The Passing Place

Dagon : The Complete Lovecraft #4

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Mark Hayes

H. P. Lovecraft was born, raised and spending the majority of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. It is perhaps therefore not a great surprise that the mysteries of the sea features so often in his fiction. Even now, a hundred years after Dagon was written, it remains a bizarre fact that humanity knows more about the universe beyond the thin shield of our atmosphere than we do about the depths of our own oceans. Back in 1917 when this tale was penned this was even more of a truism than it is today. What may lie in the ink black abyss beyond our shallow shores, caught the imagination of both the writer and his readers alike. It is, after all, the last great unknown on our own planet and stories of sea monsters have abounded since man first sailed upon the oceans.
‘Dagon‘ was one of the first stories Lovecraft wrote as an adult and was published only a couple of years later. (1919 in The Vagrant) It remains one of his best-known, and perhaps, still one of his most disturbing tales.

I myself live close to the sea, My local beach, a short twenty-minute walk from the house, is a deserted stretch of sand, boarded by dunes and the eerie lights of the power station down the coast. The bay holds the remains of a primeval petrified forest that washes up like black ash on the sand. Walk along a deserted beach at midnight, as I have on occasion, the sound of the waves crashing against the shoreline. Alone in the still oppressive summer heat, The cold of the water at your feet, a still dead night air, strange noises you can’t account for, bearly audible above the sound of the surf and the sinister nature of the sea is not far from your consciousness. That then the ocean inspired Lovecraft to some of his darkest, and best love fiction is of only little surprise to me. It is, after all, a powerful question. If the shore is the medium between one world and another, the known world and the unknown abyss, then what may lay beyond, in the inky darkness no sun ever shines upon?

‘Dagon‘ is told to us by a former sailor. A man who is now addicted to opiates, in a vain attempt escape the horror he has experienced and the terror gnawing at his mind. Penniless, and soon to be drugless he has decided to end his torment permanently by taking his own life. First, however, he decides to write his story down. His last testament of the events that drove him towards oblivion.
His tale is one of a marina cast adrift in a lifeboat after the ship he worked on was taken by the german navy. He escaped alone in his small craft, somewhere in the mid-pacific. Spending his days ecking out his limited supplies and fighting off the effects of sunstroke. Until one day he awakens to find he is no longer adrift in the ocean but in the middle of a black slimy plain, a few hundred yards from his upturned boat, the stink of rotten fish in the air. So putrid that even gulls would not dine upon them.

Eventually, he starts to survey this strange land, coming to the conclusion it was until recently the ocean floor. A vast segment of it, which has been cast up by volcanic activity or some other unknown cause. Short of options he sets out to find out more, Faced, as he is, with the likelihood that his supplies will run out and he would join the rotting fish in a short time if he does not set out walking.

Eventually, he comes across a hillock in the flat plain, and heads towards it, beyond which he finds the land falls into a canyon, so vast and deep he can not see beyond the shadows of its walls. Yet what disturbs him most is a monolith, one carved by hands, which may or may not have been human, upon which are carvings of things that most certainly were not. A strange cyclopean relic of some long lost civilisation, or more disturbingly, one still in existence hidden from the eyes of men within the ocean depths.

Then out of the inky, darkness of the canyon, a hand appears, gigantic, webbed and inhuman. What follows that hand, haunts the marina’s nightmare ever after, driving him to the dulling effects of opiates.

Sometime after the man is found, adrift once more in an open boat, by a passing merchantman. Delirious from heat stroke, he is raving of things that could not be, and only finally comes to his sense weeks later in a hospital bed.

Is the land from the sea bottom some fever-induced delusion or did events happen as he describes? Does it matter either way? To the mariner, the truth is possibly somewhere in between, and as so often Lovecraft’s narrative invites us to draw our own conclusions.

Perhaps because I live by the shore, and the darkness below the waves has a strong resonance to me. Or perhaps simply because of all the tales, I have covered so far this inspires the most guttural reaction. But I adore, as do many others, this particular story. As such it would be wrong of me to offer it less than a full six tentacles out of six.
It is with this tale that for me Lovecraft comes of age in his writing, as it is perhaps the first truly Lovecraftian tale, and certainly the first in which he begins to explore his mythos.

