Now That’s What I Call Rubric: Guest Post by Will Nett

Posted on April 5, 2023 by Mark Hayes

Sir Willian Nettleton, fathered a string of bastards over the course of his fifteen years of being ‘lost’ on safari before he finally returned to Cape Town when the gin ran out. He went on to die of consumption in 1837 on the journey back to Teesside…

He was however not the first Sir William Nettleton, the first served in the court of Queen Elizabeth the first, and rose to the distinguished rank of as lord warden of the water closest, but never advanced beyond his post of holder of the royal wet cloth on a stick. Sir William also managed to explored no where, didn’t discover a vegetable, was crap at bowls and when the Spanish armada was spotted off Plymouth hoe he was in bed with a lady of negotiable pleasure in Plymouth, so ironically at the time of the attempted invasion he was spotted on a Plymouth… We will leave that there.

The current Willam Nettleton who can trace his roots back to Devon in January 1589, though for some reason he shortens his professional name to appear cooler and writes as Will Nett… Occasionally Will Nett sends me blog posts , they tend to be entertaining, well received, deceptively intelligent reads… He normally does this when he has a new book coming out. If he has a new one out this time however he hasn’t bothered to tell me.

Please note I made most of the above up… Most of it.

This gentleman with the Codex Gigas, gives us a sense of scale.
He is not Will Nett
The real Will can not pull off a moustache like this chap clearly can.

Now That’s What I Call Rubric: by Will Nett

I do NOT want to hear about your writer’s block; not anymore, you lazy pack of shirkers. Not now I’ve seen what’s capable when you throw on your cassock, moisten your quill tip, and settle in for an evening of furious penmanship. This is precisely what a largely-unknown Bohemian monk- possibly the appropriately named Herman the Recluse- did, around 1000 years ago when he sat down to write the book that appears before me now. The Codex Gigas is a 620-page behemoth that weighs approximately as much as my first car; a Ford Escort Ghia with fully-retractable aerial. It’s stored deep beneath the streets of Stockholm in Sweden’s National Library in Humlegarden Park, Ostermalm. The book, that is; not the car. The three-floor descent to access it seems apt as, notwithstanding the gargantuan effort involved in writing it, the work is probably best-known for its seemingly tenuous inclusion of the Devil, who gurns madly from page 290 like a loin cloth-clad Ftumch. (Google him if you’re under 40).

He’s squatting in his underwear with arms raised after a night of prodding and bullying our heroic author into finishing the 3-foot high tome, much the same way that modern day blog editors do now. Apparently written entirely in one evening, the author was of course largely undistracted by Love Island, social media and the goings on across the road at no. 91. Aside from the romantic ideal of an isolated monk hounded into action by a belligerent sprite such as Satan, are the facts of the matter. Specifically, that to have produced such an undertaking would have required the author to write continuously for 6 hours a day, for 6 days a week, for 5 years, which is only a slightly-less intense work rate than that of peak-era Stephen King. Given that the Codex author was a monk, he would likely have been occupied concurrently with his monastical duties; administering bowl haircuts; washing his arse in a stream; eating pebbles etc, and therefore it would have taken even longer to complete. All this considered, experts believe it may have taken anything up to 30 years to finish. Again, this is a rate of endeavor that most current authors, and certainly this one, could only dream of. The Codex went through the usual historical upheaval of various war-fuelled disasters, being fought over by the Hussites and Catholics, and was then sold on to various monasteries. It found it’s way into the private collection of Emperor Rudolf II in the late 15th century, where it remained until 1648 before being claimed as war booty by the Swedish army. It was thereafter kept in Stockholm for a largely uneventful 375 years, but for one comedic episode in 1697 when a fire at Tre Konor Royal cCastle saw the book thrown from a window to preserve it, which it duly did, but not before it crushed a member of the public who happened to be passing by.

The contents, all in Latin, are a smorgasbord of religious texts, from sections of the Vulgate Bible to Chronica Boermorum (Google that if you’re under 900 years old), and everything in-between; spell-casting tips; recipes; the Hebrew alphabet. Think of it as a medieval compilation album; Now That’s What I Call Rubric, if you will. Despite the legends surrounding the Codex, one of the most curious things about its author, effectively a ghost writer, is largely forgotten, and instead we’re still talking about the Devil after all this time.

The Codex is kept at the Swedish National Library (King’s Library), in Ostermalm, Stockholm.

Now get back to work.

Will Nett’s first book, My Only Boro: A Walk Through Red & White, is currently the subject of a treasure hunt that has captured the imagination of shovel-wielding sleuths from all over Teesside. Part of the detective work required is finding the specific tweets involved because the link Will sent Mark to put on this blog post doesn’t work…

Posted in amreading, amwriting, books, humour, indie, indie writers, IndieApril, opinion, pointless things of wonderfulness, reads, writes, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Unblocking the Dam: Guest Post by Kate Baucherel

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Mark Hayes

Introduction by Mark

All the thoughts and considerations I write down in these blogs are of course endlessly fascinating… Occasionally other people’s thoughts are however far more interesting than mine. So here’s Kate Baucherel, fellow Harvy Duckman author, expert in anything with the words cyber or crypto in fount of them, black belt in some form of violent sport or other and occasional drinker of Guinness, with some interesting thoughts. I think this sort of thing should be encouraged…

Unblocking the Dam By Kate Baucherel

I don’t think I’d ever suffered from writer’s block. Sure, there are those times when you stare at a blank page and remember that it’s hard to edit one of those. You just start writing words to fill the space and they eventually resolve themselves into something with a life of its own that can be tweaked and moulded into a compelling story. The thing that caught me out just a few weeks ago was quite different. I’d always thought of writer’s block as a brick wall, something where you push through and the next idea is on the other side. This was different.

Five books in to a series, with characters all doing their own things and tackling challenges that change them, it should be a fairly easy ride. There’s a certain amount of housekeeping to ensure that the familiar tropes and character quirks are covered. An appearance by Donald the Cat is a requirement, as is a comment on the practicality or otherwise of smart fridges, and one day I will write down what coffee they all prefer rather than hunting back through the earlier books to check. There are threads to tug on from previous books. There is a need to make the story stand alone as far as possible with an identifiable background and a new and yet more evil scheme for our heroine to foil.

