Guy Forks by Will Nett

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Mark Hayes

There have been many Sir William Nettleton’s, the most infamous had his knighthood rescinded by the late queen in 1963 after the incident with the catholic call girls, the CoE bishop of Angleside and Elizabeth II cup final tickets the previous year. It is perhaps to his credit however that unlike modern politicians he was happy to admit and own his indiscretions. Though revelling in them may be been a better description. Certainly he was the one who told the press about the meerkat he let loose in the Tottenham Hotspurs dressing room after partaking of way too much Columbia nose powder .

The current Willam Nettleton claims he shortens his professional name to appear cooler and writes as Will Nett… But many suspect it is merely to escape the notoriety of the Nettleton name…

Occasionally Will Nett sends me blog posts , they tend to be entertaining, well received and deceptively intelligent reads… he normally does this when he has a new book coming out. If he has a new one out he hasn’t bothered to tell me this time. He has never lost a knighthood due to hookers, clergymen and purloined tickets for a cup final.

Guy Forks by Will Nett

You don’t get may ‘Guidos’ these days, do you? In Spain, maybe; but I’m not in Spain. I’m in the UK; God’s Own- Yorkshire. On Stonegate, in York, at Guy Fawkes’ house. It’s amazing to think that England’s most recognised rebel lived within walking distance of a branch of Jo Malone. Given that he is, in my opinion, the first hipster, he would more likely have occupied the nearby eco shop, instead. His credentials all check out.

The son of landed gentry, living off Daddy’s property empire. Takes a gap year in Spain, sidling up to senoras: ‘I’m Guy, but close friends call me Guido’ adopting the Italian version of his name whilst there, safe in the knowledge that it would be difficult to take the piss out of as hardly anything rhymes with ‘Guido.’

He goes on to grow his hair and cultivate Dartagnanesque facial hair- that I can’t mock too much here because I’ve done almost the same and embraced the 19th century Shanghai river pirate look- before returning home with a headful of revolutionary ideas, and presumably a load of wristbands, a fair dose of the clap and a suitcase full of novelty Sangria bottles from Duty Free. The ones with the little sombreros on.

Then he falls in with the Gunpowder gang, using a spectacularly mundane pseudonym- John Johnson- to carry out his nefarious deeds. In fairness, if it was your intent to collectively maim the nation’s entire political elite in a one’r, you’d aim to keep your new identity as incongruous as possible.

On his return to England, he frequents the Duck and Drake pub in The Strand with a bunch of insufferable edgelords; penny farthing repairmen, baristas and chilli farmers, I guess. I say ‘I guess’ are there is still much conjecture around Fawkes lore. When I was at school someone put it around that he ‘invented forks.’ He didn’t invent the ‘fork’ it was explained; he invented ‘forks’ which I took to mean that at his first attempt he invented multiple forks.

But back to the boom boom boys, who between them hatched the ingenious plan of stockpiling cartloads of fly-tipped mattresses and wildly flammable leftover Halloween merchandise beneath Parliament. Amidst this potential bombfire* of slutty kitten outfits, plastic Devil tridents, and that shitty cobweb stuff that’s draped all over people’s houses, a fuse- not the much-missed chocolate bar- would be lit, and the whole lot would be blasted to the four winds, raining down tricorn hats, powdered wigs and crown jewels, right across the city.

He was of course rumbled by some absolute grass, at which our hirsute hero gave the name ‘John Johnson’ as if in some comedic way that was the first

name that came into his head. I like to think there were previous attempts to give a false name.

“Name?”

*short pause* as he looks around and plays for time: “Err….Parliament….Barrels, at your service.”

He was subsequently tortured into a signed confession, and hung, thus giving birth to the multi-million-pound animal-scaring industry of daft fireworks, with even dafter names; we once discharged something called ‘Satanic Desecration’ in the carpark of the Pied Piper. The hole in the ground is still there, almost twenty-five years later. Perhaps the most striking irony of Fawkes’ legacy is that modern Royalists love fireworks- don’t you, Nunthorpe?- but the tradition stems from an attempt to spectacularly curtail the Establishment.

Whatever it is, it’s all very English, as the French will remind you.In the words of a cross-Channel chum of mine:

“We, as French people, cannot understand a nation that would celebrate a failed attempt to kill it’s King.”

*Yeah, you heard; ‘bombfire.’ That’s what we call it round ‘ere. And it’s turnips**, NOT pumpkins for Halloween.

** The most unmarketable vegetable of them all. No supermarket ad campaign could make hollowing out a turnip a fun way to spend time.

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Strange Influences

Posted on October 24, 2023 by Mark Hayes

Not everyone will be influenced by the same books. There are probably people in the world who don’t appreciate Wuthering Heights. There are people who fail to be drawn in to Fahrenheit 451. There may even be people in the world, strange wrong people, who have never read Roddy the Roadman.