Further Lovecraftian witterings

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The Tomb : The Complete Lovecraft #3

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Madness and the ravings of the mad are themes that Lovecraft visits time and time again in his work. It’s a subject that is close to his heart. He himself having suffered a nervous breakdown in his formative years, as well as suffering most of his life from both parasomnia and pareidolia (sleep paralysis seeing faces in dark shadows). Indeed, a fair degree of his later work can trace its inspiration back to these afflictions.
‘The Tomb’ is one of his earlier works, and in it he used the device of a narrator of questionable sanity. That narrator, Jervas Dudley, makes no bones about this in his tale, telling us repeatably that his word is questionable. All the while talking about dalliances with dryads in the woods and ghosts in spectral masons. As well as his own belief that he is privy to a more mysterious world than most, alluding to having some form of second sight and a touch of the fay about himself.
Written in 1917 when Lovecraft was at the very beginning of his publishing career, it was first published in ‘The Vagrant’ five years later. At a time when Lovecraft had begun to build a small but loyal following, at least in the pages of the small press pulp magazines.
The question of the narrator’s sanity is an open one, though Lovecraft certainly pushes the idea that what society believes to be the ravings of a madman could hold more than a seed of the truth behind it. In typical languid prose, the narrator vouches what Kipling summed up more succinctly with, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.‘ A concept at the heart of much of Lovecraft’s work.
This occasionally laboured prose is occasionally I find a problem with Lovecraft’s style. He will at times stretch a sentence around all kinds of strange geometry to say something in the least succinct way possible. Ironically this style is also something of the joy I find in reading Lovecraft, but it is easy to get lost in his sentences all the same. ‘The Tomb‘ is definitely a story of that kind, weaving long tracks through the woods, where shorter paths exist. There is, however, depth to that style which draws you in and gives voice to the narrator. Intentionally or not, these read like slightly deranged ramblings, wandering around his tale by strange roads and trails. It feels authentic the madness of the narrator, which is the real strength of the story.
In fairness, as I am no stranger to the odd bit of meandering prose (my novel Passing Place has more than a few wandering narratives within it), as such, I am hard pressed to criticise Lovecraft for doing so.

Comic book version of ‘The Tomb.’

There have been several comic book adaptations of the story, which follow the plot to a greater or lesser degree, certainly closer than a movie in 2007 called ‘The Tomb‘ which was publicised as ‘HP Lovecraft’s The Tomb‘. It went ignominiously straight to DVD and had no actual ties to the Lovecraft story at all. It was instead a low budget movie following the same basic plot of the ‘SAW‘ films. It was not an overwhelming success though has some following with the director Ulli Lommel’s fans, its interest to Lovecraft aficionado is limited.

‘NOT’ the film of the book

As a tale within itself, ‘The Tomb‘ draws you along, in mild bemusement at the narrator’s wanderings. The hints of madness mixed with the obsessive are all there. Jervas Dudley, on one of his long fanciful walks through the woodland, comes across a locked tomb hidden in a grove. Below the remains of the Hyde family mansion, long burned down after a lightning strike, (struck down for the decadence of its inhabitants by the Lord above, as the local folk law would have it.) His obsession with the tomb, the family interred there and how it may connect to himself becomes a central part of his life and the story.
When he later finds a porcelain figurine with the initials J.H upon it. in a box with a key he believes he has found the way into the tomb. Within he finds the coffins of the long dead, and one empty one, the right size and shape for himself. Whereupon he takes to sleeping within its dusty halls each night.
Eventually, Jervas is undone, his nightly wanderings discovered, though those who discover his strange obsession are convinced he sleeps outside the tomb, and the padlock on the door has never been touched.
Lovecraft leaves us with this. A story told by a man in an asylum, believed to be mentally unstable, telling us a tale that even by his own recounting of it leaves questions of its validity.
Yet one final twist remains…

This tale has long been a favourite, and one of the Lovecraft stories I have read before more than once. Its strength lays in its narrator, and the choice you are given to believe in all he says or believe instead this is merely a window into his insanity. It is in many ways the essence of a good Lovecraft short story, which explains the many ways it has bene re-envisioned by others since it was first published.
So I give it a madness inspired 5 out of 6 tentacles.

Further Lovecraftian witterings

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The Alchemist: the complete Lovecraft #2

Posted on January 4, 2017 by Mark Hayes

‘The Alchemist’ is one of the better known early tales written by the H. P. Lovecraft. Like the first tale, I reviewed it is considered to be one of his Juvenilia works as Lovecraft wrote ‘The Alchemist’ when he was still only 17, in 1908. Also like ‘The Beast in the Cave‘, it was not published until several years later, in this case in 1916, two years before ‘Beast’ when it appeared in the November issue of the ‘United Amateur‘. Which as the name suggest was another small press magazine in the north-eastern US.

Compared to the first tale I reviewed it is, however, a far more accomplished work, with a darker edge to it than ‘The Beast in the Cave‘. Rather than a simple tale of a man in a singularly terrifying situation, this is a story with real depth to it. One which can be read on different levels, making it more the Lovecraft you expect, than the admirably well-written story of ‘Beast‘ which lacks maturity in comparison. This is no great surprise, as while it is only written by a man three years older, the three years between 14 and 17 are relatively big years in the development of anyone, not least a writer.

The scope of ‘The Alchemist’ is much more ambitious, as it is a tale spanning hundreds of years, but it starts with us being welcomed into the crumbling dust-laden world of Count Antoine de C-. It is through the eyes of the Count that Lovecraft envisions the dwindling fortunes of the de C- family, and the crumbling family pile which mirrors that demise.
(note. Lovecraft is fond of the device of hidden surnames. he uses it often in his fiction. This stems from the scandal sheets of his day often redacting names to avoid been sued. It seems odd to modern eyes, used to modern media’s less care approach to libel laws. As a literary device, it is unusual to see now but was designed to draw in a reader and encourage them to suspend their disbelief.)
The Count, with his family’s last loyal servant, reside in the last solitary tower among the ruins. And when the servant dies the count is alone with his brooding’s and the family histories of his sadly depleted line, it is there he first encounters knowledge of the family curse. A cruel and desperate one at that. Each son of the family is cursed to die before they reach the tender age of thirty-two. With this discovery, the Count dedicates the rest of his ever shortening life to discovering the secret behind the curse and evading its impending embrace.

This then is a tale of obsession, the kind of story that Lovecraft excels at telling. Told, as it is in the first person, the Count shows little perspective on his plight. But then the Count is the one obsessed, so his perspective is, by its nature, a grim one. Faced with a curse which gives his life the equivalent of an expiry date, rather than living the life he has to the full, he hides himself away in the ruins of his family fortunes seeking desperately an answer to the curse, while the tale explores it further.
One can not help thinking he would have been far better off taking what little fortune remained and living hard and fast in the streets of some of Europe’s capital cities. Paris, Vienna or Rome perhaps. After all, if you know, you’re going to die young, then living fast and leaving a good looking corpse is generally the raison d’etre.
His obsessions drive him to delve into the vaults of the family library, which hold an interesting collection of treatise on alchemy, dark arts, and oddities, as well as the family histories. A collection which suggests he is not the first Count de C- to seek an answer to the curse. While doing so he reveals the history of the house de C-, and the root of the curse in the murder of one of a pair of black magicians by a distant ancestor of the Counts.

It is here, viewing the world through the eyes of one in the grip of obsession that Lovecraft’s writing excels. Yet the Counts obsession is not the only obsession in the tale. Indeed there is a far darker obsession waiting to be revealed at the end. You can feel the crumbling remains of the castle around you, the layers of dust on the ground, the dark passageways and secret ways within the ruins which Antoine explores in his obsession as it turns into a madness, the clock of his life ticking slowly and relentlessly down.

Yet this could have been far more than it finally becomes, which is perhaps my one disappointment with the tale, much like the first story, the ending and big reveal is a little lacklustre. Though it is carefully crafted it is jaded with a predictability about it, which may be tempered by this been one of the tales I have read before (several years ago.) The ending I imagined was coming as I read had a sharper twist to it, which blunted the actual ending a degree.

All the same, this is once more one of Lovecraft’s Juvenilia works. He was still finding his feet and his style. The darkness that was to come and the edge to his stories is not quite there yet. It is, however, a far more deeply engaging and troubling tale than the first. As such, I’ll give its a 3 out of 6 tentacles, for the promise of darker more disturbing things to come it contains within it.

Further Lovecraftian witterings

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The Beast In The Cave. The complete Lovecraft #1

Posted on January 3, 2017 by Mark Hayes

As you may be aware from the earlier post on the subject, I have decided to read/review the complete fiction works of H P Lovecraft as my reading/blogging challenge for 2017.
I have decided to do this in the order they appear in the collection I was given, rather than order of publication, or the order they were written. Both of which would I guess be acceptable chronologies, though they are wildly contradictory, as much of Lovecraft’s fiction was published several years after it was written, or after his untimely demise. The chronology is also of little concern as these pieces of fiction while part of an overall canon of work all stands independently of each other.
To give a little structure to these posts, I will include both the dates written and first publication dates of each piece and a little background here or there. Though I will focus on the stories themselves for the most part. Without further waffle then let us move on to doing just that.

Lovecraft wrote ‘the beast in the cave’ when he was only 14, in 1905. It was not published until 1918 when it appeared in an amateur press journal ‘The Vagrant’.

The short story is a simple one, in the context of its synopsis, a man lost deep within a cave complex, his torch extinguishing, believing himself beyond rescue, faces a slow death by starvation alone in the darkness. Until he realises he is not alone, after all, something lurks in the darkness, something hungry.