And then there’s the tech. The world is moving ridiculously fast and while the first in the series, Bitcoin Hurricane, took a matter of a weeks from concept to completion and extrapolated the tech that I’d been working with for a few years, this was different. In Unstable Realities we are diving head first into the metaverse, opening up virtual and augmented reality with a fully hybrid Olympic games as the backdrop. My work has already taken me into Decentraland and the Sandbox, immersive conference venues, flying around Second Life and projecting shows into my living room with The Round. I’m comfortable with virtual worlds, but not all my readers will be. Conveying the wonders of that environment was a challenge, alongside getting the technical elements as close to reality as possible.

So much material, so many ideas… and therein lay the problem. After rattling away a quite a pace, with a deadline in my sights, the writing stopped. The ideas were all there. I could play each of the scenes in my head with dialogue, detail and clarity, but I couldn’t write them down. The river was dammed.

How did it burst? With determination and a handy pair of transatlantic flights. I normally spend those trips watching a slew of movies. Outbound, I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. There was no washing to do, no cats to play with, no emails or social media to distract me. 6,672 words went down on the laptop between Amsterdam and Atlanta. Then a week of extra inspiration – talks by people developing or using the metaverse, from the creators of Second Life and ChatGPT to people building avatars and reality apps, and even a DJ who uses augmented reality and 3D effects in his show. Another 4,350 words appeared on the way home, writing in airport lounges and cafés (I slept across the Atlantic this time).

The final few scenes were the hardest to write. The climax had lived in my head for so long that getting it down on paper was tough, but it felt like the final break of the dam wall, words pouring out onto the page. “The End” was a sweet moment of calm. Now the book is floating towards the mouth of the river, through editing and proofreading and typesetting and audio recordings. It’s release into the Amazon ocean is expected at the beginning of May.

Keep up to date with SimCavalier news and pre-order details at the SimCavalier Café – sign up here. And don’t forget you can find the first four SimCavalier books at the usual retailers on ebook, audiobook or paperback, or come and say hello and pick up some signed copies at SciFi Scarborough, 22-23 April.

Afterword by Mark

I too will be at Scarborough Scifi between the 22nd and 23rd of April, I’ll be on the table next to Kate, wearing my New Rocks so I don’t look too short in comparison to the overly tall Mrs Baucherel, along side a couple of other Harvey authors who are at least not taller than me.

Posted in amwriting, indie, indie writers, indiewriter, opinion, reads, sci-fi, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dear Edgar #4 Loss of Breath

Posted on March 29, 2023 by Mark Hayes

“What you have to bear in mind is, it was a different time…” ~ Anon

Don’t you just detest facile justifications like the one above..? I will admit, however, such justifications get easier to swallow as they gulf in years between a work being written and it being read grows ever wider. A story written in the 1920’s was certainly written in a different time, compared to a story written in the 1970’s. One is only fifty years ago, the other a century. One is my life time, the other double it. Attitudes change. What was and is acceptable, changes, I cringe when I see some stuff from the 70’s now, so add another half century and perhaps sometimes you do need to bear in mind that something was written in a different time…

I butted up against this problem a lot when I studied the complete works of Lovecraft, and if there was ever an author that required a reader to ‘bear in mind, it was a different time,’ it was old tentacle-hugger… Sometimes I gave him the benefit of the doubt, other times, no so much… A century ain’t far enough removed to allow basic racism, homophobia and misogyny a pass, no matter how wonderful some of his stories are. Up till now however this has not proved to be an issue reading our Dear Edgar…

Up to now that is, which doesn’t bode well when you are only four stories in. But this story opens with the narrator, Mr Lackobreath spending a good paragraph berating his wife of almost twenty four hours with a frankly rather vile torrent of verbal abuse. A torrent which could be forgiven in context of the story if it had any agency within it. If we needed to detest Mr Lackobreath for the story to work, or if there was any real reason for the existence of said passage. Frankly however there isn’t. What it is, is just a torrent of abuse issuing forth from a husband at his spouse of 24 hours because I presume Poe thought it was entertaining to have his narrator do this before he lost his breath…

It’s not…

It might have been a different time but frankly no one needs to read that paragraph. A paragraph that will be triggering for some people and is just not acceptable in this day and age. It might have been a different time, but that is no excuse and so I can not let it pass without at the very least giving a trigger warning…

All that said, 1830 is nigh on two centuries ago, if the ‘it was a different time argument holds any water at all then surely it hold some here and actually in terms of the story that ‘it was a different time’ is somewhat central to our understanding of why this story even exists. The Story is based firmly on a general mistrust of the medical profession and the outlandish quackery that was the staple of the profession at the time. As a premise this is almost lost on the modern reader. We live in an age of antibiotics, chemo-therapy, face-lifts and wonder drugs that we take for granted like ibuprofen, antihistamine’s and Insulin. Sure, there are some fringe elements of society sceptical about some aspects of modern medicine but most of accept the validity of most things medical in this day and age.

This is to say that the quacks in our modern age tend to be the ones who rail against medical wisdom rather than those who spout it. When Poe wrote ‘Loss of Breath’ however the reverse was very much the case. Modern medical practises were still very much in their infancy, and a whole lot of strange and wonderful treatments existed that no one would ever contemplate in our more enlightened age… Well, some of them we would but we would call it alterative medicine if we did…

If you doubt the quackery that was prevalent in the 1800’s and have a little spare time go read up about Doctor John Harvey Kellogg. Yes that Kellogg… Inventor and holder of the patient for the Kellogg Cornflake. I will apologise in advance however if reading about him put you off your breakfast cereal.

