avoided on the basis I’d already written a creepy unicorn story or two (and editors would rather see something new). Infection Vectors is a fun story, but ultimately one that would never sell to a magazine.

Now they all exist, because a small-but-loyal crew of readers said make it so. It may not be the pulp era anymore, but it’s still a damn good time to be writing.

—Peter M. Ball

February 21, 2024

Brisbane, Australia

OUT PAST THE FENCE

A RED RAIN STORY

The storm crept up on them an hour before sunset, bringing wind and gusts of crimson rain. Janice was in the backyard, patching gaps in the barbed wire barricades protecting their house from wandering deaders. The perfect vantage point to observe the bats fleeing their colony by the river, launching and wheeling in a black-winged cloud. They dipped below the treeline and reappeared, beginning their evening migration early. Janice wiped her brow with one hand, watched the swirling bats disperse.

Out past the river, towards the beach, the rain was already thick and dark. A blackout curtain encroaching upon the shoreline, sweeping inland with a fury.

Janice sealed the tear in the fence, cinching the patch-job tight. Not perfect, but it would hold for a while, and she needed to secure the tanks before the rain’s hit them and contaminated their drinking water. Up on the veranda, on the makeshift clothesline Val had built under the cover, the sheets and towels shimmied and danced in the wind. Janice ducked under them and took the shortest route to the water supply, hauled the seals over the tanks and diverted the water flow away. She made another trip to the shed and powered down their generator, gathering up the spare solar batteries they charged there to get them through the night.

The rain started as she made it back to the house, clattering up the back stairs at a trot. Janice waited at the back door, casting a quick glance at the sky. Dinner in ten, she said. If you’re hungry.

Val went inside and washed up, sponging off the day’s sweat with the water bucket tucked into the bathtub. Janice sang as she finished up in the kitchen, her sweet voice serenading the coming storm with an old Britney Spears song Val couldn’t place. Then the storm hit with its full force,