In many ways, this is a good introduction to Lovecraft’s fiction, not just because it is some of his earliest work, but because it holds within it one of the themes that run through so much of his work. Isolation, within an unforgiving, uncaring cosmos, being alone in the darkness, and the things in that endless night you find yourself hoping will not notice your existence.
Like most Lovecraft, it is written from the point of view of a single voice recounting his tale, and looking inward towards their fears. The man ( he never names himself) fears for his own sanity, in the face of a slow, torturous demise. Indeed fear of mortality, fear of the darkness, and fear of the unknown and the unknowable are central here. The feeling of fear, experienced through the characters emotions, grows steadily as you read the tale. Until the introduction of the beast itself. A dark presence the character encounters, blind as he is in the darkness of the cave. What the beast turns out to be is in many ways an anti-climax, if a predictable one, does not really matter in the context of the story. Indeed the reveal is almost clumsy, a last minute rescue and the light of his rescuer’s torches revealing the beast itself…
but before that reveal the beast could be anything, what matters more is how it makes the main character feel, and what he fears it could be. The end softens the story while resolving it for the reader.

This is very early Lovecraft, still finding his feet with a pen and paper. Unlike modern writers, Lovecraft did not have the luxury of a word processor, revision was a difficult exercise comparatively, and in all likely hood the final draft he wrote as a 14-year-old is what was published in 1918 to a large extent. He was still to develop his soul as a writer. I suspect that if this had been a later work the beast would never have been revealed at all and the tale would have ended a paragraph or so earlier. The real darkness in the tale holds to its course until that point.
As not to set too low a bar so early in all this I give it a miserly 2 out of 6. this is not to imply it’s a bad story, it is simply a little lacking compared to later tales.

You can read ‘the beast In the cave’ yourself for free by downloading it here at Feedbooks

Further Lovecraftian witterings

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Blog / Reading Challenge 2017

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Mark Hayes

With the occasional exception, I have spoken to, notable only for their oddity, all writers are prolific readers. Indeed the notable exceptions were a couple of people who have told me they want to be writers while openly admitting they don’t read a lot. To whom my advice has always been, start reading more.
This is not because we are all driven to be derivative, or indeed have any desire to plagiarise, (though there are plenty of hacks out there who do, as witnessed by the amount of erotic Fifty Shades-esque fiction that flooded the market the moment a niche was found. Much of which was better than the original)
Reading is beyond enjoyable in of itself, a great way to fill your writing toolkit with new ideas and ways of communicating. Sometimes just by reading something which strikes you as inherently the wrong way to write a story. “I would not have written that, but the idea is interesting, perhaps if the stories told from that other characters perspective…”
You also get a steady stream of new words to play with. New idea’s to throw around. New perspectives to draw upon. And importantly new knowledge. Which is why none fiction is just as important, brewsters directory of phrase and fable, for example, is one of the finest reference books in the world for strange and exciting ideas.
With all this in mind, I decide to set myself a challenge most years, instead of a new years resolution. Generally
to read something different from my normal fodder, or to find out all I can on a particular subject.
Like all new years resolutions some work out better than others, and its bets to set a goal that other people can prod you about if you backslide.
This year I received the complete fiction works H. P Lovecraft as a present. So this is my aim for the year, to read all Lovecraft’s fiction, and to keep myself in check I will blog a review of each story, novella and novel in the set over the course of the year. Awarding tentacles out of six for each.
I will also try and get hold of some of his many non-fiction works as well. His non-fiction essays etc dwarf his fiction output but are harder to get hold of.
This will be aside from the other blog posts which will be their regular sporadic and mildly eclectic mix.
All that aside, A Happy New year to all, may the stars not be quite right throughout 2017, as the last thing we need with Trump in the White House if a sudden incursion of old gods. It quite possibly going to bad enough without Azeroth showing up… Or perhaps Natholoptep was behind the Trump election machine … now that would explain much

Whispers in the darkness

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Year of the Dead

Posted on December 28, 2016 by Mark Hayes

We have lost a lot of loved and respected famous people in the last year. Individuals who’s passing has affected us, brought tears, sadness and that strange form of grief we feel for people who we have never known personally but have been part indivisibly of our lives, Others have died in other years, but in 2016 there have been more than in any year I can remember. So many have passed in fact that it seems an endless list, that this year is out to get us all somehow.

Why we feel grief when those who are the icons of our life pass is no great mystery. I am 46, the icons of my generation, the ones who influence us and were part of our lives when we were children are only a few years older than us, but those years are enough that there passing is not actually unusual. A sad, but true fact, is people start to die of natural causes more often as they get older. Where once an accident or suicide was involved in the passing of such icons of my generation ( Kirk Cobain for example) now it is cancer, heart attacks, and just plain old age, which takes them from us.

We are the generation that television raised. Unlike our parents who were the generation of cinema. When I was a small child we had three channels, it may seem a weird concept today, but the launch of Channel 4 was a major event. For all its faults, however, television expanded our universe more than that of the generation before us, and as we grew the world grew too. Our icons are many, where the icons of the generation before us were fewer. We had a closer connection to them all than our parent’s generation, and now we feel that connection all the more.

