The Passing Place

To Blog Or Not To Blog..?

Posted on November 24, 2017 by Mark Hayes

That’s not really the question… but if you can’t steal from the old hack of Stratford on Avon then who can you steal from…

This then is a bit of an odd blog post, because it’s a blog post about blogging, so it’s somewhat incestuous in that regard. It is, like many of these posts, inspired by a question asked on a writer’s chat group. Which went something like this:

I would like to start a blog, but I do not know how to start a blog or how blogging can generate an income?

Before I go any further though, let me start with the last part of the question. ‘how blogging can generate an income?’ The simple answer is through advertising. and the less simple answer is to forget about making any income from your blog through advertising… Let me just say this and get it out of the way, if your sole interest in writing a blog is to make money you may as well forget about it right now. That’s the wrong place to start, and you will be better off learning to sell cars. In case you’re in any doubt, let me just say that the next few bits of this post are all to dissuade you for bothering to start a blog if you’re doing it with a view to making money… If you’re thinking of doing so for less fiscal orientated reasons you could skip down a bit, but you might find this interesting all the same…

Yes, there are people who make money blogging professionally. Generally, they are niche blogs, that have built a large following over a number of years, know exactly what they are doing and work towards that audience. Good luck to them, I have no axe to grind, and I wish them nothing but the best. They are making a living through writing, I would love to do the same.

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Yes, I could monetize my blog. It’s WordPress hosted, just in case you were not aware, the WordPress icon on the follow button is a bit a clue. I pay for the domain name and the basic package, which keeps it advert free, but that’s my choice it could have been completely free for me to build and have adverts on it. I could have also taken the next package up (for a small fee), monetised the site and got paid ‘by the click‘ for adverts on it. I didn’t and have no wish too for two reasons.

Firstly, I don’t actually want adverts on my site. God knows the internet has already become the adman’s wet dream. Faceache, Twitter, all the rest are full of ads. So are most news sites, most sites, in general, come to that, and a fair few blogs/opinion sites. All of them happily slowing down the internet and try to sell crap no one wants. Half of the sites on the internet are click bait trying to increase footfall for advertising revenue. the whole reason we all need faster broadband is that sheer number of adverts we have to download to get to the content we actually want to see. So I don’t want my site to be full of adverts. The only adds on my site, if you wish to call them that, are Amazon links to my novels. You’ll have to forgive those, I think I can justify advertising my own work on my blog… But aside them I prefer people to have an ad-free experience when they visit my these pages. You know, the way the internet used to be…

The second reason is not to do so is foot-fall… It is simply uneconomic to have ads on your site if your average visits a day (not views, but individual visits) is at a minimum of 250 a day. If that doesn’t sound that hard let me throw a few numbers at you. This blog in its present form has been around for about 8 months, before that it was on blogger (where it did actually have some paid ads but that’s another story). On Blogger it had existed since August 2013 and I ported over a lot of the earlier posts. In total, not including this one there are 175 posts, on various subjects, some of which have been very successful, some of which are I’ll admit more niche. I deleted a fair few old one from the blogger site or there would be closer to 250+. In all, between the two sites, I have had well over 18000 views since I started blogging. This site alone in the 8 months it has exists accounts for over a third of them. On occasion, I have even surpassed that magic 250 a day ( twice I believe). I have built a solid bunch of followers, post regularly, and a lot of people like stuff I post. Yet, if I was actually inclined to monetize the site I am nowhere near the numbers I would need to make it viable.

This blog has never been for me about making money. I also don’t sell anything other than my own novels via the blog. No mugs with the ‘Passing Place’ logo, no T-shirts with ‘Cider lane’ signposts. No pin badges, nothing. This is because of a massively complex set of reasons but mainly come down to ‘no one ever asked me for any of these things‘ nor do I expect they ever will. All these would be a way to make your blog pay, if you were so inclined, but again you have to create a following in your niche and sites that do that kind of thing have earned it through hard work. There are plenty of people in the artistic writer, artist blogger community who do. I own a couple of Dark Legacy T-shirts because I love Keydar’s work. If I thought I could get away with a mug at work that read ‘Real princess’s Wear Combat Boots’ I would have bought one from Jeanie at the Devils Panties (not satanic porn) for much the same reason. I have no objection to artists making money or buying their stuff, I read their blogs and comics, they make me smile, laugh and the world a more joyful place. But in both these cases what they are giving to the world via there blogs/comics is unique and wonderful. I also suspect that neither Jeanie or Kaydar started out on this path with the view ‘How can I make money from this.’ but rather started doing something the loved then stumbled into a commercial venture when they realised they had an audience that wanted them to.