Actually given that last one is an obscure children’s novel written by the wonderfully named Phyliss Arkle and first published in 1970 and I was forced to read to my mother for half an hour each night when I was about eight or nine, I am fairly sure that few people have read and been deeply influenced by that book, and its sequels, because they have been out of print for many years. That I was forced to read to my mother was not, I should note, any form of cruelty on her part. I struggled with English, more specifically reading, due to being dyslexic (which was not diagnosed till I was about twelve). Teacher couldn’t get me to read, mum could, so she did,. every night for several years.

The Roddy the Roadman series had a central conceit that fascinated me as a child and that in turn encouraged me to read them. Which is to say I’d only complain to the minimal required amount about having to read them to mum. This conceit was that the figures in road signs could come alive in the early hours when the people of the town were abed. Roddy himself was a men at work sign. The one oft confused, by the human boy who discovers the road-signs are coming alive, as the man opening an umbrella in a strong wind…

I have not read these books for over forty years. Tempting through it would be to track down a copies of them now for nostalgia sake I suspect they would fail to live up to my vague but glorious recollections. That said, they are out of print and so go for upwards of £100 a book in ‘library’ condition. So some bibliophiles out there have long memories for forgotten childhood treasures. I am not therefore alone in my affection for this somewhat forgotten series.

Whats my point, you may ask. Well simply this, every book, by every author, has the potential to have a profound effect on a reader, may be not many readers, maybe not always for the good (E L James for example was responsible for a upswing in light bondage sales, all the while being an utterly dreadful representation of sub/dom relationships. As well as just being so badly written.)

Yes I have gone from talking about a beloved children’s took to slating 50 Shades of Grey, whats your point?

In any regard, Phyllis Arkle manged to be an extraordinary influence on the young me. Mum didn’t buy these books, I got them out on my library card, I picked them because of a central and frankly ridiculous conceit. I read them, to my mum, because I wanted to read them. Because they fired my imagination and made me want to read more.

Despite dyslexia. Despite a morbid fear of reading aloud (to anyone but my mum). Despite it being a slow process that took years to really come to grips with . I read Roddy the Roadman and I’ve never really stopped reading since then and inspire my love of books, reading and of course writing…

So if you are ever looking for someone to blame for everything I have ever written, her names Phyllis Arkle… Bless her cotton socks.

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The Snail Telegraph by Jessica Law

Posted on October 20, 2023 by Mark Hayes

Introduction by Mark

Regular readers will be aware I have a workaday interest in quantum theory. In particular what fascinates me are ‘spooky’ particles as they can be interpreted to explain a spiritual connection to, well, everything. Having a degree that is partially in philosophy and being drawn to the pagan helps with this. It is why I have come to consider myself to be a Quantum Pagan. As this all more or less fits together as a personnel belief system. Which is to say, it just kind of makes sense to me.

As I read today’s guest blog by the eclectic energetic entity that is Jessica Law, (yes I do read them before I publish them) I was reminded of spooky particles, and this got me thinking of how in essence modern quantum theory could actually be applied to the concept of the snail telegraph, or as it is also known pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, but then I am a romantic…

The Snail Telegraph by Jessica Law

The snail telegraph: why on earth did people think it would work?

There’s a live-action adaptation of the Japanese manga “One Piece” out at the moment, in which the characters use living “Transponder Snails” – molluscs with a telepathic connection – as telephones to communicate with each other. What viewers may not know is that this whimsical bit of surrealism is based on a real-life experiment even more bizarre than fiction.

Like a lot of strange things, it all started in the 1850s. The electric telegraph had recently been invented and was revolutionising long-distance communication. However, the system was still unreliable and expensive to maintain, so inventors across the world were striving to develop a cheaper and more efficient means of communication. Into the fray walked French occultist Jacques-Toussaint Benoît with an idea that was greeted with a surprising amount of acceptance, given how utterly ridiculous it was.

His idea was that, when snails mated, they formed a permanent psychic connection maintained by a special fluid that created an invisible thread between them, no matter the distance or the obstacles in between. Each mated pair was allotted to a letter of the alphabet, then separated and glued to conductive metal plates at opposite ends of the room (poor snails!). Benoît’s theory was that if you poked one of the pair, for example the letter “f” snail, it would produce a corresponding “Escargotic Commotion” in its partner, the other letter “f” snail, allowing the user to spell out words over long distances.

This idea took him surprisingly far. The manager of a Paris gymnasium gave him rooms and funding to build a prototype of his telegraph, totally taken with the idea. Within a year, members of the press attended a demonstration of the contraption. Despite Benoît walking back and forth between the two devices throughout, and the machine spelling out “gymoate” instead of “gymnase”, reporter Jules Allix was utterly convinced and gave it a shining review in French newspaper La Presse, suggesting ladies could carry the snails like a watch on their waist-chains.

Sadly, Benoît fled the scene before a second, more thorough test could be carried out, and was later seen wandering the streets of Paris, before dying in obscurity in 1852.

Benoît’s bubble might have burst in the end, but what surprises me is how far his idea did get. Even if Benoît was deliberately deceiving people, the fact remains that a good portion of them believed him. Which made me wonder: was the idea that snails were telepathic unique to Benoît, or was it a widely-held belief at that time? And if so, why?