With the internet, that web of wonder that has encircled us all, has come an interconnection with those icons that is all the stronger. A death is not an obituary in the paper, or a two-minute piece at the end of the evening news anymore. That was a segment of our lives which we allow for a little introspective and are prepared for. If you watch the news you are ready for bad news, after all, that’s what the evening news mostly consists of. In turn, it makes taking the bad news of someone’s passing easier to process. But in the age of the internet it’s more immediate and more all-consuming, catching you on your blind side, unprepared and unready. I did not learn of the sad news of the passing of Carrie Fisher, George Micheal, Liz Smith, Rick Parfitt, (to name the most recent crop) on the evening news, I suspect no one did.

I learn of it on Facebook, That ‘happy’ place we go to in order to see what our friends are up to, look at pictures of cats, and complain about society. And these days it seems the place we express our collective grief at the passing of an icon.

Learning of the death of a loved icon on social media is intimidate and all consuming. We grieve as a collective, share that grief and in doing so we feel it all the more. Yet perhaps it also helps us come to terms with these sudden absences from our lives. Those of my generation, those forty/fifty somethings that grew up with television and the birth of the internet feel it all the more because it speaks to us of our own mortality. If our icons can die, so many of them and so often it seems, then so can we, they are not that much older than us after all.

My parents probably remember where they were when they heard Elvis had died, I can not remember where I was when Bowie died, only that the internet told me he had passed, and a wall of grief washed over it, as it had done only a few days before when Lemmy was taken from us to thrash metal heaven. Where we were when we learned of their passing does not matter. We heard it on the internet and grieved with the world. Perhaps fittingly for the icons which formed our world.

2017 does not promise to get any easier, I have no doubt that at some point in early January some other icon of my life and the Internets collective gestalt will pass. And I will hear about it on the internet, at my most unprepared. As a generation, we have reached an age where our heroes die. Carrie Fisher just the latest in the death list of 2016. That it seems to have been such a bad year for the demise of icons is just a sign of our times. That we do not become jaded and prosaic about the passing of our heroes, is a sign of our humanity, that at least gives me hope in a year so devoid of it in any other way.

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All we are saying…

Posted on December 21, 2016 by Mark Hayes

This post, like some others I have made, started out as a minor rant and attempt at light heartiness in response to a mild bout of despair at the human condition because if you can’t at least try to raise a smile, what is the point of it all…
It is not exactly faithful to the original, which I posted as the conflict in Syria drew in the west still further last year.
While it was a piece of gallows humour, laughing in the face of the ridiculous tragedy of humanity, I stand by its conclusion all the same. Yes I know it’s unrealistic, but I don’t make western democratic policy, so i don’t need to be realistic. I can instead idealise. And maybe, just maybe one day those who do make policy may try having some ideas as well.

It’s almost Christmas, in the ghetto of western civilisation, instead of singing about it lets try it. Peace on earth that is.

All we are saying……

So, we are at war AGAIN. (was there ever a time we were truly not at war as a species?)
The last war we stumbled into in the middle east, destabilised the region to the point where extremist militants could carve out there own empire across international borders. While for no reason that makes sense to me they have taken the same name as an Egyptian goddess of health, marriage and wisdom… Having carved out their new caliphate they have become a terrorist threat to the western world. Or at least the ones which we are blaming this time. Having killed off the leaders of the last lot, and then invaded Iraq on the grounds that their leader looked at us funny, had invisible weapons of mass destruction somewhere and lots of oil.
Invisible weapons of mass destruction proved to be invisible due to not existing.
The leader who looked at us funny had nothing to do with the terror attacks we had endured due to being as unpopular with the terrorists as we were.
But luckily there was plenty of oil.
But now ISIS, the one who was not a goddess, at any rate, has started grabbing territory and encouraging terror attacks… you know the ones we started the last war to end… And they are remarkably good at it, and recruiting people to their cause, often those people who we bombed in the last war, no telling why they suddenly dislike the west. but drone strikes may have something to do with it.
So we are going to war, again, because that worked so well last time…

I know it’s a wild and wacky idea, but perhaps we could try not bombing innocent people and thus creating the reason for the next war. After all, we have done this particular dance on and off for about well, for the whole of human history.
Fight a war, punish the losers, instil resentment, fight another war.
Make the losers of the first world war pay reparations till we bankrupt their economy. That’s not going to cause us any problems later down the line.
Make up countries by drawing lines on maps of the world then leave them to it uniting disparate ethnic groups, worked so well in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the entirety of Africa and most of Asia …
Fight another war or three.
Perhaps the reason the terrorists hate us, and hate our way of life is because we keep marching in with guns, shooting and bombing people, blowing up infrastructure, their hospitals and schools. Then we sod off and leaving them to patch their lives back together with grain field full of anti-personnel mines, that we sold them.
Just a thought that. Because in their position I think I would hate us too, just a little bit.

Perhaps we could, however, try a new approach.
I would like to suggest we give it some new name, to distinguish it from War. Perhaps, we should call it Peace
Under the new approach of Peace the people we don’t bomb this year will not become the people we then have to bomb in five or ten years time when they are frankly a bit pissed off with the west for its policy of bombing them.
Peace would instead mean that having not bombed them now, they will have no reason to attempt to bomb us in future.
Which will mean in turn we don’t have to go to war with them.
The billions and billions of pounds spent on the policy of War can be spent on the policy of Peace, for example, funding the NHS. not having food banks as a basic requirement of a bankrupt welfare state. free education at universities, proper state pensions, a decent standard of living for all, homes for the homeless. you know, nice peaceful things like those, things which are not in fact bombs.

We have tried this war thing time and again,
I know we are all a bit slow on the uptake at times, but frankly its past time we realised war doesn’t work. That is unless you’re trying to perpetuate a corrupt ruling class and industrial military block and breed a state of paranoid acceptance of increasingly intrusive state control designed to keep the rich in power and control of the state. All while the poor do as they’re told and accept that they are ruled by those who know better,,,, ( btw 1984 is a great read )

So let’s give this Peace idea a chance,, there possibly a song someone could write about it as well now I think of it,
Yes, let’s not kill people in a self-perpetuating state of war, followed by war followed by more war. Constantly breeding the next bunch of militant gun-wielding fanatics who want to exact some revenge because we keep bombing them.
Frankly, let’s face it if our country was bombed every day year on year, we would probably be a little tetchy ourselves,.
Peace .
It’s a new idea,
let’s give it a go …….

Posted in goodnews, humour, pointless things of wonderfulness, politics, rights | Tagged humour, internationaldayofpeace, politics | Leave a comment

The Vanities Of The Strong

Posted on December 14, 2016 by Mark Hayes

I have seen the future of humanity, and it is war.
War on a scale unprecedented.
War that will consume the world, leaving millions slaughtered in the mud of Europe.
War that will cause misery untold as nation fights nation with all the might of the industrial age. A generation of humanity blighted by the worst of us.
Then, a mere generation will pass before the world is plunged once more into darkness unceasing. Conflict on a scale un-reckoned by our night-mares, embroiling all in its embittered grip. It will wrap the world in choking hands and bring suffering to all it touches.
Factories of death, the dreams of madmen will be built. Trains will carry men, woman, even children to their gaping maws. Marching them in their millions to chambers of slaughter, a systematic butchery of a race.
More machines will fill the air, raining down their payloads upon the great cities of Europe, to leave them nothing but shells of their former glories. Their broken remains scorched and chard by the firestorms.
Meanwhile better bombs level whole Asian cities in single blasts. Leaving nought but invisible death in poisoned air behind them.
Such a weapon once conceived can never be forgotten, and the world will find itself waiting on the abyss of a single button. Tottering on the edge of it owns end when the mad shall be the only strategy.
Ideologies of east and west will clash, in a century of blood, ceaseless in the undertaking of little wars that keep humanity on the edge of annihilation. While the world’s people will suffer evermore under the yoke of tyrants both overt and hidden. Until the cause of money becomes the foremost of all ideology’s.
An ideology that eats away at the earth itself. Burning it up to feed the ever-growing appetites of those few who extend their power over the many with the propaganda of technology. Feeding lies through invisible transmissions that saturate the minds of humanity, reducing them to cattle for the factories of the rich.
Ripe for the slaughter.
Ripe for exploitation.
All to keep the system of war and hate moving forward.
All the advancements of the ages, all the wonders of humanity’s devising, all the ingenuity of man turned to one sole purpose. The slaughter the weak, to feed the vanities of the strong.
Would that, in one action, a simple changing of the past, this future could be averted.

H G Wells, unpublished introduction to the Time machine 1895.

(prologue form the forth coming The Wells of Time: A Hannibal Smyth adventure )

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A Biography of Depression

Posted on December 7, 2016 by Mark Hayes

There is this pit which, I believe, we all walk around the edge of at some time in our lives. Though the lucky among us may never notice they are doing so, the worst they may experience is a cold shiver on the back of their neck, and an urge to tread carefully or even tiptoe around for a day or two, without even knowing what it is that makes them feel that way.

Others will only perceive the pit, tread carefully for a while and then move on.

Others still may find themselves walking around the edge for a long time at different parts of their lives, but through luck and perhaps the odd guiding hand they never slip into it.

For some, however, occasionally the ground will give way under their feet, and they will stumble. If you’re really lucky at that point, you might catch yourself, or you may find a handhold or a ledge to abate your fall. Someone may reach out a hand and grab you, pulling you back to firmer ground. Yet they still may find themselves slipping down into the pit all the same.

And some of us just fall when the ground gives way.

It’s dark down there in the pit, dark and cold, and a long way down. The people walking around the edge seem like shadows, which taunt you and remind you that you too were once only walking around the edge.

Yet even in the deepest parts of the pit, you can see the sunlight. That’s why you can see the shadows. You can still see the way out, for all the sides are steep. You can still imagine that if you call out someone may drop a rope to you, and half pull, half drag you back up to the rim. There is, you see, allows hope while the sun shines…

Except at night there is no sun, at night there is only darkness, and those shadowy figures of hope are but noises in the distance. Half-forgotten. Until even the sun is but a memory, daylight a myth.

It is there, in that darkness that I have dwelled more than once in my life, dreaming of the days in the sun I can no longer remember.

Depression can take anyone. It’s not what it seems, it’s not what people say, it’s not weakness, it’s not just a dose of the blues either. It is all too human, and few, lucky people have ever passed through their lives without glimpsing that pit at some time. Many may never fall down the whole way, but most stumble at some point, and all too many fall for a while.

As for myself, I am perhaps more inclined towards it than most. Some of us just are, it’s in our make-up. For me, to the extent for a long time, that pit has been my norm. Something I have only come to realise of late because when you dwell in the pit, or around the side of it for a long time, the norm is what it becomes.

Knowing that does not really help a great deal, save that in recognising the place in which I dwell for what it is, I can try to find a way to climb out and walk in the sunshine for a while.

The first time I dallied with none existence, with seeking an end, was in my early teens. I am not sure I recognised it at the time for what it was. It was not a desperate cry for attention, as some would consider it. Nor was it some expression of teen angst taken to extremes.

More than anything it was an aspect of control I could exert upon my life where I had none. I made a choice to survive, to continue, and not to end it. It was a choice in my hands that it was being able to make that choice I believe saved me from the ultimate expression of the logic of nihilism. I did not choose to end my life because I could choose not to.

Both my novels draw influence from my own experience. As the old adage goes, ‘write what you know’.

In Cider Lane both the main characters have their struggles with the pit. In the case of Susanna, the pit is morphed into the cave of her psyche. That dark place to which she retreats. While hope and the sunlight play a major part, it starts to form the pit in many ways.

Passing Place deals, among other things, with the grief, the main character feels after the death of his wife, who herself took that ultimate choice we all have. While the novel covers many other things, my pit looms deep with its pages also.

One of my favourite reviews of Cider Lane states

‘ Hayes captures the essence of trauma to perfection in his book Cider Lane: Of Silences and Stars. It’s a difficult feat to write emotion. First, you must submerge yourself within the walls of the pain that we try so desperately to avoid.’

It’s a strange review to be pleased with perhaps, but it makes me feel that I managed to put across some of the themes I was aiming for.

Why and I taking about all this?

Well for several reasons, including the desire to write this stuff down, as writing things down is one of the ways I deal with the world. Which is probably why I feel driven to write novels and just in general. It’s my form of therapy.

But also a recent Facebook post from a friend reminded me of an organisation I have never used, but who’s number I carried with me at times when I walked the pit. It was a simpler post with a few words and the phone number of the organisation.

The Samaritans are a charity that takes its name from the biblical parable of the good Samaritan. They have their detractors and plenty of mockers, but it’s an easy target to mock because no one wants to believe they would ever need them. Even those that dwell in the pit.

As I said, I carried their number about for years, in a fold of paper tucked in my wallet. I never rang them, but the number was there if I ever felt I needed to. It helped, in a strange way, and was enough to have the number.

For many others just having the number is not enough.

Samaritans respond to more than 5.4 million calls for help every year. If even a fraction of those calls actively prevented a suicide attempt, then that is still a terrifying number.

The pit is deep, and dark, and sometimes you cannot see the sun, but there is always someone standing on the rim, waiting for your call.

You can call Samaritans for free anytime from any phone (UK) on 116 123 (USA) 1 (800) 273-TALK this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill, email jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find details of your nearest branch.

I have written about depression before here, so this is not a new subject. The first post can be found at the link below.

Depression talking about it

#samaritans

Posted in depression, opinion, rant, rights | Tagged depression, mentalhealth, rants, samaritans | 2 Comments

Valuing your craft

Posted on December 1, 2016 by Mark Hayes

How do you value the results of your craft?
It’s one of those questions that’s always hard to answer, and harder to answer as a writer than, for example, as a carpenter.
A carpenter makes a table. He cuts the wood, joins the pieces together, sands down the rough edges, lays on a few layers of varnish, then polishes it all up, Then if he adds up the cost of the materials, and ascribes some base value to an hour of his life, he can figure out how long he spent making the table. Add a reasonable percentage on top and voila he has his value, and can look to sell his table at a price that reflects its worth. If he is a highly skilled craftsman making bespoke furniture he can charge a little more, because people can see the value in his work, but ultimately they are paying for a singular item with a solid as you like value.

For a writer, however, the value of his craft is something much harder to ascribe. Ironically because while what is written is singular and unique in nature, the way we market it is not.
If for example, you add up all the hours I spent on thinking about, writing, editing, redrafting, proofing, final editing, typesetting, revising again, when I wrote Cider Lane. In the same time, our carpenter could have made a fair few tables I would posit, or else he would have made a very beautiful and very expensive table.
The novel it took me a year to write between the first word I typed on the screen and it reaching publication. Add up the hours spent and you get a rather large figure. One which a reader does not as a rule see, hence the iceberg below.

Despite this the craft of writing is for me a labour of love. I don’t write to make a living, I have a full time job and writing is a hobby, though if I could make a living doing it I would, truly professional authors are few and far between. While I get my share of readers, I would need to sell a whole lot of books to replace my day job, and that’s not going to happen any day soon.
This does not mean I do not want to be paid for my work, it’s not how I pay the mortgage, but fair recompense for the work I put in would be nice. All the same it is hard to ascribe a value to your work. A balance between trying to find new readers and trying to get a fair return has to be struck, and unlike our carpenters table placing that value on our work remains a difficult proposition.

There is compensation, however, as when we sell a book we can sell it to more than one person. the words we craft are not carve into a stone tablet by hand after all. We can figure out the cost of paper and ink easily enough, print on demand sites will tell you exactly what the minimum is and we can just add a value to that to figure our the price of a book. I use Createspace for my own, though they are plenty of others. Some possible better, a few worse.
I’m a Bibliophile, I like seeing paper copies of my novel, and like selling them direct when I get a chance, though the paperback market is not where I sell most books, it is still somewhere I like to be.
E-books are however the main marketplace for new and aspirating self published authors. E-books which bring their questions of value. With the E-book it’s not even a physical thing we are selling, just binary strings that hold together to form a readable text. We’ll sell it, then we sell it again, it’s a never ended supply of binary code. Which make it harder to ascribe a value, because ultimately your selling nothing but a copy of that code.

All the same, however, how do you place a value on a novel, it’s not just about the time spent writing it. A novel, any novel, is a little pieces of the writers soul laid bare. I say this fully aware of how pretentious it sounds, gleefully aware in fact.

Market economists (a grey inhuman bunch, lack any real soul) would tell you that the market finds its own values, through supply and demand. (see note). they would advise however that if a new writer wants readers he is best advised to give his work away. Make it free and they may come…. create a free supply and your will be at the peak of the demand curve.

Which is true enough, but do people value anything they get for free?

I know myself I have seen free e-books advertised and ignored they simply because ‘if it’s been given away its probably not worth anything’ . I am a child of consumerism after all.

yet if you set a price at the minimum ( on amazon that £0.99 ) it may drag in a couple more readers but still it suffers from the ‘if it’s cheap it must be worthless’ factor.

Other readers have go so used to free books on the internet they just don’t understand why they would have to pay for something. I have genuinely had people cursing at me on +facebook for saying no when they ask for a free copy. the world is ever a strange place, and people expect something for nothing for all they value it less for being free.

I recently dropped the price of Cider lane from £1.99 down to £0.99 in the hope of selling a few more books. Which is what inspired this ramble, or the mixed feeling I had about doing so inspired it at any rate.
I know that while I care nothing about money made from book sales, I do care about people valuing my work and the feeling of value I ascribe to it myself. Readers are important to me, I would not want one reader paying me the true value of my work (I did the maths and on hours alone its about £20,000 worth of work in time). I would vastly prefer 20,000 readers, but it still feels like giving it away. As does the option to do just that on amazon for a week which I resist all the same.

Artists (any for of artist) seldom get true value for the work they produce. Less so in a culture that glorify’s the average, pays footballers millions, yet wants movies for free.
But if we do not value our own work, who will…

Cider lane , available now on kindle for a fraction of the value of my soul, of which it is a slither…

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mr-Mark-Hayes/e/B014JD4F54/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Note, I am doing a degree in politics philosophy and economics. What I have learned is this. Economics is politics with the humanity removed, people are figures on a spreadsheet, their hopes and dreams an irrelevant factor. They never consider if they should do something, only the effect it will have on the little green bits of paper they obsess about if they do. this is why few socialists are economists.