The Passing Place

30 Days of NaNoWriMo: Day 2

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Day 2. on my NaNoWriMo calendar this year…

What were we thinking?

Target for the day, get to 3333 words
Current word count 879 words

One day down, twenty-nine to go, and in my personal journey I am already behind. This is not the way it is supposed to go, the first day (for me at least) is generally the easiest of the lot, and a wave of enthusiasm takes me past the first wordcount and banks a few hundred words for less enthusiastic days… yet I did not even get myself past a thousand…

In my feeble defence, however, I expected this to happen because…

The best-laid Nanowrimo plans of mice and men mean nothing when their girlfriend is a Goldfrapp fan and you have tickets for a gig on the 1st of November…

So I am behind, I am probably not the only one, and ‘The Goldfrapp Problem…‘ is not a unique experience, unlike a Goldfrapp concert which definitely is… But, as I reminded myself this morning, ‘I do not live to write, I write to live…’ which no writer ever said, but you would have thought one of them would have done so. Typically even the search for helpful quotes has let me down this morning… However, for everyone out there trying Nanowrimo for the first time, it is important to remember that life should not stop just because you’re trying to hit the magic 50000. Every writer writes from experience to one degree or another. Even if you’re writing about a zombie lawyer and his bestial partner trying to track down ‘The Elf-Kings Thingy...’ You still draw from real life. So it’s important to go out and experience it… Even in November writing month…

So if you did miss your first-day target like me because of something beyond your control (or just going to a gig with your girlfriend.) take heart with the wisdom of Douglas…

That whooshing sound, that was life, and you have to remember to live it… And there is always time to catch up tomorrow…

As before good luck to all of those on this journey…and adios for now ( I still have my own writing to do and an extra 500 words or so to catch up on…)

Mark

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Posted in music, nanowrimo, pointless things of wonderfulness, quotes, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, goldfrapp, music, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, writing, writingtips | 2 Comments

30 Days of NaNoWriMo: Day 1

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Day 1. on my NaNoWriMo calendar this year…

‘Say goodbye to your sanity’

Target for the day, get to 1667 words

Time to get going, dig out the notes you made if you’re a plotter. If your more a fly by the seat of yer pants just start typing… If you’re a night owl like me, you could have waited while the stroke of midnight on the 31st. Ate the last of the Halloween candy, and rode the sugar high into the wee hours typing away…

I know some people struggle with the first day. Struggle with that first line… The first word… That inescapable desire to procrastinate just a few moments longer… The write a blog post rather than start writing the NaNoWriMo novel just to put it off a little longer… But with luck, you will just leap in there, besides, do you really expect anyone to believe you have not written that first line in your head a few dozen times already. The first day is hard, but also should be easy. After all, you have the bare bones at the very least of what you are going to write, your working titles been on the board for a few days at least. You’re scared, even if you’re not going to admit it, even to yourself, your a little scared… But take solace in the words of the great sage…

So revel in that little bit of fear in the pit of your stomach, your on a journey and the first steps are ahead of you. Take a breath, fetch a coffee form the kitchen, put on some music, block out the world for a moment, close your eyes and breath… Just breath… Then remember the words of L’Amour…

Take one last deep breath and type…

So good luck to all of those on this journey…and adios for now ( I have my own writing to do…)

Mark

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

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Posted in nanowrimo, quotes, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, amediting, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, writerslife, writing, writingtip | 2 Comments

Everything Must Go…

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Both my novels are on Kindle 99p/99c sale this week. Which I set up some weeks ago, forgot about, got caught unawares and should have mentioned before. Nothing like a badly planned promotional sale…

However, that said, please take the opportunity to buy one or both the novels on Kindle if your remotely interested 🙂 It would make Errol the bookcase dragon very happy…

I’m not going to go on about them on this post because I mention them often enough and they each have their own page on the blog you can get to form the links above. I don’t often put them on a promotional sale, but if your interested get them while they are cheap.

You can read sample chapters of both novels here:

Posted in books, booksale, cider lane, errol the bookcase dragon, goodreads, kindlesale, Passing Place, pointless things of wonderfulness, publication, reads, sci-fi, writes | Tagged #amwriting, #scifi, amreading, bookblog, books, booksale, horror, kindle, kindlesale, kindleunlimited, paranormal, romance | Leave a comment

The Hound: The Complete Lovecraft #36

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Mark Hayes

From one of the crumbling gravestones–dated 1747–I chipped a small piece to carry away. It lies before me as I write–and ought to suggest some sort of horror story. I must place it beneath my pillow as I sleep…