First, we need to view it in the context of some of the other ideas floating about during that period. One popular theory was Animal Magnetism – or you might have heard it called Mesmerism, after its inventor Franz Mesmer, an 18th-century German doctor. Mesmer theorised that all living things had an invisible life force with which they could physically affect other organisms from afar. This theory was a big inspiration for Benoît. But if the telegraph was based on Animal Magnetism alone, surely Benoît could have used any animal – including humans. What made snails so good at being psychic? And why on earth did they have to mate first?

As a Biology graduate and longtime pet snail owner, I have a few personal theories. The first is that snail sex is weird…

To start out with, snails kiss by joining mouthparts – but that’s where the cuteness ends. To avoid clashing shells, snails’ reproductive organs reside in their necks, and it’s from this location that the snails shoot calcareous “love darts” (basically limestone harpoons) into each other’s bodies. This might have led people to believe that a part of one snail was permanently embedded in the other snail after separation.

This is significant: in some circles, flesh transplantation was already thought to create a telepathic connection between the donor and the recipient. 17th-century esoteric cultists the Rosicrucians even exchanged skin grafts tattooed with the alphabet, in a style very similar to the snail telegraph. Indeed, it was this idea that Benoît based his experiment on.

But that’s not all. The snail’s love dart also evokes the myth of Cupid’s arrow: the strongest and most lasting romantic bond that could exist between two beings. Originally, it was probably the other way round: the snail’s courtship routine probably inspired the Ancient Greeks to dream up the tale of Cupid and his amorous ammunition. But what’s accuracy in the face of a great story?

These love darts contain a pheromone which stimulates reproduction, prompting the snails to join at the neck and exchange sperm. When they do, their necks appear to merge and they secrete a huge amount of foamy mucus, almost as if they are dissolving into one animal – or forming the invisible fluid that Benoît was convinced connected the snails forever more. Garden snails are hermaphrodites, so both snails go away fertilised and able to lay eggs, and the overall courtship routine takes hours and hours.

All of these factors probably contributed to the genuine and fairly common 19th-century belief that snail romance was a higher, more noble form of lovemaking than the comparatively cursory human process. One that could form an eternal bond that surpassed time and space. What a romantic way to view our common garden gastropods!

And really, was the concept any weirder than some of the ideas knocking around today? At this very moment, 3% of British people believe a single molecule of arsenic dissolved in water can cure their illness, and 12 million USA citizens think we are secretly ruled over by alien lizards. Only history can be the judge.

About the author ( by mark )

Jessica Law is a musician, singer, writer, children’s author, blogger, quite possibly a ghost inhabiting an anatomical dolls body, a roller of mini cheese, the morally ambiguous queen of the fay realm, obsessed with obscure Italian mythic poetry and is occasionally exhausted but still manages to have more energy than anyone else.

She also like snails…

You can find her music, which is both unique and wonderful in equal measure on Bandcamp.

Alternatively you can just shout at your smart speaker, tell it to play Jessica Law and it will. I have surprisingly never tried this, I will be rectifying this later… Apparently this doesn’t actually make Jessica sing to you, just recordings of her songs, but maybe there are some spooky particles involved and she will find herself compelled by unseen forces connecting us all to suddenly start singing if enough people shout play Jessica Law at their smart speakers at the same time. We should definitely try that all together at midnight on Saturday…

Jessica’s own blog, which see updates at least once every 2 years can be found here. And you can follow her on Instagram here. So why would you not want to read more and follow her…

Apparently she has also written and published a novel that she tells no one about. That I was utterly unaware of until she mentioned it in passing when she emailed me this blog. Honestly I despair sometimes… Its only available in eBook… but is on amazon , or smashwords .

It may become available in paperback after someone offers ( with tenacious Yorkshire determination) to typeset it for paperback as they, and at least one outlaw want to hold the book in their hands.

Posted in amreading, blogging, dreamlands, fantasy, humour, indie writers, indieoctober, music, writing music | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Breaking Reality in Gloucester by Nimue Brown

Posted on October 18, 2023 by Mark Hayes

Introduction by Mark

Nimue Brown is one of my favourite authors and one of my favourite people. Despite this I invariably mispronounce her name, I’m a bit useless like that, I read a word and how it sounds in my head is how it is pronounced, and once a pronunciation takes root in my head its hard to shift. As penance for this terrible crime, a year ago I offered to typeset a novel for her*.

*most of this is true, apart from the penance bit, I enjoy typesetting…

The Novel in question was Spells for the Second Sister, which was a particular delight to work on. It’s a wonderfully weird, yet insightful, and entirely strange novel about the life of the Kathleen. We start with her as a fourteen year old angry teenager and then each progressive chapter is set set at intervals of seven years, so twenty-one, twenty-eight, Thirty-five etc. As you can see from the contents page graphic below I put together for the paperback edition…

Isn’t that lovely, the weird titles of each chapter are Nimue’s obviously but the lay out an snazzy graphics and layout are mine. As is the glaring error.

Now, if you’re observant you might spot the grievous error I made with the contents page. The contents page that is in the final book and is part of every paperback copy of the novel, that I didn’t; spot until I had a copy of the paperback in my hand. The novel I typeset for a friend… The novel where, and this is important, every chapter is set seven years after the previous one… So fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, Thirty-five and so on…

If you spot the glaring error on my part, don’t tell Nimue… I’m hoping she doesn’t notice I’m a blithering idiot. Luckily she is very unlikely to read the introduction to a guest blog by whoever is the guest blogger today…

Breaking Reality in Gloucester By Nimue Brown

Spells for the Second Sister is a madcap alternate realities kind of
story set around Gloucester.  This is the Gloucester that lives in my
head, although to more steampunk shenanigans we get into the mix, the
more real my version becomes. Frankly, the Drag King in Yellow would
not have felt out of place in this story.

Here’s a little bit of it.

So I went to the sinister mouse circus. For the escapism. “Existential
crisis guaranteed,” said the Dormouse. Door Mouse. Whatever. “Personal
unease, mild disaffection, the kind of apathy you can have before
lunch without ruining your appetite entirely.”

Inside the circus, it was dark. There were noises; some giggling, and
shuffling sounds. I detected a lingering smell of sawdust and wee. Or
popcorn. Hard to be sure. Uncomfortable wooden seats. Every now and
then, someone played a single note on what sounded like a badly tuned
triangle. I got up to leave, but there were no exit signs. I blundered
about in the dark, banging into things. None of them felt like people
but some of them complained anyway. I slipped in something and bashed
my knee on something else and the stitches went in my stomach and I
could feel the blood and entrails coming out.

The lights came up then, revealing a lone mouse in a pink tutu,
wobbling on a unicycle, and me, doing a one woman impression of a
zombie apocalypse. The actual people in the audience started screaming
and running away – I guess they got their money’s worth. The circus
mice offered me thread, and a contract to work full time with them.

Mugged by Neo-Neolithics. It has been a day. I’d assumed they were
from one of the other Gloucesters, having seen a few of them from afar
before now. Close up is a whole other experience. They smelled rank
enough to seem authentic, but some of them were distinctly wearing fur
fabric and those who had skins clearly didn’t know much about skin
preparation and even less about how to use flint tools.

They mugged me for my shopping. I tried telling them bread was exactly
the thing people on paleo diets don’t eat and that my processed cheese
was certainly not going to do them any good. This is when I learned
that they call themselves Neo-Neolithics.

“It’s not the fucking paleo diet, right? It’s not a dairy free, gluten
free lifestyle.”

“So, what is it then?” I asked, still clinging to my proto-lunch.

“Hunter gatherer, living off the land, off our wits. Fuck industry.
Fuck work. Fuck capitalism. Fuck contemporary western civilization.”

I admit to having had a hard time taking them seriously. “So you’re
what, foraging me?

“No, we’re mugging you,” one of them helpfully explained, and then
they grabbed my bag and ran off with it, leaving a trail of moulting
animal fur behind them.

Here’s me reading a bit (not this bit)

If you’re interested in reading the whole thing, you can grab the *free ebook version over here – *(throw money at me if you feel so moved, but it’s totally ok to have a free one. It’s a bit like a gateway drug, in theory).

There’s also a print version over here –

Complicated barter arrangements are also an option, but you’ll have to talk to me about that. *

Final note by Mark,

*Nimue is on Bluesky , Twitter , has two blogs here and here and can be found on other bits of the internet is you look hard enough, or just make a small amount of effort to be honest because she is everywhere and marvellous… But if you do reach out, don’t tell her about the twenty-eight error. I think I have got away with it…

One final, final note. I am going to fix the error, so the current paperbacks out there in the world will be the valuable rare first editions with the glaring typesetting error that turn up at auctions in twenty years time. Clearly you should buy a copy while you can still get the rare first edition versions, and this was clearly my plan all along…*

*Also, its brilliant and you should read it, did i mention that?

Posted in amreading, amwriting, book reviews, books, fantasy, fiction, indie novels, indie writers, indieoctober, reads | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Observations… by Roz White

Posted on October 13, 2023 by Mark Hayes

As is my want in October I have opened up the blog to guest posts, in part to encourage those shy retiring beasts writers to leave there shells and case a little light on the thoughts that pass for what we shall laughingly called sanity, in there minds. Sometimes this leads to strange and wonderful places as authors are a strange lot as a whole… Occasionally they just write a piece of fiction but we let them off as its an entertaining bit of fiction. Also I do this all the time so who am I to argue…

What follows therefore is a story by Roz White, from the perspective of one of her creations Professor Prudence Weatherpenny, whom is the principal character of one Roz’s series. And not entire true to her name as she does seem a little imprudent at times*

*yes you have heard that joke before, its in my Play ‘The Drag king in Yellow’ and no it wasn’t particularly funny then either…

Observations on the Potential Arising of Demons or other Apparitions in Unexpected Places such as Food: (by Roz White)

From the Notebooks and Journals of Professor Prudence Weatherpenny

A knife can be a very dangerous thing, it appears. Now, I appreciate that this might appear to be a totally obvious and indeed superfluous statement: knives on the whole are intended to be dangerous, it is the very point of them (forgive the pun).