Among other things Kellogg was an ardent believer in water therapy, hot baths, cold baths and hose pipes where ‘the sun don’t shine’. Colonic irrigation might as well have been spelt Kellonic… He also believed firmly that the way to treat men who were ‘chronically addicted to masturbation’ was with adult circumcision without aesthetic, because the man who invented cornflakes believed that masturbation was the root of all evil, that it caused cancer of the womb, urinary diseases, nocturnal emissions, impotence, epilepsy, insanity, and mental and physical debility… And of course death… Of those who suffered from such ailments, he once stated without a wit of humour…

“such a victim literally dies by his own hand”

I shall not explain how he proposed to treated women in whom he diagnosed as afflicted with similar afflictions, including ‘nymphomania’ which is to say any woman who enjoyed any kind of sexual agency in her own right outside of the marriage bed, because frankly you don’t want to know. Just let me state it was horrendous.

Yes more horrendous that male genteel mutilation without anaesthetic… Much more horrendous… Occasionally research takes you down some dark dark alleyways and frankly I am never eating Kellogg’s cornflakes again…

In any regard when reading a story in which Poe lampoons the medical profession for all it is worth it’s worth bearing in mind that it was written twenty years before Doctor John Kellogg was even born… So imagine the strange and questionable practises on the fringes of medicine at the time…

A time when electricity was only just becoming a thing an average medical scientist could play with… This story was written only 14 years after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and the idea of reinvigorating human tissue with electricity was an exciting new science full of all kinds of possibilities for the medical profession… At the same time surgery was an evolving science and some surgeons had complex moral compasses about the sacrifice of the few for the benefit of the many. Dissection was a great way to learn new skills if the corpse was fresh enough, which was why Mr’s Burke and Hare had being undertaking their own unique solution to the freshness issue in Edinburgh again only 4 years before Poe put pen to paper…

Suffice to say the medical community were not held in the highest of esteem in 1830, making them a fair target for Poe’s satire. In the case of the medical profession, it really was a different time… That however is also the essence of the issue’s I have with Dear Edgar’s ‘Loss of Breath’ It is all of its time and while that doesn’t excuse the horrendous misogyny of opening passage, it does explain all you really need to know about the rest of story. Mr Lackobreath in the midst of berating his with suddenly losses the ability to breath. He doesn’t die, he just can’t talk and doesn’t breathe. Of course at first his main issue with this strange affliction is that he can not longer berate his wife… And so he geos into hiding so she doesn’t realise what has happened to him…

What follows after is perhaps his due. As the narrator has a series of misadventures at the hands of the medical profession who keep assuming he is dead so dissect him , shock him, break his bones to practise setting them and a dozen other things. All the whole he is conscious and unable to breath. The problem with all of this is mostly its hard to care and the modern reader has a very different attitude to medical professionals than was common at the time. The humour in all this misses it’s target and its all just a bit pointless. But then it is very ‘of its time and its time has long passed…

Beyond that, there really is little to it, save perhaps as an exercise in understanding attitudes to the medical profession in the past a little better.

ONE DEAD RAVEN OUT OF AN UNKINDNESS

Should your read it: Frankly no, it contains little of interest and is just a little detestable.

Should you avoid it: It comes with a trigger warning and its not worth making any allowance for its being ‘of it’s time’ so yes, you should avoid it .

Bluffers fact:  Some more ‘fun facts’ about Doctor Kellogg… he once designed a mechanical camel… A vibrating chair, and was highly taken with electro therapy. Also, in 1906 he founded the Race betterment Foundation, a centre for the Eugenics movement in the USA, which promoted racial segregation is the US and believed immigrants and non-whites would pollute the white American gene pool… So while eating your cornflakes please remember the man who invented them was a racist favouring the kind of science most associated with the Nazi’s.

You don’t want me to tell you anything about the inventor of Coco-pops, trust me.

Posted in amreading, book reviews, Dear Edgar, fiction, goodreads, horror, Lovecraft, Poe, quotes, reads, retro book reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Eating the Livers of my Lovers: A guest post by Nimue Brown

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Mark Hayes

Introduction by Mark:

The full title of this blog is ‘Eating the livers of my lovers and other poems I now have to write because Mark gave me a title’ Which was a writing prompt I gave to the ever wonderful Nimue Brown when she asked the world to do so. Having supplied this title I abdicate all responsibility thence*. The rest is all Nimue…

*I’m always delighted to use thence in a sentence, its one of my favourite words…

‘Eating the livers of my lovers and other poems I now have to write because Mark gave me a title’ By Nimue Brown

As it happens, the current work in progress on the poetry front is a ‘How To Love’ sort of collection. It’ll be my fourth How To title – ‘How to Unpeel a Monster’, ‘How To Make Bone Soup’ and ‘How to Adore a Horned God’ having already happened, and being available through my Ko-fi store

Click on this to go to Nimue’s Ko-Fi

Not that I write especially conventional love poems. There was one about skin worms, I thought that was fairly romantic. A lot of what I’m currently working on is about love of landscape, wild things and life itself. Being in love with life is a good thing, and you don’t
get to spend so much time being unrequited. As a polyamorous person I spend a lot of my time being besotted with people, but I’ve had scandalously few actual relationships. And I’ve not eaten anyone’s liver, not even a little bit.

As with How To Make Bone Soup, I’m much more likely to be consumed, in the normal scheme of things. Bone Soup is what you make when there’s nothing else you can use, and it’s a metaphor that has loomed large for me. There have been too many rounds where it’s felt like I was making stuff out of my own entrails, and then out of my own bones. At this point, dear reader, you’re probably getting the impression that I’m an alarming mess both as a person and as a poet, and as sales pitches go, I’m probably not doing very well here.

I’m a hard sell, speaking as my publicist. I jump around between forms – graphic novels, novels, poetry, non-fiction, songs, short stories – I’ll have a stab at anything. I hop around between genres – gothic, steampunk, pagan, murder mystery, fantasy, erotica. I get bored
easily, but it makes it hard to explain to anyone what I actually do. Consistency is not my strong point.

That said, if you’re a monster too, or a monster shagger, or some other kind of lost and haunted meatsack, I may well be for you. I’m here for the walking wounded, the haunted and the lonely. I write for the people who do not know where they belong and who feel too much and think too much to ever really be comfortable. I write weird and bloody things, and sometimes I write ridiculous happy endings where impossible beings are finally able to find solace in each other.

Clearly the livers poem would have to be about werewolves, because so long as you can regenerate, that works. While I haven’t written any werewolf erotica in years (and not under this name, so there’s no point looking) I used to, and the scope for violent passion is a lot
higher when you’re going to regrow yourself the next day. You can have consenting liver consumption in that sort of context, and beings so obsessed with each other that they need to ingest each other. And this is why I’m not allowed to write romance fiction.


Aside from the ko-fi store, you can find me blogging in a mostly non-fic and Pagan way over here

Click on this to go to Nimue’s Druid Blog ( really you should its fabulous )

And I contribute fiction over here 

Click on this to go to Hopeless. Warning once your arrive then you will never leave, but click anyway…

I’ve got a silly enough number of books out there that probably the best bet is just to Google me and see where the fancy takes you.

As instructed I Googled Nimue. This is a small selection

Afterword by Mark

Nimue under estimates my skills with the internet if she thinks I am not going to at least try and track down her werewolf smut… I mean, that was just handing down a challenge, plainly… But even if you can’t track down the werewolf smut, and I will…. Do yourself a favour an track down some of Nimue’s easier to find stuff that hasn’t been hidden behind former names, in a locked filing cabinet, underneath the British Library and guarded by sentient statues of otters.

I recommend everything Nimue has written but if pushed I particularly recommend ‘Hunting the Egret‘, or ‘Intelligent Design for Amateurs‘ I wrote blogs about them and everything…

Posted in amreading, amwriting, blogging, books, druidry, fiction, IndieApril, indiewriter, pagan, reads | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Ebooks, Publishers and going full circle

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Mark Hayes

This is a fascinating read for anyone who is involved in the publishing industry on any level. I have my own views which I have expounded upon many times but it is great to get (and share) a fresh bit of perspective now and again from people whom’s opinions I value.
She is of course entirely incorrect in thinking books don’t just sell by magic, but then she doesn’t weave suggestion spells that make people buy books into their covers. That’s Tom’s department…

Nimue Brown's avatarDruid Life

Electronic publishing began in earnest long before social media really existed and when many people weren’t online. Twenty years ago we relied heavily on egroups – mostly Yahoo groups to find each other and share books. Tiny publishing houses proliferated, and sold books directly to readers. Some of those houses grew enough to be able to afford artists for book covers, which is how Tom and I met.

When Amazon got into the ebook market, it was because that market already existed. Their early policies made it hard through to impossible for small houses to keep publishing via their own websites. Of necessity, we had to all sell through them, accepting a loss of control and lower income on each book in the hopes of reaching a wider audience, and of not being made obsolete.

Many of the more successful ebook houses at that time were selling smut, and the…

View original post 416 more words

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Steampunk Fiction, what is it?

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Mark Hayes

Anyone who knows anything about the Steampunk subculture will generally answer the question “What is steampunk?” with words to the effect of “Whatever you want it to be..!”

This is of course an absurdly unhelpful answer.

Luckily, while steampunk’s are often a shrinking violet of introverts (1)(2) they become quite animated and extrovert when they start talking about their collective passions and they will go on to talk about “Victorian technology, meets science fiction and has a bastard step-child that looks a little like a cross between HG Wells and Jules Verne, having gone wild with moustache wax, hats and corsetry.”  

Sidenote 1: there is apparently no collective noun for introverts, so I had to invent one. This does however make sense, as the old joke goes, “Introverts rise up as one and stand in your own houses, then sit down again and get back to soldering tiny cogwheels on to a set of cufflinks…”

Sidenote 2: not all steampunk’s are actually introverts, nor are they all broken in some way, or using steampunk as an outlet against the crushing mundanity of life. This is just a stereotype, most of them are perfectly well rounded individuals without deep-seated emotional problems and/or a tentacle fixation… Probably they are just in it for the hats…

In any event, the question “What is steampunk?” is by its nature far too simple a question for the long complex answers you will get if you ask the wrong man in a top hat in Gloucester. You know who you are, and you’re a delight, don’t ever change… So, the answer “Whatever you want it to be…!” is as it turns out a good summery when it comes down to it. You don’t have to wear a hat, or corsetry, or sport a beard, waistcoats, petticoats, or indeed you can wear any of those even if you’re not of the gender to which any of these items are normally associated, frankly as long as your splendid to everyone else, everyone will be splendid to you.

As a rule, I tend not to worry about it too much…

However, the Harvey Duckman Anthologies with which I am deeply associated have been asked to do a Steampunk only anthology to be released at a Teesside steampunk event in November. While steampunk has always been one of the main genre’s associated with the series we have never planned a single genre book before so this is quite exciting… Luckily for the editorial team there is a  resident ‘expert’ on steampunk on the staff. Unfortunately for me I’m the resident ‘expert’, may the bearded skygod of your choice help us all…  

This had led to me having to ask myself the question “Steampunk Fiction, what is it?”, somehow “Whatever you want it to be” doesn’t strike me as an overly helpful answer… Perhaps I need some bullet points…

Steampunk fiction, what is it? A brief guide :

  • Set from the early 19th century up to the early, pre WWI 20th century or in an equivalent society
  • Societies technology should be primarily based on steam power and/or clockwork
  • The hero’s and heroine’s should be Gentlefolk of a cultured middle class or above
  • The use of course language should be restricted, instead use ‘Gosh, Golly, Blast it man, I say…. etc’
  • There should be no discussion of things below the waistline and above the ankle, frankly ankles should be avoided if at all possible.
  • Hero’s should be dashing, heroines where required plucky.
  • Villains should want to tear down the empire. The preservation of which is the primary concern of the hero/ heroine.

There that’s all nicely sorted out then isn’t it, time for tea and cake, anyone for a slice of Battenberg?  

Except, its not. For one thing, one fairly large fly in the ointment in fact, I am for my sins primarily a steampunk writer. As you can plainly see from the picture above four of my novels and a collection of short stories are set in the same steampunk universe…. Two separate trilogies one set 150 years before the other… So do these rules apply? Well…

Hannibal is not a gentleman, he is a guttersnipe with aspirations. If he is dashing it is normally in the opposite direction to danger if he can help it. He uses coarse language all the time, I mean all the time, indeed he tends to pick up on rather a lot of foreign swear words while he is at it. He is more concerned with preserving himself than the empire, indeed he actively works against the interests of the crown much of the time. As for things above the ankle and below the waistline, well if I was to be polite I would say ‘he is a great admirer of the female form’ as its better than saying he is a lecherous swine. His trilogy is set at the back end of the 20th century and as for technology well Hannibal doesn’t really understand how anything works which is a convenient way to avoiding dull explanations of how the nano-clockwork spider in his eye actually works, what powers the airships, and how the engines work on Jules Verne’s submarine.

So our ‘Steampunk fiction, what is it?’ list basically doesn’t apply to my main steampunk characters series. Oh, and he hardly ever mentions cogwheels… Yet I am, I think it fair to say, pretty much as much a steampunk writer as it is possible to be. Most of my novels are steampunk, and I doubt anyone reading them would disagree with that.

And you know what, I am happy with that, just as I am happy with other people’s visons of steampunk being different from mine. My other series ‘A Ballard of Maybes’ ticks a far more of that list but still steps outside those boundaries. If someone what to write a steampunk story that fits in with that list then more power to them, indeed I look forward to reading it. But as far as the Harvey special is concerned and me in general, I want to be surprised and astounded by as many different visions of steampunk as possible.

Steampunk is a broad church, or sunken temple, or mad cult of star spawn worshiping loonies…

It can be airships on Mars, it can be sinister clockwork mice and druids on steamrollers, it can be a hand-job in Calcutta from a psychopath with great legs and razors for fingers, it can be a Polynesian engineer and the search for the fountain of youth with a walking corpse. It can be nothing above the ankle or below the waist with manners, tea and crumpets. It can in fact be anything, as long as it’s splendid and silly and wonderful. Even when its dark and grim…  

So lets fix that guide a little shall we…

Steampunk fiction, what is it? A brief guide version 2:

  • “It’s whatever you want it to be..!”

So there you go, If you are interested in trying your hand at a short story fro this project consider that your brief… The Harvey Duckman’s Splendiferous Steampunk Special is open for submissions from now until probably September.

Harvey Duckman Anthologies in general, I should add, is always open for submissions…

You can find details of how to submit and the submission rules on the Harvey website. Note, occasionally we don’t actually apply rule 2 but it is there for a reason… probably.   

Submit a Story
Posted in amreading, amwriting, books, Canadian steampunk, fiction, Hannibal Smyth, indie, indie novels, indie writers, indiewriter, novels, opinion, reads, steampunk, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

More words to music…

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Mark Hayes

When I write, I write to music. I have in fairness mentioned this before, but these posts seem surprisingly popular for what amounts to Mark’s favourite obscure bands and musicians, so what the hell here is another little collection of musical joy.

The music changes, depending on mood, and what I am writing. Often times the music influences the words, not so much on a individual basis but in sense of place, emotion and feeling. So sometimes the right music is needed for what I am attempting to write. As it hard to write intense emotion while listening to Aqua singing Barbie Girl…

I am glad to report I have still never deliberately listened to Aqua singing Barbie Girl…

Usually I choose what I listen to, and let it just slip in the background but on occasion I just stick on You Tube and let it throw music at me with the joy of algorithms. This can lead to odd choices and chance discoveries and occasionally unexpected joys of discovery, or rediscovery.

Just about every time the algorithm spits out anything by Unwoman for a start, though she is a fixture of my playlists these days… but sometimes one must wander through the temple

But then there are the more delightful and unexpected ones like this by The Edan House.

For those unaware of them, The Edan house is a collaborative musical project, best described as Progressive melodic goth, started by Stephen Carey (This Burning Effigy) that includes among many others Simon Hinkler (The Mission), Julianne Regan (All About Eve) Tony Pettit (Fields of the Nephilim).

I have two of their album and never remember to play them because who remembers to play albums these days, but they are fabulous.

Finally, since this is a post about joy that started with singer and cellist Unwoman I’ll round this off with another cellist though this one ‘play it wrong’ though does so in a delightful way.. With The Dead South, a band playing their own version of Bluegrass country, despite been from a little way north of the Mason Dixie line.

Oh did I say finally…

Well finally apart from this sort of ‘cover version’ of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah… Praising a slightly different deity. Because sometimes the star’s just are right…

Posted in amwriting, humour, indie, indiewriter, music, music, reads, writing, writing music | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Dear Edgar#3 A Tale of Jerusalem

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Mark Hayes

To write a parody requires that an author treads a fine line. A good parody is as much a celebration of another’s work, as it is a shot across the bows. A good parodist strives towards their art with a love of the source material, rather than seeks to merely lampoon. Bad parody on the other hand tends more towards the mean spirited and on occasion seeks to be offensive for the sake of causing offence.

The latter of these is where some critics believe Dear Edgar’s ‘A Tale of Jerusalem’ falls, and it is cited as an example of why Poe earned a reputation as a mean spirited and harsh, even venomous, literary critic. Indeed, his reputation as a critic was far greater than his reputation as an author in his own right for the majority of his career. A reputation he certainly earned, and which made him less than popular among his peers. However to dismiss ‘A tale of Jerusalem’ as nothing more than a mean spirited parody is far too easy.

First off, a little context. You can’t call something a mean-spirited parody without knowing what is being parodied in the first place. This is something of an issue and rather prosaic, because the chances of a modern reader having read the novel being parodied are virtually negligible. Horace Smith’s 1829 novel, ‘Zillah, a Tale of the Holy City’, has been effectively out of print for over a century and a half despite it being a popular novel of it’s time. Popular enough to be a subject of Parody by our own Dear Edgar.

Thanks to the wonders of the modern age, the likes of The Gutenberg Project and industrial scanners ‘Zillah, a Tale of the Holy City’ has actually been brought back to life. You can track it down for free on google books if you so desire. You can even get ‘copies’ of the novel in paperback via the great south american river corporation, as some enterprising individual, of dubious moral’s, has recreated it using poor quality scans of the original printed text, thanks to the broad pretext of intellectual ownership allowed by public domain and copyright laws. Not that there is anything wrong with doing that but they could at least actually typeset the book and done a proper modern edition, rather than the bare minimum in the hope of a fast buck…

Despite its internet age availability, judging by the number of reviews its hasn’t received on any of the platforms it currently lingers in the half life of zombie availability, it is probably a safe bet to say that next to no one has read this once popular novel in years, in much the same way no one will be reading Dan Brown’s inexplicably popular novels of the 1990’s in a hundred years time…

Least-ways, we can hope…

Smith’s novel, ‘or more correctly novels as it is in four volumes of 380 odd pages a piece,’ you can reasonably say, hasn’t really stood the test of time. its parody however is still around because its author went on to write bigger and better things… It would however be unfair to review this short story without knowing the source material. Thus I have of course sat down and read all 1463 pages of Mr Smiths grand opus set in The Holy Land fifty years before Christ amidst the Roman invasion and later occupation…

Except of course I didn’t, it sounds dreadfully dull and frankly I’ll pass. In stead I decided to read a synopsis on line, which I couldn’t find as no one has read the book for over a century and a half, about the best you get is this…

“Zillah: A Tale of the Holy City” follows the adventures of a Jewish girl in Jerusalem during the 2nd Temple era.

Not a glowing indictment of a novel effectively longer than Wart and Peace is it… But back to Poe.

As is the way of parody Poe lifted the basis of his story directly from the novel. Characters, though names were altered, are recognisable to readers of the original, as indeed are whole sentences lifted from the original text… Of course having not read the original text I have no idea which ones but what you gonna do? However as the original was still a poplar novel when this story was first published the original readers were very much in on the jokes, in a way the modern reader is not…

That said, the basic story and importantly the subtext remains funny, in the way Monty Python’s Life of Brian is funny. Indeed it is not difficult to imagine Mr’s Cleese, Idle and Palin playing the three principal characters and doing so virtually word for word in a skit that would slot straight into the movie. How much of that is the original intent is another question, but the exert below highlights this…

“Thou forgettest, however, Ben-Levi,” replied Abel-Phittim, “that the Roman Pompey, who is now impiously besieging the city of the Most High, has no assurity that we apply not the lambs thus purchased for the altar, to the sustenance of the body, rather than of the spirit.”

“Now, by the five corners of my beard!” shouted the Pharisee, who belonged to the sect called The Dashers (that little knot of saints whose manner of dashing and lacerating the feet against the pavement was long a thorn and a reproach to less zealous devotees- a stumbling-block to less gifted perambulators)- “by the five corners of that beard which, as a priest, I am forbidden to shave!- have we lived to see the day when a blaspheming and idolatrous upstart of Rome shall accuse us of appropriating to the appetites of the flesh the most holy and consecrated elements? Have we lived to see the day when-“

“Let us not question the motives of the Philistine,” interrupted Abel-Phittim, “for to-day we profit for the first time by his avarice or by his generosity, but rather let us hurry to the ramparts, lest offerings should be wanting for that altar whose fire the rains of heaven cannot extinguish, and whose pillars of smoke no tempest can turn aside.”

The basic premise of this story is that it is set Jerusalem in around 50BCE. The King David’s at the time was under siege by this bunch of upstarts known as the Romans, and the Romans are doing what Romans do best and starving out the population. However Simeon, Abel-Phittim, and Buzi-Ben-Levi, three Gizbarim or ‘sub-collectors of temple offering’s’ or low level functionaries at the Temple, have managed to strike a deal with a roman to ostensibly to secure an animal for sacrifice. The Roman is to be paid thirty sheckle’s to send up an animal for sacrifice in a basket.

A sheckle at the time was a mid weight Hebrew coin made of silver. So that’s thirty pieces of silver… I suspect there is a subtext there, due to the large sign saying SUBTEXT, and that someone is planning to betray someone…

Our three ‘holy’ bureaucrats of course most vehemently deny to each other and anyone in listening that the ‘sacrificial’ beast they are purchasing with the temples money would in any way be used for anything other than sacrifice. It would be a betrayal of everyone trapped in the city if the three were planning to feast upon the flesh of an animal destined for holy sacrifice. Many are starving within the besieged citadel… No, it will go to the knife and its life’s blood be drained for the glory of the lord and then it will be roasted over a… sorry… ‘burned on a temple fire’. Eating the freshly roasted flesh of a sacrifice is certainly, they assure anyone who might be listening, not a perk of the job…

So our motley bunch of temple functionaries take the thirty pieces of silver, and send it down in a basket through the early morning mist to a Roman legionary below who takes the silver as agreed and sends up a beast back up in the basket to them…

Of course doing all this must also be risky for the Roman, he can’t be seen to be taking a bribe or feeding people in the city they are besieging. But as the three Bureaucrats have assured him it will not be eaten, ‘no definitely not’, ‘not it is for religious purposes only, honest’ . Well if you can’t trust low level bureaucrats who can you trust… Honest folk these Hebrew priests, clearly… But, well, best to make sure and keep them honest, so his Centurion doesn’t take the hump. There is after all one beast he can send up to the Jewish citadel in a basket and be safe from sanction…

The story ends with the three Gizbarim discussing what kind of beast the Romans have provided for them to ‘sacrifice’ for their thirty pieces of silver as they pull the basket back up through the morning mist…, A succulent spring lamb perhaps, or maybe its a fatted calf perhaps… ‘Oh, it will be a tasty… erm … fitting sacrifice, yes yes a fitting fresh tasty meaty sacrifice… What was that a bleat, a moo… or ….’

Roman’s, honest as the day is long, you pay them for an animal for sacrifice that’s what you get. Not a swine among them… In the basket however.

Now this is a short tale, its fairly verbose, all the more so as Poe incorporated phases and whole sentences from Horace Smiths novels, which added to the humour value for the original audience no doubt. But does it stand up to the test of time,this parody of a novel long forgotten by the world? Well surprisingly yes its does, its short, witty, full of subtext and the punchline hits home perfectly. It’s not overly subtle but its not intended to be, and as story you can read in minutes it is well worth your time. Sure you’ll forget most of it ten minutes later, but as a bit of pure entertainment it does it’s job, in the way the first two stories of the Evening Courier quintet don’t. On a basis level it’s just funny and silly, smart, well levelled fun at that.

Of course the question really is how much of that is Poe and how much is what he ‘borrowed’ rather directly from the long forgotten Horace Smith. But still it gets …

FOUR RAVENS OUT OF AN UNKINDNESS, OR, ALMOST A FLOCK…

Should your read it: If you have ten minutes to spare and want a story to make you grin and grimace in equal measure, yes.

Should you avoid it: There is an argument that has been made that there are aspects of racism within this tale. But frankly I don’t see it, it is no more racist than the life of Brian. So if Monty Python offends you avoid it… But really, come on now… Try and look on the bright side of life…

Bluffers fact:  At one point in the story a list of Philistine deities comes up, one of which is Dagon, a half man half fish giant… No one has ever used that deity in a work of fiction since, I am almost sure… Apart from my old friend Howard… Lovecraft was of course a huge Edgar fanboy, and while he was fastidious with his research, he was not above borrowing from Poe in much the same way Poe borrowed this story from Smith…

Posted in amreading, book reviews, humour, opinion, Poe | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dear Edgar #2 The Duc de L’Omelette

Posted on March 7, 2023 by Mark Hayes

French, it was the Lingua Franca of the early 19th century, the language of trade, of science , of advancement and enlightenment, much as it had been in the 18th century. It is also where we get the term Lingua Franca from in the first place.

Most everyone spoke at least a smattering of French, while professional men were required to be able to read and write it with reasonable fluency. This may also have been true of a great many ‘professional’ ladies, for French was the language of romance, love and you could charge an extra shilling or two for your charms if you could whisper sweet nothings like a Parisian born, or at least say Ola-La in a vaguely convincing way, which is a well established ‘fact’ thanks to all those scenes in hack westerns set in frontier brothels…

Those same hack westerns would led you to believe that only suspicious plantation owners and occasionally slight poncy individuals trying to appear clever, and working girls ever spoke any French, but actually it remains the third most widely spoken languages in North America. While in Poe’s time it was spoken far more widely. Thus when Dear Edgar’s ‘The Duc de L’Omelette’ was published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, the fact than it contained more than a mere smattering of the language would be less of a hindrance than we might otherwise assume.

This was also only a generation after the Louisiana purchase, much of the deep south and mid west up to and including parts of Canada had been French territory less than thirty years before. Though admittedly much of that territory had been French in name only and still rightfully occupied by indigenous peoples at the time.

So French in the 1830’s remained both widely read and the language of intellectualism. Thus putting a smattering for French in a short short, particularly if that smattering of french is where you put all the jokes, makes a story look smart and intellectual as humorous…

At least, I suspect, that is what Dear Edgar and the publisher of the Philadelphia Saturday Courier thought in 1832…

The Duc de L’Omelette is the tale of an aging French aristocratic, the original title being The Duke of Le’Omelette. As with Metzengerstein, it was first published without its authors name and the title was changed for later editions, Duc being the French for Duke. The main reason for the change of title was presumably because the original title was not pretentious enough.

The story begins with the Duc dying while dinning upon an Ortolan. After which he finds himself in a finely furnished apartment belonging to the devil. Cast as he is, straight down to hell. Now for a little context let us talk about what he was devouring when he died…

An Ortolan is a small migratory bird not much bigger than a sparrow. For centuries if they are unlucky they get caught crossing the Pyrenees on there way down to Africa for the winter by the local mountain folk in large nets. A practise which has led to a French delicacy from the people who brought you frogs legs and escargot The captured Ortolan’s are caged and kept in the dark. They react to the absence of light by gorging themselves on grain or millet until they are so fattened they could no longer fly if released. Not that they are released… Instead they are then drown in Armagnac Brandy, then roasted for eight minutes before being plucked. They are then served to be eaten whole by lowering the bird into the dinners mouth, feet first. The traditional dinner on such a fayre also wears a towel or napkin on their head while doing so. No one is entirely sure why the towel is required…

Also, spitting out the bones afterwards is permissible, but it is more proper to swallow them as well. Occasionally however there is some justice to the universe and a dinner on this delicacy will find themselves choking on a hard to swallow bone. This is of course terribly sad, because most of the dinners don’t…

This then was how the Duc died, choking on the bones of a small bird that had been force feed then drown in brandy for his culinary delight. He is surprised, all the same, when he finds himself in Lucifer’s palace contemplating the roaring fires of hell. Naturally his first thought is not of remorse for a life of sin, let alone remorse for eating the Ortolan that killed him. Instead he contemplates how he might best avoid his fate. Luckily for him it appears the devil has a taste for games of chance, specifically cards. Something the Duc has a fondness for himself.

The Duc is also something of a cheat, which is the kind of thing that can lead to damnation in the first place yet apparently Old Nick is not sharp eyed enough to spot he is being cheated.

Humour ensues…

Or rather it probably does if your were reading this story in 1832, had a good foundation in the French language, and didn’t need to use googles translate to figure out what was going on. I say this because most of the punchy lines are in French and translating them on the fly to make sense of it all somewhat robs the story of any impact. Like this bit below I have translated…

cet oiseau modeste que tu as deshabille de ses plumes, et que tu as servi sans papier!

this modest bird which you stripped of its feathers, and which you served without papers!

This story is by repute one of Dear Edgar’s better pieces of humorous endeavour. Which may well be true though I hope not as I personally struggled with it, mainly because of all those lavishly imparted lines in French. I can see why he has put them in there. I understand that the French language was the original Lingua Franca and the language of the intellectual in the early 1800’s. But I don’t read French, I don’t even have a schoolboys smattering, because I ditched the language as early as I could.

Dyslexia and foreign languages doesn’t mix well and there were better uses of my time at school I thought…

In the end the Duc beats the devil in a game of chance and pontificates with some arrogance upon doing so. Frankly though I didn’t care, which is the problem. Hoping between languages makes it the story awkward and drags my interest away. In the end it is neither not funny nor interesting, it is at best a mildly dull that is a tad fatuous… It’s main character is equally fatuous and that he gets away with cheating the devil at cards and thus saves himself from hell just doesn’t sit well as a story.

But besides all that when it comes down to it, while I am not a veterinarian by any means, I find it hard to sympathise with anyone who puts a towel on their head to eat a bird that’s been force feed and drown in brandy.

You can call me picky about this, but C’est La Vie…

ONE RAVEN OUT OF AN UNKINDNESS

Should your read it: Do you have a good grounding and comprehension in the French language, because if not. I would give it a miss.

Should you avoid it: Apart from the culinary habits of the french there is nothing offensive here and frankly it doesn’t go into any details, which is probably for the best, I mean who wants to read about drowning force fed birds in brandy…

Sorry about that.

Bluffers fact: The eating of Ortonlan’s, the ‘feast’ that killed the Duc, is illegal in the EU and as such in France. The french government enforce this ban with stiff fines, they never impose. It is illegal to buy a meal of traditionally prepared Ortonlan anywhere in France. It is however perfectly legal to buy a single glass red wine for and outrageous 500 Euro’s and to be give a complimentary aperitif that happens to come complete with a towel to wear on your head while you consume it.

50000 of these birds are captured each year in the Pyrenees…

Posted in book reviews, Dear Edgar, fiction, humour, opinion, reads, retro book reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Writing about future war… Guest Post By CG Hatton

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Mark Hayes

CG Hatton is a writer of anti-military military scifi. I have waxed lyrical about her novels for years and I have been patiently waiting for book 7 of her main series and in no way tapping my foot… CG is not the first CG Hatton to write, a distant relation Cyril Gertrude Hatton was both a writer and a pirate who sailed the Spanish main in the 1600’s. Cyril was as much an explorer as a pirate, made his own paper from tree bark and monkeys droppings, upon which he wrote detailed descriptions of native wild life in the West Indies, and their uses in the interrogation of Spanish sailors.

Original photo of Cyril ‘Gertrude’; Hatton on the Spanish Maine 1632**

Historian and Piratologist Dr Anne Forsdyke, self-proclaimed authority on the first CG Hatton published a paper on the ground that ‘Yes Gertrude’ is a strange name for a bloke, thats because Cyril was an assumed name and Gertrude was her real name and she only passed herself off as a man to be accepted as a pirate. ‘

Other historians dispute this claim on the grounds that ‘No woman could ever be so blood thirsty…’

To this Dr Anne Forsdyke responded ,’ Oh? You think so do your matey.’ brandished a cutlass and gutted three of them before she was restrained by a brave member of the Geology department.

Miss Forsdyke is now doing fourteen to life in a secure women’s unit at Broadmoor and the mystery of Cyril’s middle name remains unresolved, But by strange and uncanny coincidence the ‘brave member of the Geology department was one Dr C G Hatton, who later went on to write military scifi. What follows is a guest blog post by her.*

*some of this introduction may be made up, but not all…

** Photo may be a fake as photography hadn’t been invented in the 1600’s , or proof of time travel…

WRITING ABOUT A FAR FUTURE WAR WHEN WAR IS RIGHT HERE NOW…

Photo by Ian Robinson

As anyone who knows me knows, when I finished LC’s first book, Kheris Burning, I almost didn’t release it.

It was too close to home, too close to what was happening for real. My story of kids living on the streets of a war torn mining colony in a far off future, with tanks on every corner and soldiers patrolling the bombed out buildings, suddenly felt way too close to what was happening in Syria at the time. It wasn’t intentional. I hadn’t planned it that way. I’d always known, way back even before writing Blatant Disregard, that LC had grown up in a war zone. When he came to finally tell his story, those one line flashbacks from Book Two came to life all on their own.

And now, as I am finally getting to grips with Book Seven, I have NG facing the reality of invasion… standing against an enemy that cannot be reasoned with, that will not accept failure, that cannot be beaten… as, in the real world, we all watch the unfolding events in Ukraine.

I don’t write about war to write about war. I write military science fiction, but my heroes aren’t soldiers, at least they don’t want to be. Personally, I struggle with rank, and orders, and uniformity, and conformity… (that’s why I’ve never been able to hold down an ordinary job for long) and so do they. I write the stories of the guys on the ground, who want to be invisible, who don’t want to fight, definitely don’t want to lead, but find themselves facing enemies at every turn with everyone else looking to them for answers, for a way to find safety and stability, against a foe that will not ever stop. And I love that they don’t hesitate to step up to it, albeit reluctantly.

It is true that sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. As writers, we sometimes don’t go looking for inspiration, but we find ourselves embroiled in storylines we started writing years ago, that resonate now louder than ever.

One of my favourite comments on Kheris, and one that made me glad to have released it after all, was that it is ‘both a joyously fun read, and a window into the darkest corners of the real world’…

I hope I can pull it off again with this latest book.

If you haven’t read Kheris Burning yet, I have some free Kindle copies to give away and some free promo codes for the audiobook from Audible. Give me a shout if you’d like one xx

Note form Mark… CG Hattons blog post is a serious, thoughtful and insightful reblog of her original from her blog. My introduction less so…

Posted in amreading, amwriting, big questions, books, Harvey Duckman, indie novels, indie writers, indiewriter, pirateday, pirates, sci-fi, writes, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment