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.