But on this occasion, the knives and other implements I and some of my associates carry on a day-to-day basis are not the subject of my musings, oh no. This time, it has been brought home to me rather forcefully that even allowing for its serrations, a bread-knife can be a bringer of doom, destruction and danger.

I had better explain, perhaps. It was a fairly ordinary day – well, actually, given that I began it in my own bed, in my own house, it was really not that ordinary; being a Professor of the Arcane, the Peculiar and the plain, downright Weird, a night in one’s own bed – a night unassailed by demons, ghosts or other supernatural denizens of the night, to boot! – is a rare and wondrous thing indeed. I actually awoke refreshed and bright-eyed – relishing the feeling of a soft mattress and a warm blanket over me, if I am being frank. There have been too many instances just lately of attempting to sleep on park-benches, railway-platforms, the floors of various hostelries…

But to resume: I awoke, I rose from my bed and, clad in a dressing-gown over my night-wear and a warm pair of slippers, proceeded downstairs. Sadly the marvel of a regular night’s sleep had not extended to the roiling Realm of Chaos that is my kitchen, and the mess of the last… er… well, as I have explained already, I am not often at home these days. I really should advertise for a housekeeper, except that I doubt I could persuade any of quality to suffer the surprises and peculiarities my house tends to extend to visitors. For similar reasons, I rather think getting a maid is also out of the question.

I eventually found the kettle, however, and after a little further exploration discovered the range to be lit and ready for me. The tea-caddy appears largely immune to the insanity that often surrounds it, thankfully, and my cups are kept (usually) in a securely locked cupboard in an attempt to curb their more adventurous natures. So there was every likelihood of tea in due course; what, I wondered, did I wish to have with it? Another look towards the range suggested that attempting to fry anything might not be appreciated just then, and there was no guarantee that the bacon was still edible, nor that any leftover eggs had not hatched into… something. Perhaps some toast-and-honey?

My honey generally comes from a reliable source, and after a thousand or two years in a dry, underground environment does not appear to have suffered unduly. But did I have bread? I made a cautious way through the kitchen, around the table and the laundry-rack (which has a habit of lying in ambush for me if I am unwary), towards the pantry where the bread-bin resides. Yes, there was bread! It wasn’t even showing signs of changing colour or growing a fur-coat yet, so toast could well be on the menu.

And now, Esteemed Colleagues, we come back to the bread-knife, with my apologies for what might appear to be interminable rambling – but I do feel it important to set the scene, as it were. I took up the aforementioned implement – it acquiesced readily enough – and cut into the bread; but! Imagine my shock and surprise when, instead of the well-baked and even-coloured image of bread I might have expected, I found holes – holes in the form of a face!

Not a very happy face, either, I have to say: two apertures resided just below the crust, as if using it as eyebrows, and a larger one where a mouth might be imagined, its corners turned down as if howling, or perhaps simply enraged at being disturbed. In fairness, I do wonder how I might react if my own head were suddenly cut into; conversely, I had spent good pennies on this loaf and I wanted toast! So I made another cut, thereby isolating this potentially demonic slice, skewered it with my toasting-fork and proceeded back to the range in order to brown it sufficiently for my honey to melt. I rather hastily put the rest of the loaf back into the bread-bin, and I have not found the fortitude to examine it since.

That is also a matter of some concern, if I am being totally honest. I ate the toast, it was very good, and I am not aware of any after-effects in my physiology. But what of the loaf from which it came? Is it still angry with me? Is it, even now, hatching plans for some worrying and demonic form of vengeance? Just whose face have I eaten? 

Moreover, what if mine was not the only such loaf? What if the very Bakery itself was the target of this otherworldly infestation and we now face an attack from the very hearts of all our kitchens and pantries? I think what concerns me most of all about such an occurrence is that in all probability I will have to venture out from my fireside to unearth and then deal with such an event, and I was already rather getting fond of sleeping in my own soft bed!

Respectfully Submitted to The Society,

Prudence Weatherpenny (Professor) (Independent)

You can find more about Roz White and her books on her Amazon Page here

Posted in amreading, fiction, indie writers, indieoctober, steampunk | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Masks

Posted on October 13, 2023 by Mark Hayes

This is a post about masks derived from an old posts about masks from 2017. In 2017 I was still writing the first Hannibal Smyth novel, COVID was yet to be a thing and I was not the same person I am now… I reread that original post for reasons… and the middle section stood out. This is a reworking of that original post based on how much I have changed, six years and a lifetime later…

Everyone wears masks…

I know that this is a cynical viewpoint to hold but it doesn’t make it any less true. Some of us, however, wear more masks than others. Some of us wear masks over our mask because woe betides we let one slip then at least we have another mask to hide behind. That is the point of masks after all. They are there to hide behind, to obscure our true selves from those who might seek to know us.

It is, and always remains, a truism that the more insecure we feel, the more insular we become, and thus the more masks we wear. Masks of confidence to hide those insecurities. Masks of bluster to hide our lack of confidence, masks of cynicism to excuse the bluster…. and so on.

Then of course there are always those most pernicious of masks, masks of humour.

Oh but it’s so much easier to make a joke out of something than face a problem head on. We build masks of smiles designed to hide our depression from the world. We grin , we laugh, we make a joke of it all and never let the world see we are broken inside. Cracked porcelain facades just waiting to shatter.

We all wear masks even if don’t know we do. Masks protect us from what we fear by obscuring our true selves from all, an all that includes ourselves. For our darkest fear of all, is the fear of letting all the masks slip, just once, not in front of anyone else, but in front of a mirror so that we can seeing ourselves for who we truly are are.

I have always found it hard to let my guard down, to let a few, just a few, of those masks fall away because I really, really, don’t do people. From my perspective everyone else seems to know how to interact with people. Everyone seems so much better at being a person that I am, and if they are hiding behind masks, they are seamless disguises… Yet I know this isn’t true either.

Don’t misunderstand me when I say ‘I don’t do people’. I don’t mean I cannot deal with people, can’t interact with them, or can’t seem to be one of them. It’s just I’m one of those people you meet in the kitchen at parties, the one who sits on the edge of everything talking quietly to those who might listen or just to himself. And I am not unhappy about this, this is not one of the causes of my occasional bouts of depression. On the edge of things is where I prefer to be. I wear black a lot, its suitable for all occasions. It lets you merge into the shadows just a little if you keep to the edge. (And yes I also have every Sister’s of Mercy album, what of it?)

Basically, I am not good with people, I have found I don’t like them as a rule, people in general that is, I like individuals. Which is why I have a few really good friends and very few casual acquaintances. Small talk has never been a skill I really managed to learn, and its why I have a mortal dread of actually talking to people about my novels. I have never found a way to reply to that most awkward of questions ‘what’s it about…?’ not least because I expect I will look like a bumbling fool when I do. 

Six years ago I really needed to find a ‘confident writer guy’ mask to wear, but I was not even sure I know how to make one… Yet somehow I have cobbled one together of the intervening time. I have grown as an individual, I am older, wiser and in many ways happier. I have a larger circle of people I would call friends, if i was the kind of person who would call people who’s continued existence I cherish ‘friend’, I may have even done so…

I have fewer bouts of darkness and the masks, well some have slipped a little…

Occasionally, just once in a while, but occasionally all the same, I can stand before the mirror and take off the last mask.

Occasionally when do, I even open my eyes.

Posted in big questions, depression, opinion | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Are you ready for the apocalypse? by Liz Tuckwell

Posted on October 12, 2023 by Mark Hayes

Introduction by Mark :

Elizabeth Tuckwell is a fellow Harvey Duckman writer and the aunt of an old friend of mine. These two things are not connected and we were unaware of the second connection till the old friend read a Harvey that contained stories by both of us and pointed this out. the world is small and full of coincidences…

Elizabeth is also in all likelihood not a distant decedent of Frier Tuckwell of Kirklees Priory cira 1107. Neither was he that Frier Tuckwell, who is entirely fictional, but was played brilliantly by Phil Rose in Robin and Sherwood between 1984 and 1986. Frier tuck was also played with some gusto by Mike McShane in 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a movie that featured a great scene in which from a tree in Northumberland you can see Nottinghamshire. Some one recently cut down that tree in an act of vandalism which quite rightly made everyone angry.

However, I would posit that the fate of a single ‘famous’ tree that was once in a movie with Kevin Costner, pales in comparison to the felling of the rain forests of Brazil for palm oil plantations, and perhaps, just perhaps, having the same amount of rage about Palm oil as we do about the felling of a sycamore tree beside a wall some roman order built 1800 years ago would be more likely to help avert the common end of civilisation… Which brings me to the question Liz asked herself when writing the guest blog below… *

*wow that was convoluted even for me wasn’t it…

Are you ready for the apocalypse? I’m not.

I recently watched an episode of the TV series of The Day of the Triffids with my niece. She loves the book and told me she’s read it at least eleven time after I gave her a copy of the original Penguin Paperback with the cute line drawing of a triffid. The Day of the Triffids is a cosy catastrophe. It’s also relevant today as one of the two main causes of the the catastrophe is Man’s greed.

It has one of the best openings of any novel ever.

“When a day that happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”

Anyway, it struck me while watching it, that electric cars would be pretty useless after an apocalypse. Where are you going to be able to charge up your car? I have an electric car.

It then got me thinking about apocalypses generally and I realised how useless I would be. I don’t have food or even more importantly, water, hoarded. I’m not an expert in any martial art. I can’t shoot and don’t have any stockpile of weapons, which I usually think is a Good Thing. I’ve never read a book or watched any YouTube videos about survivalist tactics.

And even worse, I live in London and even I know that when the apocalypse comes, you really don’t want to be in a large urban area.