Just on the off chance, you had any doubts whether Old tentacle hugger was a bit on the odd side, the above quote is not from one of his stories. It is instead drawn from a letter Lovecraft sent to his friend Rheinhart Kleiner, after a visit to a Flatbush Reformed Church in Brooklyn NY, which seemed to be mostly spent looking at the gravestones there. This was in 1922, a few weeks before he wrote ‘The Hound’ a story which centres around a bit of gentle grave robbery by two young English men and the horrifying events that their odd passions set in motion. So unless your of a school of thought that believes sleeping on stolen bits of gravestones is normal behaviour, a phrase with the words ‘mad frogs as a box of‘ arranged in a slightly different order springs to mind, Lovecraft’s source of inspiration was a tad odd. If you do think his behaviour was normal then we should probably worry about you, or possibly you just wear a lot of black clothing, listen to ‘The Sisters of Mercy‘ and are into the whole ‘dark’ aesthetic…

Hey now, hey now now, sing this corrosion to me
Hey now, hey now now, sing this corrosion to me
Hey now, hey now now, sing this corrosion to me
Hey now, hey now now, sing

Now, to be clear, I personally wear a lot of black. I grew up on the late 80’s alternative music, dimly lit clubs, lots of hairspray and dark eyeshadow. ‘Floodland’ currently resides in my cars stereo, after I swapped it out for ‘Nymphamine’, so I ain’t judging anyone here… Not even old tentacle hugger himself. That said, I can’t remember ever stealing bits of gravestones to sleep on myself, no matter how much I was searching for inspiration… Lovecraft, however, did and despite that rather eccentric (or just plain creepy) inspiration, ‘The Hound’ is both one of his more idiosyncratic 1920’s tales while also being one that could very easily be set in modern times.

Here then is the thing, the narrator (just for a change he never gives his name), and his best friend, confidant and fellow despoiler ‘St’ John are remarkably easy to relate to for all their strange infatuations. Unlike many of Lovecraft’s characters which seem so firmly rooted in 1920 East Coast middle-class American angst, these two have a far more modern angst about them. They are in love with, or at least fascinated by, the arcane, the mystical and most of all death. Not for these things themselves, you should note, but for the aesthetic of them, in short, for the look of the thing. If Lovecraft were writing this tale now the sub-culture to which they aspire should be obvious. Because, well…

‘And the devil in black dress watches over’
‘My guardian angel walks away’
‘Life is short and love is always over in the morning’
‘Black wind come carry me far away….’

The pair have built there own… Ahem… ‘Temple of Love’ for the aesthetics of the night, the dark places, of death and the arcane… in the cellar of an old manor house out on some deserted stretch of moorland. In it, they keep relics and other things they collect. All collected themselves, but only provided the aesthetics were right at the time. If the moon was the right kind of luminous yellow on an autumn night, if the storm clouds were the right kind of ominous, the left hand of a murderer was the left hand of a murderer buried in an unmarked grave at a crossroads, and not just some random left handed murder buried with grace…

Yes, in case you have not guessed where I am going with this. St John and his friend are Goths… Or at least the archetype portrait of goths that we are used to seeing in popular culture. I will just say this before I go any further, however, real goths are happy, well-adjusted people, they laugh at cats on the internet, dance with joyous abandon, and while they may have skull candle holders, ashtrays shaped like bats and love Tim Burton movies, they would happily invite you to take part in their ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ singalongs. While the aesthetics of wearing black lace veils in a churchyard, looking moody in the twilight and pretending to avoid direct sunlight, may appeal to them, they don’t as a rule go around despoiling graves. They are far more likely to want to go round the pub, sit around, and have a bit of a laugh with their friends. We are a happy people and have the best Halloween parties…

Love became the in theme then
Opposing fakers thrice by ten
Don’t perceive his empty plea
That redundant effigy

But back to ‘The Hound’…Everything is going well for St John and his friend until they chose to despoil the wrong grave, in a small cemetery in a Dutch Reform church in Holland. For this is where the pair, having followed clues from an old text, take possession of a strange amulet with a stranger inscription. An inscription they learn after some research is mentioned by a certain mad Arab in a certain infamous book. Indeed, it is the first time this particular tomb is mentioned in Lovecraft’s stories, though not the first time the Mad Arab makes a guest appearance. You would have thought that the amulet been referenced in the ‘Necronomicon’ would be enough of a warning not to play fast an loose with it. Or at least to put the damn thing back where it came from and go join a monastery… But no, our two proto Goths instead put it on a shelf in their basement shine, and light a candle beneath it, because it seemed like a good idea to draw attention to there new possession…

From there on in this is predictable fare… A slow descent into fear and madness as strange occurrences begin. Fingers scraping on doors, strange sounds in the night, the howls of some monstrous beastie that seems to follow them. ‘The Hound’ hunting the pair and seeking retribution. St John is eaten alive by the beast, and the narrator endeavours to return the amulet. Guess how well that goes…

Lovecraft was not overly fond of this tale. Indeed he was openly disparaging of it, dismissing it as “a dead dog” and “a piece of junk”. I don’t altogether share his opinion. Sure it has some very obvious tropes. You know where it is going long before it gets there, and it lacks his normal slow brooding build up. There is very little that stands out about it, apart from it been a tale ahead of itself in many ways. As I said, it would be an easy tale to set now with, for all it’s slight ‘Gothexplotationess’ which isn’t a word but should be… But personally, I have always had a certain affection for ‘the Hound’ it is actually one of his more readable stories for anyone who has never read Lovecraft. It is less Lovecrafty that most, but that is not always a bad thing. That said it still only gets four tentacles, eyeshadow black tentacles with opaque contact lenses, but four all the same.

If only St John and his friend had chilled out The Cults, ‘Love’ Album for a while rather than dug up the amulet all would have been well…

The fire in your eyes, Keeps me alive
And the fire in your eyes, Keeps me alive
I’m sure in her you’ll find, The sanctuary
I’m sure in her you’ll find, The sanctuary….

Further Lovecraftian witterings

(Normal service, without random Goth song lyrics will resume next time. And bonus points for anyone who knows them all, as at least one of them is reasonably obscure…)

Posted in fiction, Goth, horror, Lovecraft, mythos, reads, rites, sci-fi | Tagged amreading, bookreview, Goth, Lovecraft, lovecraftian, music | 4 Comments

To Plot Or Not To Plot? That Is The NaNoWriMo Question…

Posted on October 23, 2017 by Mark Hayes

With #NaNoWriMo2017 about a week away. The oldest of questions has reared its ugly head at my writing desk… To plot or not to plot..? Whether you attempting NaNoWriMo for the first time or the eighteenth time you’re probably contemplating this fundamental question. Though if your one of the original 21 people who took part in the first NaNoWriMo way back in 1999 you’ve probably have figured out your own approach by now. If however, you’re a NaNoWriMo virgin, then it’s a safe bet you’re wondering what the best approach is… So this post is for you…

If you have never heard of NaNoWriMo, you can find out what I am talking about here at an earlier post on the subject… It has calendars and all sorts…

There are two main approaches people take to NaNoWriMo, the plotters approach, and the ‘fly by the seat of your pants‘ approach, and to be clear from the start, there is nothing wrong with either of them. They both have advantages and disadvantages, and most people probably end up falling somewhere between the two. At the end of the day, you should take the approach you feel will suit you best, and ignore any advice to the contrary, but it helps to know the options. So in the somewhat vainglorious hope that it may be helpful to someone, here is a brief summing up of the approaches…

Pantser’s And Pantsing…

‘Flying by the seat of your pants‘ should require little explanation, but everyone loves a helpful definition… The phase technically means to decide a course of action as you go along, using your own initiative and perceptions rather than a predetermined plan… or to pilot an aircraft without all those irritating navigation aids and other clutter in the cockpit. In terms of NaNoWriMo when someone is referred to as a ‘Pantser’ it is someone who just sits in front of the keyboard and starts to write. Just throwing everything down in the hope of building up- momentum and just keeping going. Pantsers embrace their imagination and intuition in full and just run with them. Which is you can pull it off is a neat trick.

Upside to Pantsing:

Lack of self-imposed constraints.
Freedom to roam where the story takes you.
The wild abandon of creation…

Downside to Pantsing:

Running out of steam.
Writing yourself into a hole.
Lack of cohesion.

Plotting like Machiavelli…

There are many ways to plot a novel NaNoWriMo, and many degrees of plotting. The whole idea of which is to construct a framework in which to write. These can be as details or not as you wish. Brain maps and post-it note plot walls, as well as plot grids (often referred to as the J.K style these days), are all popular. Some claim they are essential to guide you when you write, particularly with NaNoWriMo as you can build them to give structure to your writing and keep you focused on the overall plot, which helps you to avoid wrong turns and dead ends…

Upside to Plotting:

If you know where you’re going its easier to follow the path.
Avoids wrong turns and lack of cohesion.
Keeps you going as you know whats ahead.

Downside to Plotting:

The constraints of your plot path can seem binding.
Hampers wild creation.
Knowing where you’re going can make the journey more of a bind.

The Minimalist Approach…

As you’re not actually writing there is nothing at all wrong with plotting everything, it’s not cheating in any way; indeed there is a lot of encouragement to do so. There is some conjecture that Plotters are more likely to be successful than Pantsers, there is, however, no actual documented proof of this. No study I am aware of at any rate. It is, however, the route most people encourage you to go down. Some preparations before you sit down on November the first to write your first words are advisable at any rate. Even if it is just a title (which you need to register anyway), the names of the main characters and a vague direction of travel. Otherwise, the blank page will just stare at your for a while, but how much plotting do you actually need?

Well, you don’t need any, as the dedicated ‘Pantser’ inside me will tell you. I have always written with only a minimal amount of plotting. I find forcing characters to follow a plot is a bit like herding cats. Yet that’s a lie to an extent. I plot as well as any plotter. I just aim for a fluid approach to plotting. I like to plot a few chapters ahead, and the further ahead, the more grey in the plot, but I stick to broad strokes rather than tie myself down. The vast majority of the story takes shape as I write, and as ideas occur to me. I keep a notepad open and scrawl in notes as I go when something occurs to me, normally when a character says or thinks something unexpected. The plot evolves ahead of the story, and I have a vague idea where it is going, though I can’t swear its where it will end up, as I write the notepad will grow, generally experientially. I may write my 1330 words on the 1st, but by the end of that, I will have five more plot points on my list. By the end of the second day, it will be eleven or twelve. Plots, like characters, evolve organically, and like any organism, they can start to do what you least expected at the start, which is why I like to write that way.

This is my style, I don’t recommend it as such, it is just what works for me, in particular when I am working within the confines of NaNoWriMo, because I find it better not to worry about where I am going, and just to steam ahead. However, it may help people new to NaNoWriMo to have a glimpse of my own plottings. Also, I intend to blog along as I write this year, with a short post each day on my NaNoWriMo experience. I suspect the blog-a-day will fall down occasionally, as the NaNoWriMo writing will take precedence but we will see how that goes. So having a glimpse of the planning makes sense as well, with that in mind…

The Elf-Kings Thingy…

This is my working title, mainly because I haven’t really figured out what the ‘Thingy’ is, just that it is missing, and the hunt for it is one of the main plot threads. So far I have a few brief character sketches (and here I am cheating slightly because they are characters from my ‘scrap ends’ which I am going to use as the basis for the novel), This is also nothing like anything I normally write, which is why I chose it. This way I get a break from my usual fiction and the sequel to Passing Place and the First Hannibal novel can take a back seat for a while. After all, this is supposed to be purely for fun (which is the best excuse in the world if it turns out to be a load of codswallop…) What I end up with will be whatever it turns out to be.

Brief Characters Sketches…

Mr Spleen, a practical lawyer (thug), technically a zombie, dusty, very dry sense of humour, some would say arid, very English. Viciousness hid behind polite apologies with no weight behind them ‘I’m sorry but I need to remove your tongue…’

de’Manfess, Mr Spleens partner, (another thug) not human, (not sure what he is, werewolf, demon, beast…) rhymes everything, badly, as a rule, vicious with no apology, kept in check by Mr Spleen… Think Lord Byron on cocaine…

The Elf-king, every bad, mad king ever. Hern the huntsman with a bit of Joffrey thrown in. Ruling a court of lackwits and lackeys… Unthinking tantrums reminiscent of a two-year-old commonplace…

The girl, A girl from the real world who by accident or someones else design ended up ‘borrowing’ the Elf Kings thingy. Nieve, and in wonderment of the world…

The Queen, ice cold to the Kings hot-bloodedness. Calculating, never contrite. Despises the King for his weaknesses, but is crueller in that she thinks about what she is doing and does it anyway…

Chapter Briefs, with plot pointers…

Chapter 1. introduce de’Manfess and Mr Spleen, Practical Lawyers, Start with de’Manfess, and Spleens general disparaging, end with a phone call…

Chapter 2. Earlier, The king’s court, a lowly courtier trying to explain that the ‘thingy’ has been ‘stolen’ to the king. The king’s wrath. Calling in the ‘practical’ lawyers

Chapter 3. The girl, recalling a dream, where she went to a strange place, hints at being called there. Then discovers strange object on her bedside table. The dream was not a dream, she has the thingy, in the mortal realm.

Chapter 4. Planning to cross into the mortal realm the lawyers are ‘accosted by the queen’s guard and brought before her. She insists they bring the Thingy to her not the king…

Chapter 5. The girl goes to school, with the thingy in her bag, strange occurrences, hears voices, sees odd doors, doors form her dream, meets a cat, who is not a cat (esqwith?)

Chapter 6. some more stuff happens here…

In summary

Okay, you get the idea, so far it is far from original, but then again there are only so many stories, what makes something truly original for me is the magic that happens when you start to write. That will happen no matter how much you plot, or if you just fly by the seat of your pants. By the time I get to November the 1st, the plotting will be further along and so will the character sketches, but not much further. Perhaps I will know what the ‘Thingy’ is, beyond just a slightly odd piece of innuendo…

To everyone reading this who has decided to give NaNoWriMo a go, best of luck. You will hopefully be able to follow my progress via my blog, at least until I have no time to write the blog because I have fallen behind with my word count. You can also track my progress on the NaNoWriMo site at https://nanowrimo.org/participants/mark-hayes you can if your doing it yourself even be a writing buddy if you are mad enough…

Speaking of calendars, as I did very briefly much earlier in the post. Here is my favourite one, which I did not use on that original post earlier this month…

Much more NaNoWriMo to come obviously but until then adios…

Mark

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

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Posted in amwriting, nanowrimo, opinion, pointless things of wonderfulness, self-publishing, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, authors, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, writer, writerslife, writing, writingtips | 2 Comments

What The Moon Brings: The Complete Lovecraft #36

Posted on October 18, 2017 by Mark Hayes

ales …the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams…

Lovecraft at his best is a master of lurid weird description and verbose excess, sometimes he does this to such an extent you can read a whole story and find yourself wondering what the hell it was all about. This is also the reason we go back to Lovecraft so often and reread the tales. It is also the reason that sometimes mere fragments of a tale appear in his cannon of stories, as with the unfinished ‘Azathoth‘. Most of these fragments of tales were never published in his lifetime but appeared posthumously when apatite for his stories caused those who managed his estate to dig through the equivalent of his old hard drives. It’s not always the case. However, some of these short fragment tales were published before his death. ‘What the Moon Brings‘ being a case in point, at least that is a view taken by many. Personally, I think it is a tale complete within itself. Short though it may be. To call it a fragment somewhat belittles it…

Of the dream cycle tales, it is among my favourites. If not actually my favourite. Which may well be down to my general dislike of the longer pure dream tales. I am not counting tales like ‘The Cats Of Ulthar’ here, but the pure dream tales rather than those that get lumped in with them.

Also like many of the shorter tales, there is something to be said for listening to them. While never written specifically for the spoken word, there is something in the way Lovecraft writes that lends itself to this form. If you can find the right voice to do the reading, hence the Youtube below with the wonderful Nick Gisburne reading the tale… Which is more than worth a listen if you have a few minutes to spare, in the dark, or with your eyes closed, just feeling the words…

You may notice I have told you little about this tale from old tentacle huggers. Which is because there are only so many times you can say, ‘Its based upon a dream Lovecraft had...’ or, ‘For a teetotaller, the bard of Providence didn’t half have some odd dreams…‘ or even ‘ Old Tentacle huggers been on the night nurse again…‘. Occasionally you just have to go with it. So read it, or listen to it, indulge yourself for a few minutes in verbose descriptions and a strange ride through the subconscious of that lamentable genius Old tentacle hugger and his desire to be eaten by sea worms… Draw your own conclusions from that.

As for a score, as I said this is a favourite, short though it is, this is what a dream sequence should be like, so its five slithering tentacles reaching up from the seafloor from me…

Further Lovecraftian witterings

Posted in dreamlands, Lovecraft, mythos, reads, retro book reviews, sci-fi | Tagged #scifi, bookreview, dreamlands, horror, Lovecraft, lovecraftian | 1 Comment

Shrinking world…

Posted on October 15, 2017 by Mark Hayes

The world shrinks every day, in more ways than one, but as a by-product of our shirking world, many people feel less safe. They think that the world is getting more dangerous, more bad things are happening, people are nastier, there is more violence, more horror, more death and destruction, and the world is a worse place than it has ever been… Yet this is an illusion we have brought upon ourselves.

When I was a child, back in that other world, we called the 1970’s, we have a 30-minute news program on the TV every night. Just that, 30 minutes at 6’oclock, then thirty more at 9, or 10 if you watched the other channel. There were only three channels btw, and they did not broadcast 24 hours a day, BBC2 was mostly just the test-card girl… For most of us, she was still in black and white…

The other sources of news were the radio and newspapers. So there was only so much News to go round, basically, you got as much news as you could squeeze into 30 minutes on the TV and the broadsheets. That’s if you wanted it, it was easy to just blank it out and go news free for days on end. Most of the time we didn’t know what was going on outside the UK, and quite often we had sod all idea what was going on inside it. A war in Africa might make the news once a fortnight and only then if someone really important visited the area like the pope or the foreign secretary, or a former Beatle… Even then unless you actually sought out the news, you would probably only hear about these things third hand at best… If you wanted to block it out the world, you could, without seeming strange, or being considered odd in any way, because most people didn’t really care much about the news they never got. Times were grim, but no one bothered to tell us times were grim, so we didn’t worry overly much about it.