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All of which is a rather long way around saying this. If your interest in blogging is to earn money unless you’re prepared to do a whole lot of work to earn it then forget about it, and even if you are, forget about it because you’re starting from the wrong place.

If, however, you’re thinking of starting a blog because you think you have something to say. Something that may add to the greater human experience. Something that may inform, or make someone smile, or you just want to have a good rant to the universe in the vague hope someone might listen. Express yourself, your opinions, your idea’s. Try to help make the world a better place. Just get on with it, start a blog, talk to the world, throw your ideas out there and see what comes back.

And then maybe you’ll reach some form of apex where you can decide to try and make money out of your blogging. If enough people give a damn about the things you have to say…

But don’t start with that in mind. Entertain, inform, help make the world a little better, or give people inspiration, advice and ideas, but don’t go straight for there wallets…

Mark

Links to my own social media and stuff for those who may be interested.

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Posted in blogging, goodnews, goodreads, humour, opinion, rant, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, blogging, opinion, rant, wordpress, writerslife, writing, writingtips | 1 Comment

The Rats In the Walls: The Complete Lovecraft #38

Posted on November 22, 2017 by Mark Hayes

The first Lovecraft story I ever read was ‘The Rats In The Walls’. I always have, and will always, looked upon it fondly, for all its flaws. It remains the tale I am most likely to recommend as a starting point to anyone who has never read the old tentacle huggers macabre scribblings. So with that in mind, I can not claim to be entirely unbias on this one…

So let me get this out of the way first, no matter what else I say, I love ‘The Rats In The Walls‘, it is a masterpiece of the grotesque, the disturbing and the chilling. If, as a writer, you want to write horror. If you want to send chills down the spines or your readers. If you want to know how to get under their skin, to make them feel the itch they can not scratch, study this tale. It is the quintessential horror story, it is as good as it gets for insidious, nasty narratives about the worst of humanities failings and the thoughts of a disturbed mind. It is, in a word, perfect…

Heres the thing, despite these blog posts been a generally lighthearted look at Lovecraft, and occasionally stumbling blindly in to literary criticism, I don’t really want to tell you all about ‘The Rats In The Wall‘, because of all the Lovecraft stories, this is the one I most want people to read. So here is a link to the story itself, go read it…

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/rw.aspx

Or alternatively listen to it being read by the wonderfully dulcet tones of David McCallum, him of Saphire and Steel, the Man from Uncle, and many more TV shows and movies. His distinctive voice adds to the tale all the more…

So, now you have read, or listen to it ‘hopefully’, and agree its perfect… Let’s talk about its many flaws…

Reading ‘The Rats In The Walls’ you can not help but feel you have read it before. Okay, in my case I most certainly have read it before on several occasions, it’s my favourite Lovecraft story after all, but that’s not what I mean. If you’re reading these in order along with me you will know what I mean (at least three people are apparently according to their emails, which is both gratifying and horrifying in equal measure, so possibly I am inflicting a reading list on more than that, but I digress.) The story centres around an American who has brought back the old ancestral pile, and is the last remaining descendant of the last remaining scion of a family with a long history that fled to the United States to escape some dark event in that family’s past… Sound familiar yet? Further to this, they have to bring in workers from far afield, as the locals still tell black rumours of the old house up on the hill and the family who once lived there… If you’re thinking you’ve heard this tale before, well this is not a surprise… He also manages to glean more of his family history form the folklore and whispered tales of those few locals willing to talk to him. Not that most do, because of the shadowy history of his family and dark acts over many centuries. Even fewer once he adopts his original family name rather than the Americanised version he began life with… Got it yet?

Basically, if you aren’t sure, this is the plot from ‘The Moon-bog‘ which back in #31 got a measly 2 tentacles. It’s not even a case of this story been written after but published before, and the moon-bog only coming to light when Lovecraft achieved more popularity. The Moon-bog was published two years before ‘Rats‘, and the recycling of so many elements of the plot really has no defence. That said a good story stays a good story no matter how many times you retell it. Doctor Who has been saving mining colonies in outer space form the ancient evil they freed by mistake for over fifty years. Every incarnation of Star Trek has a time loop story in it at least once a season. Every James Bond novel tells the same basic plot, and the problem with ‘the Moon-bog’ was never the story itself. All the same to read ‘Rats’ so soon after ‘Moon-bog’ is somewhat jarring in its familiarity. Beyond one been set in Ireland and the other in Sussex, there really is hardly a slither between them in the basics of the setting and background plot.

There are other problems too. Not least the name of the narrator’s favourite cat. Let’s just say its a black cat and much like the dog in ‘Dambusters’, it was a different time. It does bring up an internal debate I have had with myself, and indeed a wider audience than my inner thoughts. I am, generally speaking against censorship, I explained my point of view on the subject in some detail in the post ‘That Offensive Word…’ a few months ago. I also am absolutely against the diluting of an author’s work after they are dead, just as I understand why Ray Bradbury was so angry about the way Fahrenheit 451 was butchered for America schools. But there is a case, all the same, for some minor tampering to match 21st-century sensibilities when it has no effect on anything other than the name of the cat. If the cat were called ‘Mr Tibbles’ it would have no effect on the story in any way. That said I would call the cat ‘Shadows’ or ‘Darkness’ to keep it clear its a black cat we are talking about. Would it matter if the name was changed in newer editions of the collected works?

Of course, once you start down that road, where do you stop. Lovecraft is beset with issues, but for the most part not much worse than many other writers from the same era, though he tends to show his underskirt more often, and certainly is less liberal than most of his contemporaries. The writer’s politics are just something you have to contend with and reach your own conclusions about, it should not be sanitised just because we don’t hold the same views on the whole as he did then. If you can’t read Lovecraft or any other author because their views and politics horrify you then fair enough. Just as not reading a book by Steve Bannon now because of his horrendous views makes sense to me, it doesn’t give me or anyone else a right to decide what should be printed and what should not, that is an uncertain road down which to travel. So I guess it’s better to live with a cat call N******-man…

What set’s ‘Rats’ apart from the likes of ‘Moon-bog’ is the intensity of the tale and the way it quietly, and slowly builds up. It is also a window into the mind of madness, or possibly not, as the story is told from Delapore ‘the narrators’ point of view exclusively. Is he really hearing the rats, or is it all in his fevered imagination. Is he slowly going mad, is this a family trait, is it just karma for naming his cat N*******-man… The descent of Delapore’s sanity is matched by the descent into the caverns below Exham Priory, and the ancient sites dark history. Yet what you chose to believe is the truth of the tale is left ever open-ended, all of which adds to its strength as a narrative. That and those wonderfully telling hints of the winder Lovecraft universe like the one below…

…the rats seem determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players…

I am not alone in thinking this is the perfect Lovecraft tale. Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian among others, wrote to Wierd Tales praising ‘Rats’ after it was published. This letter was passed on to Lovecraft and was why they became friends and correspondents for the rest of H.P’s life. While Lin Carter, who wrote a few Conan stories himself, called “Rats” “one of the finest stories of Lovecraft’s entire career. If you read one Lovecraft Tale in your life, then Rats is the one to read, as it achieves what Kingsley Amis described as ‘a memorable nastiness’…

In case you have not guessed this is a tale that gets all the tentacles from me. Six is not enough so my out of six scale, may have to grow a couple of extra pseudo-pod’d limbs.

Finally, in keeping with another increasingly long-running theme of these posts, ‘Lovecraft stories inspiring Metal bands,‘ American Power metal band Seven Kingdoms wrote ‘In The Walls’ based on the tale. Its a surprisingly cheerful bit of speed metal. (It has reached the point I will be surprised the next time I do a story that hasn’t inspired a heavy/death/goth/metal band of troubadours to pen a tune. Also possibly disappointed when that happens…)

Posted in fiction, horror, Lovecraft, music, mythos, opinion, pointless things of wonderfulness, reads, retro book reviews, sci-fi | Tagged #scifi, amreading, horror, Lovecraft, lovecraftian, music, mythos, reads | 5 Comments

Wisdom for the uninspired…

Posted on November 17, 2017 by Mark Hayes

I found myself lacking inspiration, having crashed out of NaNoWriMo this year earlier than expected and waiting on a proofreader. So while it goes against my nature as a rule to seek inspirational quotes, I found myself looking for them last night. Mainly it was to take a break from the Nuka-world/Supergirl combo that has been taking up way too much of my free time since I took the decision to drop the NaNo novel due to external factors. Basically, I hit a slump and needed a boost of motivation to get on with the editing I had before me on ‘A Spider In The Eye’. So for those in a slump or those who need just a little nudge to help them along with there own NaNoWriMo projects if you’re still going (and I hope you are), here are some of my favourites.

“I get my best writing done when I’m supposed to be doing something else entirely. And that’s why I keep my day job.” ~ Joyce Rachelle

“You flourish one hushed breath at a time. Imagine all you can build word by single word.” ~ Laurie Seidler

“One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life…” ~ Evelyn Waugh

“Writing is lonely. Until that moment you write your first character and suddenly you have company.” ~ Eliza Green

“An idea for a story can be anything. The sky is not the limit, the limit is beyond it.” ~ Chrys Fey

“I think… the most brilliant thing about being a writer is that if you don’t like the way the world is, you can create your own.” ~ Maegan Cook

“a sentence a day keeps the doldrums at bay” ~ Nikki Broadwell

“Solitary walks are great for getting new ideas. It’s like you’re in a video game and you pick up idea coins on the way.” ~ Joyce Rachelle

“What doesn’t kill me provides writing material.” ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

“If at first you don’t succeed–write more!” ~ N.B. Williams

“A love of writing is far greater than any word count.” ~ Molly Looby

So, hope that leaves you inspired, (not sure reading all these and a few hundred other last night helped me but I did get a chapter of final editing done before I slipped back to the sofa and the PS4 so who knows…) But one final quote, which may help those struggling with NaNoWriMo, and which Hannibal Smyth would certainly agree with… From the delightful Kilian Grey…

“When in doubt, go the scandalous route.” ~ Kilian Grey

Posted in nanowrimo, pointless things of wonderfulness, quotes, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, humour, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, quotes, writerslife, writing, writingtips | Leave a comment

30 Days of NaNoWriMo: Day 16

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Mark Hayes

The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that… Sixteen days in and the observant among you may have noticed it been eight days since my last update. Simply put doing the blog and trying to keep up with the word count was becoming too much of an issue. Something had to go by the wayside and these blog posts, as they are a product of doing NaNoWriMo this year, were the obvious sacrifice…

So drop the blog posts for a while and focus on writing the novel… great plan… and like all great plans equally doomed. This is because I’ve had a bit of a real-life interlude… Work has been hectic, and so I’ve been working extra long hours. The few events I had planned for, took more time out than I expected. Such as watching Alice Cooper getting beheaded by a vengeful Nurse Betty taking up the what was left of Saturday after I had to work that morning… (which as it was Alice Cooper, was worth losing a day to…)

But between full day gigs and fuller than usual days at work, my writing time has been limited. On top of which I got back a serval chapter edit of ‘Spider in the Eye’ the current novel I am actually working on (aside from the NaNoWriMo tale) and lost another couple of days working through the notes from the proofreader. I hadn’t expected anything back till form them until the end of the month, but the questions I was being asked dragged me back to the story and I thought I would be fine losing an hour or two looking at them ( two days later, damn…). Then there was more work; a simple two-hour job turned into a twenty-hour shift at the coalface and… Well, to use one of my favourites Douglas Adams quotes… Whoosh…

So here I am, 16 days in and only 10000 words down on paper, calling it a draw… All I can really do is caulk it up to experience, take what I have and not worry too much about it. It is not the first time that I have crashed out on NaNoWriMo, it won’t be the last, but as my real job is not going to ease off for the next week or so, and I have another busy weekend ahead I am going to stop trying to force the writing to happen.

But there is a bright side to this, failure though it may be, no one really fails at NaNoWriMo. I have 10000 words down of a good solid premise, the dotted plan of an interesting story and while it’s going in the scrap file on my hard-drive, for now, there are elements of both the story and the characters I can and will reuse. Indeed, it occurred to me while I was writing it that much of it would work within the Passing Place framework. Indeed it was shaping up to be very much a Passing Place style tale that while it will not directly fit into ‘Something Red’ the sequel I have sketched out for my 2016 novel ‘Passing Place‘, it may well be drawn upon anyway. It actually fits well in the very rough sketches I have for the third in the series.

So, while I am disappointed to be bowing out of NaNoWriMo2017, I am philisop[ical about doing so. No writing is ever wasted. At the very least, all writing is practice in the art. To steal another quote…

I found my voice with ‘Cider Lane’ and ‘Passing Place’ but I still need to practise the art, every author does, and a whole lot fo my ‘million’ words were written in previous NaNoWriMo ventures… So for those who like me have found themselves struggling with NaNoWriMo this year. Take heart; you lose nothing through trying and falling by the wayside because even if you fail to hit those deadlines you will gain more for the trying than you ever would if you hadn’t tried at all…

So, adios for now, and for those still in the chase, the best of luck to you all. I’m back to working on ‘A Spider In The Eye’ in what little writing time November seems to be affording me. Which has its own deadline, which already went whooshing by me a couple of months ago…

Mark

Links to my own social media, by all means, connect with me on them.

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Posted in humour, nanowrimo, pointless things of wonderfulness, quotes, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, humour, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, opinion, writing | 2 Comments

The Lurking Fear: The Complete Lovecraft #37

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Old tentacle hugger has inspired a lot of writers over the years. He’s also inspired an awful lot of bands. There is definitely something about Lovecraft and musicians. Not that I can claim to be above the occasional musical reference in these blog posts, as regular reads may have noticed… (Yes, I know ‘The Hound‘ which I covered last time read like the hitchhikers guide to my record collection…) As such it would be remiss, for me not to mention that if you google ‘The Lurking Fear‘ the first things that pops up is not the H.P.Lovecraft tale, but the Swedish death metal supergroup… Yes, its a supergroup, as they were formed by a bunch of death metal artists from influential and successful Swedish death metal bands, several of which even I have heard of… What is it about the Scandinavians and heavy metal? Must be the Viking in them… They are, it has to be said, my usual cup of Earl Grey, while I can appreciate it, I would seldom listen to more than a couple of tracks in a row, but I can recognise good death metal when I hear it. And this is damn good death metal, so if it’s in your ballpark give them a listen, there is a link further down to the wonderfully Lovecraftian track ‘The Starving Gods of Old’… But back to the ‘literary’ review…

With ‘The Lurking Fear‘ Lovecraft is back up in the Catskill mountains, he has a real thing about the Catskills, or at least about the people living there. He is as unpleasant about the locals in this tale as he was in ‘Beyond The Wall of Sleep ‘. Specifically, he refers to them as…

…a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the locality…

Normal, in this regard I suspect means White New England Presbyterians. Lovecraft, as I have mentioned occasionally, but not as often as I might have done, was a man whose opinions on politics, race and gender don’t sit well with my own sentiments. I read him with my eyes wide open to his failings, and a certain degree of the forgiveness for living in a different time, but occasionally he can offend me even with the allowances I make for a writer from the 1920’s. Let’s just say the name of the narrator’s black cat in the next story I will be reviewing is reminiscent of the name of the dog from the ‘Dambusters’, and from a 21st century point of view as reprehensible, but I get ahead of myself, that’s for the next post in this series… Suffice to say that Lovecraft’s characters opinions about the people of the Catskill’s are consistent enough whenever they crop up in his fiction that one can only suspect it reflects his own views very closely, and they are not pleasant opinions… Indeed, on occasion the views are a tad more horrifying than the stories…

The Lurking fear centres around an old mansion in the mountains, that once belonged to rich Dutch immigrant landowners, the Martense mansion is one of those places that abound in Lovecraft’s fiction, an abandoned half ruin of which there are many forboding local legends. Forboding legends, the locals at least believe have more than a grain of truth to them, given recent events the narrator mentions, including the massacre of a whole village one stormy night which has led both the narrator and a flood of reporters to the region. It’s odd that the narrator spends so much of this story belittling the humanity of the locals, (he is very fond of the word ‘degenerate’) but he puts a great deal of weight to the locals tales, he is, however, a man who describes himself as having a:

love of the grotesque and the terrible…

and of having:

made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life

So I suspect he is a man used to listening to those he considers ‘degenerate’ when he wants something from them. isn’t that always the way…

This is another tale that is separated into several parts as it was originally published as a serial. Unlike the first of these ‘Herbert West,’ it doesn’t suffer from recapping at the start of each part, which is a blessing. It does, however, lack ‘Reanimators‘ slightly quirky charm. More importantly perhaps, neither does it have the sense of progression you get in Herbert West. In part that can be explained away by the shorter time span, Herbert’s tale covers a decade or more, whereas the events in The Lurking Fear take place over the course of a couple of months, but it is a poorer story for it. Where Herbert West charts a descent into depravity and madness by the main character that carries the story through its various threads, this feels more like a few short stories strategically nailed together with a common narrative to make a longer tale. There really is no reason you could not treat the four parts as separate tales if you wanted to. It reads as if Lovecraft did so when he wrote it…

The narrator managed to survive each episode, unlike whomever the ‘hero’ gets to tag along with him, who die off like red shirts on an away mission. Which is one of the problems, new characters are introduced as no more than fodder for the monster to kill, and you realise this very quickly because the author doesn’t invest much in them either, by the third episode the redshirts don’t even get names… The monsters themselves are cave dwell mole like bestial creatures that it’s hinted are the descendant of the Martense family. As they share a common weirdness of eye colour with the family. Which is in part where this whole tale started to lose me. Unlike most Lovecraft, it both tries to explain itself or refuses to explain itself in equal measure, this story tries to do both and fails.

The final tipping point was when the narrator realised that the strange mounds of earth appearing around the mountains were ‘molehills‘. My normally perfectly suspended sense of disbelief sunk without trace. Yet despite explaining too much (a rare charge for a Lovecraft story) it utterly fails to explain why any of this had anything to do with thunderstorms. Yet it trails that ‘thunderstorm’ motif throughout the story. This second serial style story, written by the tenants of the serial fails in all the ways that Herbert West doesn’t. So I suspect Lovecraft was far fonder of this tale than Herbert West which he always disparaged. It left me distinctly underwhelmed, so much so that I read through it only once, (normally i read them all at least twice before I write these reviews.) It is not the first time this has happened, but unlike other tales, I did not want to reread this one was simply because I was bored by it, perhaps because from a longer format I wanted more depth than this story held.

Someone somewhere loves this story, but that someone is not me, unfortunately. As such it gets only a couple of tentacles, but not to worry, ‘The Rats in the Walls’ is next… And all will be forgiven…

Back to Music, as promised here’s Swedish Death metals finest…

But as I said, Lovecraft inspires a lot of music, so in another vain, here is another Lurking fear, by Graham Plowman, who has a whole album of orchestral Lovecraft inspired music. So Lurking Fear for all tastes… Remarkably I like both…

Further Lovecraftian witterings

Posted in horror, Lovecraft, music, mythos, pointless things of wonderfulness, reads, retro book reviews | Tagged books, Lovecraft, lovecraftian, music, opinion | 1 Comment

30 Days of NaNoWriMo: Day 8

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Day 8: Today’s gem, which the calendar feels obliged to quantify, just in case the whole experience is really getting to you presumably…

Kill somebody! (in the story)

Target for the day, get to 13333 words
Current word count 6875 words

Literary murder aside, you know your getting somewhere when something a bit odd occurs to you and you write it down, but don’t notice what an odd thought it is till you are half way through writing it… Like this little gem when I found myself thinking about how despite the urban myth that says otherwise they don’t actually keep growing after you die…

He had never realised how much of a habit biting his fingernails had been the quick ceased to be quick and he’d bitten them down to nothing. He’d tried false nails for a while afterwards. Gluing them on, however, was something for which he had little penitence. Particularly as he knew he was only glueing them on so he could bite them off again. It just seemed pointless after a while. When they talk about the troubles of the undead lifestyle, he noted, they seldom mention you can no longer bite your nails…

Which is what I get for combining a weird thought and a major character who happens to be a zombie… BTW, if our interested, the reason hair and fingernails seem to grow when someone dies is because the skin dehydrates causing it to tighten back and so reveal more of the root and stem. Thus they appear to be growing, hence the myth… Also BTW, please don’t judge that paragraph, it is as raw as hell, this is the first draft, and written with some hast after all. I am just using it to illustrate a point. speaking of which…

My point here, which may seem a little odd, is that what I enjoy most about writing is the joy of invention. Those little sparks of inspiration that occur to you midstream. In this case, what does a zombie who used to bite his nails do when he dies and his nails stop growing… Or whats the strangest item of footwear that would ever become a trend among teenage girls … (Moon boots in case your wondering, platforms shoes with soles so soft they are like walking on blancmange, the desert, not the 80’s electropop duo…)

Or for that matter when the odd sentence gets away from you like this one:

The cut and thrust of the politics of the Elven court was quite often a literal cut and thrust, or at least a taciturn bit of bludgeoning at any rate…

Writing should not be all blood, sweat and fears… It should be entertaining, joyous, and downright fun. If it’s not, you may not be doing it right… Besides which I am reminded of a quote from Allen Ginsberg, which I have always kind of liked to remember when I feel I am taking myself too seriously…

Now as I am still a little behind with the word count, and ain’t quite ready to let a body hit the floor I am gonna ignore the calenders advice for now… The important things right now is that I am enjoying the journey, and sure in some hypothetical final edit, a lot of the madness may fall away. But right now it’s starting to be fun finding out exactly what going to slip through the medium of the keyboard next form the darker, and occasionally strange corners of my mind. Or to throw one last quote out at you, to sum up how I am feeling about the whole Nanowrimo experience right at this moment …

So I hope everyone else playing along is enjoying the NaNoWriMo ride as much as I am right at this moment… And here’s to happy accidents.

Adios for now.

Mark

Links to my own social media, by all means, connect with me on them.

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Posted in humour, music, nanowrimo, pointless things of wonderfulness, quotes, writes, writing | Tagged #novel, books, humour, magic, music, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, opinion, writing | 3 Comments

30 Days of NaNoWriMo: Day 7

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Day 7: The unfortunate truth from today’s calendar…

Nobody said it had to be good, now write…

Target for the day, get to 11667 words
Current word count 5824 words

While that particular truth may seem disheartening my advice is don’t worry about it, no one will have a finished novel on November 30th. Even the ‘winners’ of NaNoWriMo will have no more than 50000 words down. A lucky few may have gone beyond that and written sixty or seventy thousand. At the very most what any ‘winner’ will have is a complete first draft, and first drafts are as a rule a bit on the crap side. Heres a helpful quote on the subject to put it in perspective, from the delightful Shannon Hale…

There are exceptions to this rule. I have a friend who writes a single draft, then sends it to her editor, but she writes maybe 300 words a day, 500 on a good one, and tries to perfect every word along the way, as a full-time author she spends a long time on these few words a day. I am sure she wouldn’t write a first draft in thirty days. A year perhaps…

So no, nobody said it had to be good, just that it has to be written. Remember that.

My first published novel (as I may have mentioned previously) started out as a NaNoWriMo. Believe me, no one, including me, ever wants to read that first draft. I sure as hell don’t want to after three redrafts and many months of work turned the bare bones, hacked out story, into the novel I wanted to publish. ‘Cider Lane’ became the novel it is after a lot of hard work. But don’t dismiss for one moment the NaNoWriMo version of the novel. That still forms a good 70% of the final text, and the novel that it became would never have happened had it not been for the NaNoWriMo novel it started out as. So don’t worry about it being good, and write…

But let’s put that to one side, because sometimes this blog writes itself for the day, and last night it did just that, due to bloody annoying technical difficulties. Between my lunch hour and a small amount of downtime at work waiting for a conference call to start I hacked out a good 500 words yesterday afternoon. (Hurray, put the flags out, words on the page…) Then before I left work I hit save to send the document back up to my One Drive and all was good. I had a fine start on the days writing and once I got home, ate and did a few jobs about the house I could carry on…

Typically an error happened when I threw the file up to the cloud and when I tried to open it at home I got the version from last night and 500 words were not there. The joys of writing on multiple devices and expecting the tech to do its job right…

So rather than just write I spent an hour trying to move a file from my work laptop to my desktop. Which as it would not just do it over the internet consisted of me scrounging around the house for a USB drive. Which despite being certain I have lots of them, I couldn’t find. Then I reset the laptop and tried to get One-Drive working properly again, changed file names, messed about with file types until I finally managed to get it to move the file properly in word via a VPN once I got it up and working through San Fransisco from my laptop to my pc which was sat next to it my front room in Teeside.

This was not the kind of procrastination I was looking for, I needed coffee at this point and realised to my utter horror I was out of milk… Some days just want to kick you in the &%&**^%(*%, so a trip to the shop was in order, for as everyone knows…

One needs one’s caffeine….

But anyway, finally I got to work on the story again and made some inroads into the word count deficit. I can’t help feeling I would have made more if I hadn’t had the issues with the cloud drive. The lesson here is, save often, save properly, and if your gonna use the cloud make sure the cloud behaves itself… And don’t forget the milk…

Adios for now.

Mark

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Posted in fiction, humour, nanowrimo, opinion, pointless things of wonderfulness, quotes, writes, writing | Tagged humour, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, novels, opinion, writer, writerslife, writing, writingtips | 2 Comments

30 Days of NaNoWriMo: Day 6

Posted on November 6, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Day 6: Nothing desperate about the calendars advice today…

When in doubt, add a flying monkey…

Target for the day, get to 10000 words
Current word count 4127 words

So yes I am still some way behind after the fun and frolics of the weekend but with that distraction out of the way I can get down to some serious writing. I just need to remember the advice of Hemingway and bleed a little…

The trouble with distractions though is there are still plenty of them about, here’s a list in no particular order of the distractions…

The next episode of Star Trek Discovery due tonight
Learning to play the F chord with a smooth swap form a D on my guitar
The whole of season two of Stranger Things
Twitter
Clearing out Nuka World on Fallout 4 on my PS4 (a current obsession that has been eating my time despite really wanting to turn it off and write…)
Blog posts to write ( not just these but I really need to do the next Lovecraftian instalment.)
Sleep
2000 AD to read ( about three weeks behind with these.)
Two whole seasons of The Walking Dead on my to watch list
Facebook
Car Insurance to sort out
On Call week at work
The new Philip Pullman to read
Matter, the I M Banks novel to read
Multiple DVD season sets I still have to get round to watching, Arrow season 4, Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl season 2.

Anything but writing in fact and some of those things are actually important… And of course, you have to feel like writing… Except you don’t, To borrow from Anne Tyler.

Self-discipline is important, and when I find some I will let you know the secret, but my current target is 2000 words a day, every day this week, and to start them before I do anything else on the list. Because to borrow from Philip Pullman, whose new novel will just have to sit on the shelf for a while longer waiting to be read…

So, this that said I will glue my backside to my desk tonight when I get in from work, put on some music, and write… No, Honestly I will… Really, no distractions just write. Just getting words on the page. Self-disciplined me .. typing away.

I may just have an hour on Fallout4 first is all…

Adios for now.

Mark

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Posted in humour, nanowrimo, quotes, sci-fi, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, fallout4, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, writerslife, writing, writingtips | 3 Comments

30 Days of NaNoWriMo: Day 5

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Day 5: And today the calendar offers this gem of wisdom… (yes I ain’t sure what it means either, just go with it, 5 days in the brain gets a little odd sometimes…)

The plot bunnies are coming, write for your life…

Target for the day, get to 8333 words
Current word count 3589 words

So if you’re following this little wander alongside my NaNoWriMo journey, you will probably notice that word count has barely moved. Yes for all my advice yesterday on how to deal with the weekend, I failed utterly to follow any of my own advice… So nothing new there (says anyone who has read any of my writing/self-publishing guide posts over the last year or so, chock full as they are of advice based on my own mistakes.) Added to this, if your really paying attention you’ll notice this post is late because I normally post these about noonish in the UK. Which is because after a long day of not writing yesterday, and an evening catching up with Lucifer with my girlfriend on the sofa, we drove out to see a wonder of nature in the dales at High Force Waterfall…

A fracture point where a seam of volcanic rock slips between a layer of sandstone and Limestone, has caused over several hundred thousand years to create this wonder, ain’t nature grand… The Wifi service is shocking however and there is nowhere to plug in your laptop. Unlike where these update posts have mostly been written, at work in my lunch hour…

So, as a result, I am over 3000 words short of where I should have been yesterday before I even start typing tonight, let alone the 1300 words needed for today. I have however had a good weekend, spent time with my significant other, caught up with the prince of hell’s odd little adventures in LA and seen a really great waterfall, oh and on the way to it passed a mating pair of alpacas, which was odd to see in the Yorkshire Dales. So writing wise it has been a bust, and writing this post is not helping me much getting back on track… So rather than an inspirational quote, today it’s just a painfully honest sign to make and put on the door of your personal writing cave if your NaNoWriMo weekend has gone anything like mine…

And, one bit of sages advice if you are as far behind as me, I have been further behind and still got across the finish line in the past, and sometimes, no matter what the cynic’s say, its the taking part that matters most…

Good luck to everyone, off now to try and get some serious catching up done with the rest of my evening and hopefully cut into that word court at last.

Adios for now.

Mark

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Posted in nanowrimo, opinion, pointless things of wonderfulness, quotes, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, amediting, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, quotes, writer, writing, writingtips | 2 Comments

30 Days of NaNoWriMo: Day 4

Posted on November 4, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Day 4: And the calendars reflected of the wisdom of the crowd for today is

You’re not stealing Facebook statuses you’re paying homage

Target for the day, get to 6667 words
Current word count 3432 words

Its the weekend, the time of rest, recuperation, and juggling the hell out of your social life trying to get some words down in a desperate desire not to fall further behind… All the while hoping you’re not going to get called out to work as it’s your on-call weekend…

Okay maybe that last bit is just me, but the weekend experience is one most NaNoWriMo writers hit at some point, and generally if you’re doing this for the first time it comes as a bit of a shock. It’s the weekend, you probably don’t have work, surely its easier to find time to write, right? For some perhaps, this is even true but I suspect a lot of us hit the ‘first-weekend wall’ and suddenly it gets a whole lot harder to find even a couple of hours to hammer out words on the computer.

This is one of the reasons I like to try and get ahead, banking a few hundred words at least to avoid falling behind on a weekend. Loved ones want your time, and are a lot less understanding of that mad hobby of yours, because it doesn’t matter how you think of all this, to them its a hobby… You can just take the advice of William Goldman…

But be prepared for the kickback from friends and family on that one, and if you’re not spending time doing what you would normally do on a weekend you might have to… There are however other ways. Get your backside out of bed early and write for a couple of hours on a morning. Steal a couple of hours at the end of the day. Or, and I do not recommend this… sleeping tablets and a hot chocolate for your partner around seven o’clock… Or just keep the document open on your computer and find ten minutes here, and a half hour there. All the while doing your best to make time for those you should be, and with luck, they will make time for you to write in return…

Or just get yourself ahead through the week and have a few words in the bank… Which is always my prefered plan (Damn you Goldfrapp…)

In case you haven’t worked it out I am still behind, and Facebook doesn’t have a single status worth stealing… Grrr…

Anyway, a happy weekend to everyone, and hopefully you’re all further down the road than I and can take a bit of downtime to keep those sails in the wind…

Adios for now.

Mark

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