And then there’s the Zombie Apocalypse. I really would be even more useless because I don’t like looking at zombies. They turn my stomach. I’m assuming this wouldn’t help while you’re trying to bash their brains out. The only three Zombie films I’ve watched to the end are Shaun of the Dead, World War Z and 28 Days Later. I started watching the sequel to 28 Days, 28 Weeks Later. I’ve never watched The Walking Dead or Fear The Walking Dead or any of the classic zombie films such as Night of the Living Dead. I have therefore gleaned no useful tips.

So, I’ve come to the conclusion that come the apocalypse, zombie or otherwise, I’m doomed. Are you?

Liz Tuckwell is a regular contributor to the Harvey Duckman Presents anthologies and the author of Moonsleep and Other Stories, a collection of darkish fantasy and horror short stories.

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Dear Edgar ~14: Four Beasts in One

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Mark Hayes

‘Glory of the East,’ thou art in danger of mastication! 

This is clearly either on of the finest sentences ever written, or a really odd typo to find in the middle of an Edgar Allen Poe story. So lets go with the former, and appreciate it for what it is, a really bizarre but somehow wonderfully understated sentence.

The ‘Glory of the East’ in question is Epiphanes king of Syria. As to why his is ‘in danger of mastication!’ well he chose to dress himself up as a cameleopard, half camel, half leopard in order to enact the public execution of a thousand Jewish prisoners before an adoring crowd. An act that so enrages the domesticated animals of the city of Antioch that they riot through the crowd and chase the king in an effort to eat him. Hence the rather imprecise cry from the crowd, which should have been.

‘Glory of the East,’ thou art in danger of being masticated! 

Now, as I chose to start this entry of Dear Edgar with a short discussion on just one sentence in the middle of a story, rather than speaking about the story as a whole, you might infer that I was struggling to say anything about this story…

You would be right…

The problem with this story is it is a whole lot of nothing, interspersed with long meandering rambles of word soup descriptions that at no point hold your interest. If it is comedy the joke misses it target, if it is a window on to antiquity it fails to inspire. It is dull and torrid and just not very interesting. If Poe had not written this then the impact on the echelons of human achievement would be nil. As it is the only reason it gets read and is remembered is because of its author.

Which is why, as you may have noticed if you are following this series of blogs, Dear Edgar has been on hiatus for a couple of months, because after the high point of Shadow: A Parable, I read this and could not find a word worth saying about it. I left it a while then read it again, and then left it a while longer and so on… And still I can’t find much to say about it because it is a whole lot of nothing. It was also the last story published of his published in the Southern Literary Messenger for six years and this was also the beginning of the end his association with the magazine on an editorial front. Though a couple of his poems were published there in then January of the follow year.

In essence this story is told to you by the narrator who invites you to look at events in the past. think of this as an antiquarian giving you a power point lecture, who randomly sings a couple of hymns at you along the way. I say power point, actually its more like a bad slide show, and the narrator is either drunk, or had a failing memory. Possibly both.

Don’t get me wrong, I am sure Poe researched the period, and certainly Epiphanes is a historical figure, who did quite horrendous things to captured enemies and is documented as doing some quite mad things in general, so none of this is actually that much of a stretch, but it is just dull for the most part. An intellectual exercise that recreates on the page what you could find in hundreds you tube speculative history documentaries, but without the narrative charm.

THE DEADEST OF RAVENS, ONE THAT IS TRUELY NEVERMORE…

Should you read it: No… Just no…

Bluffers fact: Epiphanes, was a name adopted by many kings of the Hellenistic period. In Greek it means  ‘God Manifest’ or possibly just ‘the Glorious one’. So no ego’s there…

Posted in amreading, book reviews, Dear Edgar, Poe, reads, retro book reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Short Review Friday

Posted on October 6, 2023 by Mark Hayes

In a effort to get on top of the list of books I have read, intend to review, but have not reviewed yet pile, here is a short review lacking my normal wittering preamble, you will probably not be disappointed to discover…

The Forging of Lady Ghast by Roz White

This is very much a book of two half’s. I enjoyed both, but the second half stands out as the half of the book I enjoyed most. In fairness to Roz, this makes sense, and is a good thing.

Having said that it would be remiss of me not to explain why the first half of the book didn’t entirely ring with me personally. While I found the latter half of the book more to my taste as a reader there was plenty in the first half to keep me reading, the style and quality of the writing is excellent. My problem was simply I did not like Cora Ghast, the central character. She was, for my taste, far too much a woe is me, upper class, objectionable snob. As a character I found it hard to identify with her, or perhaps more importantly care what happened to her.

In effect Cora was a certain kind of cardboard cut out of a steampunk Lady with a capital ‘L’ , that I have always found irritating. Its a character that turns up in other writers work quite often, though generally as a secondary character, who just annoys me as they seem to be there more to represent the upper echelons of society as a back drop than as a character of real depth. Good writers can pull this off, and Roz manages to do so admirably, but it is still not a character with whom I find any natural affinity. And as a main character in particular I found her labour-some.