Fast forward to a different world. 24-hour news channels, channels mind, not just one of them, but an endless selection. And in case you miss the news itself, Twitter, Facebook, the whole social media explosion will repeat it to you. The news is constant, and the bad News is the News people pay attention to. You can’t avoid it, it’s in your face, and we interact with it on a level that has never been seen before. In the 1970’s you might discuss the news down the pub (okay in the playground in my case and not very often at that) if you were angry about something, and I mean really angry about something, you might write to a newspaper, or That’s Life… Now if you wish to vent your spleen, and boy do we enjoy a good spleen-venting, we can go online and broadcast our inner nazi to the world… And we do…

(for Americans and other stranger forms of life, ‘That’s Life was a 1970’s consumer rights program that championed the small guy and got dogs to say sausages. It was a bit like a poor mans U-Tube once a week for five minutes. With the same damn dog every time )

The world is not a more dangerous place than it was in the 1970’s. People are not nastier. There are not more paedophiles, rapists, murders, killers and hate spewing nazis in the world. There aren’t more wars, disasters and death. (okay maybe more environmental disasters, I am no global warming sceptic.) The world, in general, is not a worse place. In fact, the opposite is true. Successive generations are ever more liberal-minded, less racist, less homophobic, more accepting of difference. We have just let ourselves be swamped by it all.

We have given voice to the worst of us, let the worst of the world come to our door and then opened ourselves up to it. It is the price of the shrinking world, one we all pay and while it nice to look back on the days before the internet and 24-hour news revolutions we need to remember the world was just as much of a shite pond then. Indeed it was a damn sight worse, we just didn’t know it…

And perhaps, once in a while, put down the screens, turn off the TV and just let the madness of it all stop for a moment…

Posted in goodnews, opinion, rights, writes | Tagged goodnews, opinion, rights | Leave a comment

A Quote Or Two For NaNoWriMo

Posted on October 14, 2017 by Mark Hayes

With the thirty days of NaNoWriMo looming on the horizon for many of us. I’ve trawled my big book of quotes for inspiring words, (and some not so inspiring) here’s a selection of quotes on the subject of that most NaNoWriMo of things, the deadline… But first a little historical perspective…

“Historically, the ‘deadline’ was the line around a prison beyond which prisoners were eligible for shooting. In keeping with shifts in the exercise of control, what one was delineated spatially over life is now enforced temporarily over labour.” ~ CrimethInc.

“A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all.” ~ Rita Mae Brown

“Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It’s no coincidence we call them ‘deadlines.” ~ Tom Robbins

“Dreams without deadlines are dead in the water. Deadlines are really lifelines to achieving our goals.” ~ Mark Batterson

On a slightly lighter perspective…

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ~ Douglas Adams

“Deadlines just aren’t real to me until I’m staring one in the face.” ~ Rick Riordan

“…a deadline should not prevent you from writing, but writing will help prevent you from missing your deadline. Then write a word. Then remind yourself of that again. And then write another and hey, look at you! You’re spitting in that deadline’s eye.” ~ Courtney Summers

“A deadline is a finish line. Don’t stop ’til the door shuts in your face!” ~ Raven Moore

“I had three days to screw over Nicodemus Archleone and his crew and get this thing out of my head, without getting myself or my friend killed while I did it.” ~ Jim Butcher

“A hammer made of deadlines is the surest tool for crushing writer’s block.” ~ Ryan Lilly

“If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up.” ~ George R.R. Martin

Speaking of George, a final word from that most awaited of writers Pat Rothfuss, fans of whom have been waiting for the third novel in the Kingslayer trilogy for quite some time. They have also been complaining since the moment they finished reading the second instalment… Which led to Neil Gaiman once to say of both Pat and George (I paraphrase slightly), ‘Readers, they are not your bitch…’ But as promised a word from, Pat…

“Normally I miss deadlines like a stormtrooper misses Jedi.” ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Good luck to all the NaNoWriMo writers out there and have fun chasing those deadlines…

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Posted in humour, nanowrimo, quotes, writes, writing | Tagged #amwriting, nanowrimo, NaNoWriMo2017, quotes, writer, writerslife, writing, writingtips | 2 Comments

Hypnos: The Complete Lovecraft #35

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Mark Hayes

“…Young with the youth that is outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned.”

As gods go in Lovecraft’s fiction, the Greek god of sleep is probably one of the least terrifying. Lovecraft’s elder gods are usually a little more utterly terrifying after all. Tentical faced gigantic winged beasts for whom humanity is just a eat all you can buffet laid out for breakfast once the stars are right. Beings that will send you mad trying to comprehend them fully, tend to inspire a modicum of awe after all… Where as a god of sleep seems just a little mundane in comparison…

But wait a moment, in the original Greek myths Hypnos is the son of the night and darkness, brother to death and resides in Hades. Sleep is ever the little death… Which is why old tentacle face lays in a sleep akin to death beneath the oceans. Where there is sleep, there are dreams… and dreams in Lovecraft have a nasty habit of being more than the nightly meandering of the mind as it tries to bring order to the chaos of the day… So let’s not write of Hypnos just yet, for the night is indeed dark and full of terrors…

It is fear of sleep that haunts the narrator of this strange little tale. A fear that takes its name from that same Greek god, Hypnophobia. As a man who likes a pleasant doze on the sofa, I find the concept of being afraid to sleep, terrified of sleep to be more exact, a little on the scary side. Even when my random bouts of insomnia are at there worst at least, I am not afraid of sleep, the faces in the dark perhaps… But that’s the fear that at the heart of this tale, and our narrator, like so many Lovecraft narrators, brought it all on himself…

The narrator who is not named just for a change, (one occasionally thinks Lovecraft just didn’t like thinking up names very much with all the nameless creations who tell his stories…), is a sculptor, a bit of a recluse and for most of his life friendless. Until he meets a mysterious man in a railway station. With a logic that escapes me, he realises the stranger will be his friend the moment he opens his:

“immense, sunken, and widely luminous eyes”

Because let’s face it the moment you meet a mysterious stranger in a railway station with huge sunken eyes that glow the first thing that crosses your mind is the word ‘friend’… but hey, artists, their sanity is always fluid even outside of Lovecraft’s fiction…

Regardless, he sees something in this stranger, that something been mysteries he has always sought knowledge of reflected in those strange eyes… and takes him home with him. (see I told you he brought it all on himself.) He then spends his days making sculptures of his friend, or at least busts of his face. While he spends his nights…

‘exploring worlds beyond human comprehension.’

Indeed they together seek to transcend into the unknown to rule the universe, through the excessive use of drugs… Artists… What can you say… But eventually, they come to a barrier they can not cross and when they awaken once more the strange friend warns the sculpture that from then on they must avoid sleep at all cost. Which can only be achieved through the use of more drugs… It’s the sixties all over again …

If Lovecraft had lived in the sixties, the sculptor would be a pop culture artist and call himself Andy while hanging around with assorted Beatles… For a teetotaler old tentacle hugger certainly, he likes his drug fantasies. This is hardly the first time his narrators have been heavy users of powdery substances… With the aid of drugs, the two avoid sleep as much as possible, but when on occasion they succumb, they rapidly age in appearance and are plagued by nightmares which in true Lovecraftian fashion the narrator refuses to explain. Eventually one night, the stranger falls into a deep-breathing sleep and was impossible to arouse. The narrator shrieks, faints and awakes surrounded by the police and his neighbours. Those neighbours claim he never had a friend, yet there in the centre of the room is a statue of the stranger with the weird eyes. Engraved with the Greek word: ΥΠΝΟΣ… (Which in case you can’t guess is Hypnos).

So there you go, the drug fulled fantasy life of an artists insanity and obsession with strange men that could be greek gods… Or a visitation of a greek god upon a mortal that ends in madness… With a lot of sixties vibes thrown in. The only thing missing is a girl called Lucy hanging about on a cloud wearing nothing but an 18-carat diamond studded tiara and Sargent Pepper playing in the background…

It’s a bit of an odd tale, and I ain’t very fond of it. I am not exactly sure why. The sixties references that are not sixties references perhaps. I don’t think it has aged well, not because of anything internal to the story, but because the world has moved on. The narrator is not some strange junkie living a strange wild life because we have had the sixties, and the seventies, the eighties, the nineties… etc. Junkie artists are hardly an oddity to us, they don’t inspire much when they are just a stereotype that’s so common as to be mainstream… Which is not to say the 1920’s did not have junkie artists of its own, but they were not just a run of the mill stereotype, they had an alluring mystery that they just don’t have to a modern reader. I’m from the ‘Trainspotting’ generation, even the sixties and LCD trip fiction seems a little tame, and I have read Micheal Moorcocks ‘Fireclown’. I am used to Irvin Walsh, dead babies on the ceiling and diving into the worst toilet in Scotland … So in drug-fueled visions, I kind of expect more…

It’s unfair of me I suspect, to expect a teetotaler from prohibition era Providence Rhode-island to match up in drug fantasies to the sixties, let alone the nineties Edingbrough heroine scene with its imagery, and normally I don’t compare the fiction in that way but with Hypnos I struggled not to. So its a mere two slimy tentacles reaching out from the pillbox for this one. That and the god of sleep telling someone not to sleep… just seems a little odd… Still, don’t let me bring a downer on it all… pop one of these and have pleasant dreams instead…

Further Lovecraftian witterings

Posted in dreamlands, Lovecraft, mythos, opinion, reads, retro book reviews | Tagged bookreview, dreamlands, drugs, Lovecraft, lovecraftian | 1 Comment

NaNoWriMo: Or how to first draft…

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Mark Hayes

With November less than a month away, and in the mildly self-aggrandizing of attempting to offer some advice to budding writers… This is the story of how I managed to write my first novel. It is also the story of how I managed to write my nineteenth novel. They just happen to be the same book. The other eighteen are still sat on hard drives, in paper copies or in one case on an old Amiga floppy disc I can not access. You see, in case you have failed to guess, the only reason Cider lane became my first novel was because I actually finish writing it. More importantly, perhaps, I actually finished the first draft.

Like most writers I suspect, I have started a lot of projects over the years, far more than nineteen technically, as I have endless notebooks and scrap ends, one-off chapters of unwritten masterpieces (or utter drivel in all likelihood). That nineteen is the number of projects that got past 40 pages or around 20000 words minimum. Then for one reason or another, they ground to a halt. Some are a lot longer than that, some just scrape over the line, but all of them had one thing in common, all of them (until Cider Lane) never got completed to the end of a first draft.

Maybe I just lost interest in a story. Maybe I found myself inspired by something else and launched myself into it and left the earlier work behind in the ‘get back to this later’ tray. Quite often life just took a turn to the left, life does that on occasion, I have been writing for over thirty years, after all, children, relationships, depression, different jobs and a whole lot of other stuff has happened in that time. Life has a way of happening to us all… But if I was asked to nail down one main reason that all these manuscripts fell by the wayside it is this one: I used to edit as I went along…

Edit as you go, go back to chapter one and rewrite it again, and again. Write a bit further then feel you need to revise things again. Edit, edit edit. Re-write, re-write, re-write… I could write 100000 words, but the actual manuscript would still be 10000 words long. I know I am not alone n this experience… It is also one of the reasons why I would get stalled with a story.

Generally, I would go back to a previous chapter because something had made a little light bulb come on in my mind and I would realise that whatever I had just written would work better it ist had a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps just if it was alluded to by a character in an earlier chapter. Then I would go back to add it, or change something and find myself sucked into revising the whole chapter from the start, yet again…

When NaNoWriMo came around every year I used to be busy, November in my old job was the worst, long hours tight deadlines. Added to which I would always be in the middle of something writing-wise. So while I always like the idea, I never actually did it.

NaNoWriMo, for those who do not know, is ‘National Novel Writing Month’. It’s well organised, but you don’t necessarily need to go down the organised route. The idea is to write a 50000 novel in the 30 days of November. There are groups who cheerleader each other along. Calendars to track your writing with. A whole lot of social engagement and help from other sources, you can register here, and find a local group via the main website. Importantly they also have a couple of guiding principles they suggest you stick to if possible.

Write every day… and stick to your targets
Don’t edit just write… editing if for December…

Its the latter one that really makes the difference for me, so I decided one year to try it. In July … as I say November was always a busy month for me. But other than getting the date wrong I used the word count guides and the forums, and the guideline on not editing as I went along. A month later, I had done it, not a 50000-word novel, but at the time a 69000-word novel. I overshot because it went so well. It was bare bones, there was almost a year of redrafting, editing more redrafting more edit etc. before the manuscript was somewhere near its final stage. But I had the first draft and therein lays the trick… I had something real, and complete to work with.

I am an exception, to a degree. Few NaNoWriMo novels ever get published by there writers, that’s not really the aim. Certainly not in the form they are first written (when I say Cider Lane had a lot of editing afterwards I mean a lot.) But plenty prove to be the ground stones on which a novel is built. Its an exercise in creativity, not perfection. It forces people, in a gentle way, to write with a certain amount of self-discipline. There is no failure if you don’t succeed in completing your 50000 words, not in any real terms, no one will look down on you for failing, but they will all cheer when you cross the finish line on November the 30th. Even if you fail, you will still have words on a page, something you might be able to take on to the next level, or just a whole lot of practice in writing. Also, it can do wonders for your self-discipline, teaching you not to edit as you go, to work to deadlines no matter how self-imposed. and just the pure love of writing.

What I got out of it was just that, which helped me no end, and still does. I am a better writer for it, not just in terms of productivity.

Its October, you have all month to register at https://nanowrimo.org/ you can plan and plot your novel as well if you want, or just wait until November the 1st and start writing. But in the end, you have little to lose, and much to gain, if all you gain is friends who struggle along with you…

Current ‘working’ titles I have under consideration for myself are:

Maybes daughter part dux ( actually an on going project that is 30k done , but is planned for around 50k more and as I say nanowrimo is a great way to get a first draft down)
Like a Bad Penny (a spin-off of a spider in the eye with a female protagonist, guess what her name is…)
The Droitwich Horror (spoof Lovecraft horror set in the west midlands…)