But I kept reading, because the story was intriguing and there was a lot going on…

The title of this novel is however ‘The Forging of Lady Ghast’ and there is a clue in the title. The main character is not whom she appears to be. And who she is in the beginning is perhaps exactly the annoying snobbish objectionable upper class woe is me character she needs to be, in order to go through the transformation the character undergoes in the second act.

This is because Lady Cora Ghast did not start out life as a lady. She married well, but now widowed she is forced to return to her roots which are among the seedier side of London. Her father is a major player in the criminal underworld of the city, whom unexpectedly (to her) welcomes her back into the fold, and helps her plan her revenge. It is then we start to see the real Lady Ghast, a far more interesting and likeable character. Some one you can invest in, cheer for and fear for. Which is why the second half of the book shone for me.

There is a lot going on in Lady Ghast’s world. A lot of threads are left deliberately loose at the end, and there is a lot of odd strangeness and oddities. Roz has given themselves a large sand pit to play in in later novels. And Forged a central character in this one that is involving and fun. There is also some very well researched snippets in here, a young HG Wells turns up briefly having go himself in a tricky situation over a woman and some debts… There are other little gems berried in here as well which made me smile.

All in all its a fun read I can recommend and the rest of the series is intriguing after this.

One small note, the typesetting on the paperback version is not ideal, if that is the kind of thing that puts you off a book then I advise you get the kindle version.

Normal wittering preambles will be back next time, probably, because the lack of a good witter about something to start with just seems wrong…

Posted in amreading, book reviews, reads, steampunk | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Pagan feasting

Posted on October 5, 2023 by Mark Hayes

For want of a better definition I am a Quantum Pagan. Which is to say I have a workaday understanding of Quantum physics, and I believe both science and pagan spirituality to be in a quest for answers and the underlying truth of the universe. One approaches the questions of reality and the universe through the pursuit of testable facts, thesis, and theories, the other through the pursuit of faith, our connection to the natural world, ritual, and the commonality of ancestral experience.

I am not going to go deeply into the concepts and ideas of my personal faith in this particular blog, but I thought it worth mentioning at the outset, given the subject matter of this post. For anyone interested in the subject however I have written on the subject extensively but the most pertinent of my blogs on the subject can be found here , here and (he says with a rye smile ) here…

In any regard, this blog is not about my personal belief system but something broader and a tad more traditional, as it concerns a layperson’s guide to the wheel of the year. This, if you are unaware, is an ancient framework to pagan belief systems that dates back to the dawn of human spirituality, or as it is otherwise known the 1970’s…

Yes, I am being slight flippant here as you may have guessed but it is ostensibly correct that in its current form ‘The Wheel of the Year’ or the four major and 4 minor sabbats that frame most general contemporary pagan belief systems, is an modern invention. All be it drawn from various interpretations of ancient rituals and feast days. This doesn’t make it or paganism any less valid however.

Unlike the ridged structures and beliefs of the mainstream monotheistic religions pagans are oft encouraged by their fellow pagans to find their own way in their spiritual life. That is not to say guidance is not offered, or that there is a lack of teachers. But what you practise and how you practise is far more a matter of the personal interpretations than the structured interpretations of a ‘church’. How a pagan seeks to connect to the divine, be it in a group or individually is not for anyone else to say. There is no hierarchy beyond that which exists within small groups.

I’m explaining all this because I’ve always had a vague awareness of the history and the wheel itself. I have always been somewhat sporadic in my paganism. Some feast I celebrate, Beltane Samhaim, Yule, mid summer… Others I merely nod towards at most. A sort of pick and mix paganism, that is not uncommon even among those who are more spiritually inclined than I. Paganism is a broad, forgiving and very personal church.

It does, for me, however require an openness and willingness to explore.

Which brings me to The Witches Feast by Lilian Brooks, a fascinating little book that is in part a history, in part reference guide and in part a cookbook with recipes for the various pagan feast of the wheel…

Lilian is a practising pagan and the writer of ‘The Whitby Witches’ novels, which is how she ended up writing this small none fiction guide to the wheel of the year, because her non-practising readers kept asking her questions about it in response to it coming up in the books, in particular the third novel which take place through a full turn of the wheel. She has also been sharing recipes on her newsletters and in the original editions of her novels. At some point doing the book probably just made sense in order to avoid the same questions coming up time after time…

Divided into nine sections, the introduction and then one for each spoke of the wheel, each section has an overview of beliefs and a history of the feast in question, along with ideas and suggestions for how you may wish to celebrate the feast and several recipes for food and drinks that fits the season and the feast in question.

While it doesn’t pretend to be an academic text as such, it does give broad strokes and fascinating snippets of information. It certainly serves as a good introduction to the wheel and the foundations of pagan belief systems. What you will take from the book will vary from person to person. But it does form a useful and entertaining resource, even if you have a grounding in paganism to begin with . also there are recipes for cocktails.

I may not be much of a baker, but I am always happy to try a new cocktail…

Posted in big questions, book reviews, books, pagan, reads | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments