The Passing Place

Nanowrimo 2016

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Mark Hayes

The keyboards are cooling off, The maddening race is over,The final words are done, if your lucky.

Congratulations to anyone who succeeded in the attempt, and the same to anyone who tried by fell short.

Cider Lane came out of a Nanowrimo three years ago, that fell short at the final hurdle, as I remember I got to 38k that year, the final novel, after a good 18 months more work, redrafts , edits and raging at the keyboard… was published at 86k, but that #nanowritmo started it all.

So if you fall short, don’t despair…

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dyslexia

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Mark Hayes

This is an unapologetic rant which started on facebook when someone pointed out an error I had made spelling popularism.
I have placed it here only because having ranted I realised it was perhaps something I felt I needed to say to a wider audience than the friend in question who pointed out a ‘U’ i should not have had in a word. It was a very minor thing to rant about in many ways, but the rant came from deep within. I was far from my happiest at the time I wrote it…..

Any particular reason you are nitpicking away at someone who sufferers from dyslexia XXXXX?
I ask only because of your desire to do so and in doing so make me either feel or indeed just look stupid, while you feel a modicum of superiority by pointing out a single letter in a word I have misspelt in a two line facebook post is both mildly irritating and somewhat perfidious in nature.
My spelling is seldom perfect. However, what small satisfaction a person may gain from pointing this out should perhaps be weighed against the utter irritation I feel when this is done.
I am broken, a sad but true state of affairs. My brain does not work the way the majority of people’s minds work. It sees and translates language differently. Indeed I must force it to twist back upon itself, to take an extra step to understand the words on a page, be they ones I read or those I write.
I read slower than most people, despite this, I read with ravenous ferocity, but slower all the same.
Not because I am stupid, but because my brain needs an extra moment to perform that additional translation that others do not need to find.
I despite Karaoke, not because of the thing itself, but because I am incapable of it, I can not read and understand words quick enough to sing along.
I abhor reading aloud, even when I used to do it each night for my children because I stumble and fall over words, that extra step all the harder when I have to speak them too. I read to them each night anyway, because I loved them and wanted them to love books and the wide world of imagination, despite it often made me feel inadequate to be stumbling over words in books like ‘the hungry caterpillar’ and ‘a bag of wind.’
Most people’s brains are reading ahead before words leave their lips, mine is struggling to keep up.
At primary school, I was held back, had special classes, because my reading age, when spoke was behind, and I felt utterly stupid because of it. Yet in every other subject but English, provided I did not need to read aloud, I was far ahead of my peers, because I am actually far from stupid. But the child I was did not understand that, only that I was in that special class, the one everyone else looked down upon.
I have read the classics, I have read modern classics, my home is in many ways an extended library, my son even described it as such to his girlfriend. I have hundreds of books, and I have read them all, yet I read them slower than most people for all that.
I am doing a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, at the ridiculous age of 46., its taken me 6 years, because while I could have done it in three, I could never have read all the course material if I had tried to do it that way, because my brain doesn’t work properly.
It’s a pointless degree, done for the challenge of doing it, but I have forced my brain around it all the same.
I have written two novels. They took me years. And only because of the help of those willing to proof read have I managed to make the final books mostly error free, because even with all the computer software in the world, which is helping spell check this, my brain still does not see typos.
I have done all this, and yet there are times I still feel stupid, like that child at primary school when someone points out the inadequacy of my spelling. I still feel stupid and shite about myself, even though I know I am by no definition stupid. Whenever anyone points out a typo or a grammatical error in a fucking two line facebook post. Because despite all I have, and all I have done, I can still be made to feel stupid. I can still have someone point out a one letter typo and feel utterly shite about myself and my broken dysfunctional dyslexic brain, because I have been feeling that way since I was a child

Occasionally I feel the need to get this stuff off my chest …

Posted in dyslexia, opinion, rights, writes | Tagged #dyslexia | Leave a comment

#passingplace 2

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Mark Hayes

More single shot Passing Place promotions pictures

The wolf king of Winter

The corner of your eye

The world-tree in the garden

Faces in the dark

Posted in Passing Place, pointless things of wonderfulness, publication | Leave a comment

Alan Turing

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Mark Hayes

As a nation, the British were lucky in the second world war to have Alan Turing. His genius directly shortened the war by two, possibly three years, and in doing so saved millions. Further to this, we know the Nazis were working on their own atomic bomb development program. If they had had the time and the resources to spare, which they would have done had the war lasted another couple of years, they may well have completed it before the Americans. Alan Turning shortening of war then may well have saved many British and American cities from the fate of Hiroshima. Indeed, perhaps the whole world from a premature nuclear holocaust.
As a nation, the British were unlucky after the war in that homosexuality laws caused us to lose one of our finest minds. Had Turing lived, then silicon valley may have been built along the Thames. The powerhouse’s of the internet age could well have sat somewhere outside Richmond, while the rest of the world was running just to keep up.
But more importantly, Alan Turing was unlucky to be born in a nation which persecuted one of its finest minds, among so many others, for the ‘crime’ of loving another man.

When you read this, more than likely on your mobile phone, or maybe your laptop or tablet, I would like you to think for a moment. You are doing something you can only do that because of Alan Turing. Something you can only do, not because his genius led us to the point where you can hold in your had a device that can access the sum total of all human knowledge. (That device you use to look at funny pictures of cats). Which it is entirely possible is the case.

But something you can only do because had it not been for Alan Turing the city you were born in may have been nothing more than a pile of irradiated rubble. A pile of rubble over which a much misused ancient Hindu symbol of peace on a black and red background flying over it. Something you can only do because you were born at all, which you may not have been had we lived in a world under the black jackboot of fascism.

Tonight (when I wrote this on 22/10/2016) I was watching the news when a Tory government minister talked away a bill named in Alan Turing’s honour. A bill which would have pardoned homosexual men whose sexual orientation was criminalised in the 1950’s. A bill which was to be named Turing’s law, because it was this same act that led one of our finest minds, indeed, one of the finest minds the human race has ever produced, to commit suicide after been chemically castrated by order of the British government.

I, a straight white guy, not that it’s relevant, have never been much enamoured of the Tory party. Which will surprise no one who has ever talked to me about politics. I, therefore, have little love for any government of which the Tory party is a part. But under David Cameron, they legalised Gay marriage. This was in my view a great step forward in equality and humanity. I have always been able to marry someone I love, and see no reason what so ever why any gay man or woman should ever have been denied the right to do the same. With that in mind, I have been known to point out the gay marriage bill to those who roundly castigated the Tory government.

“Yes,” I would say, “they are not the government of these blessed isles I would wish for, but at least they are heading in the right direction on this subject if no other. There is hope…”

Tonight (22/10/2016) they have proved otherwise….

Posted in opinion, rights | Tagged lgbt, opinion, rights | Leave a comment

Polarising America

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Mark Hayes

The polarisation of American society over this Presidential Election is the worst I have ever witnessed.
The partisan hatred between Republican and Democratic camps has grown in vitriol and anger with each passing week. Each side seems entirely blind to anything the others says. To a point where it has become astounding. The level of debate has become not about ideas or policy but which of the candidates is the worst person. Indeed rather than question their own candidate over anything both sides opt for the path of least resistance. Instead of trying to justify the actions and words of their chosen they attack the other candidate.
This is, to be fair to both sides, not a new tactic. I am sure if we could look back at the senates of old Rome we would hear Pro-console Trump denigrating Pro console Clinton, rather than explain the plan they didn’t actually have to get the rats out of the sewers beneath the Coliseum. A major campaign promise of course…

The problem, however, is the sheer vitriol that is expressed in these attacks. If any other candidate had said or done half as much as Trump, they would never have made it to the candidacy. Yet rather than turning against his increasingly controversial statements, or even questioning them, his supporters rally to point out the flaws in his opposite number Hillary. Mrs Clinton herself is far from saintly, though the list of political ‘crimes’ she has committed is increasingly hysterical in nature, and I do not use the word in the sense of comedy here.
Yet this is not actually all Trump’s fault. Indeed Trump is a symptom, not the disease, the disease is the right wing media, the Republican parties lurch to the right in recent years.
Back when Obama ran against McCane, the Republican candidate was the first to espouse rhetoric that became the birther movement. He refused to stand and watch while others tried to claim Obama was a Muslim or a foreign national by birth. He was also the last Republican candidate to make a stand against the ridiculousness of that protracted lie. While Romney 4 years ago did not make direct reference to it, he also did not try to expunge it from the campaign. For the 8 years of the Obama presidency, the vitriol of the Republican press, the Fox network and the blocking tactics in the Senate have widened the gap between reality and republicanism. The rhetoric is no longer the ever hopeful, positive, optimistic ‘shining city on the hill’ of Reagan. Hatred, anger and blame have become the watch words. The darker extremes of the Republican movement have moved to the floor.
It’s not just Trump, look at the state of Maine’s Republican Governor Paul LaPage, a man who spouts racism, anti-immigration, sexism, and obscene remarks so often that it has ceased to be news-worthy anymore. Yet he remains in office. A man who describes himself as a Trump supporter before Trump even ran for office. Indeed, if anything Trump for all his outrageous statements is a mild manor political animal compared to LaPage. (for more on Lapage read the NY Times item linked below)
None of this is to blame the Republican party supporters alone, the vitriol runs from both sides of the debate.

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In the latest debate, a presidential candidate talked about haveing the other arrested and imprisoned if they won ( and forcing the AG to do so). It was the kind of statement you would expect in some 3rd world directorship, (BTW the last American president who tried to force an AG to prosecute someone was Nixon. The AG resigned as it was unconstitutional, and beyond the powers of the presidency, but then that candidate seems to have no idea about now the political structures of the USA work, so somehow it’s unsurprising. Yet even this has led to further bunkering down of the respective sides. It no longer matters what you say, it only matters that you can point to the other side and say they are worse.
“Lying Hilary…..” as has become Trumps rallying cry. This from a man whose capacity for mistruth seems even greater than his ego. Yet even when Trump is caught out with lies, they are brushed aside by his supporters.

“I never said that…” a response to the claim that China made up global warming to disadvantage American business. Yet he most certainly did and on Twitter. Yet his supporters response is to point out the ‘lies’ of the other side. It’s a case of ‘forget my wrongs look at her wrongs’, and again the Clinton campaign is not blameless here.

My fear goes deeper than this. However, it is that after November the 8th what will be left behind no matter who wins (and I hope it’s not the bewigged one ) is a divided nation, scarred across political lines at war with itself. Because currently, all I can see is people talking about how much they hate the other team, and utterly ignoring anything about their preferred candidate…

Luckily for me, I don’t live in the US, my opinion is of no weight, and perhaps that very separation gives me the ability to see context more. But what I see is a divided nation, and I can not see that whoever wins in November will change that. Some divisions run deep, and America looks more and more like two desperate sides facing off at each other.
Well, at least, that’s never caused a problem before …..

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/31/us/paul-lepage-maine-governor.html?_r=0

Posted in politics, rights | Leave a comment

Interviews

Posted on October 9, 2016 by Mark Hayes

I don’t do many interviews. There is a reason for this. I don’t get asked to do interviews very often … In fact as far as I remember the only actual interview I have done previously was for the publisher’s book club when they gave me an award, and that site closed down shortly afterwards.
Not due to my interview, but due to illness I hasten to add.

Luckily Jianne who ran that site is on the road to recovery now, though it’s a long hard road , but I digress and only mention this because I have talked about Jianne’s problems and the ridiculousness of the American health care situation before on here.

Anyway that aside I still have never done many interviews, because I don’t ask people to do them. Publicity is all well and good but I prefer to grow organically, and some ‘interview’ sites are scams that ask for money for the interview etc. Paid publicity is a choice, but know what you paying for is always my opinion and I do not trust the scam blogs that I have seen out there. However, on occasion people just ask if you want to do an interview. As Mercedes Fox did for her blog, and I had loads of fun answering her questions.

So if you have a moment swing by her site (link) , enjoy and take a while to read some of the other stuff she has there.

In other news more Passing Place and Cider Lane teasers to enjoy 🙂

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#passingplace

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Mark Hayes

the gunslingers tale …

The forest in the cellar…

The girl in the nighttime

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2000AD hits prog 2000 redux

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Mark Hayes

Back in the mists of time (or 1977 as we also called it). Before the video game revolution, before mobile phones, and before superhero movies had real special effects. When Star Wars, was the only Star Wars movie and the Sfi Channel was not even a wink in a TV producer’s eye. Something happened in the world of comic book publishing which remains in many ways unique even now. The self-proclaimed Greatest Comic in the Universe was born, and for me at least that is just what it was, or would be when I started reading it 18 months later after the slightly ill-fated Starlord which tried to repeat its success merged with the big boy of British comics.
Starlord, which I had read from the first issue, was perhaps my first flirtation with grief as I mourned its passing. It had gripped me from the first issue, and I had been there at the start. 2000AD, on the other hand, was foisted on me because I wanted to keep reading my favourite strips. I was in truth a little aggrieved by this, (I was also eight years old, the death of my favourite comic loomed large in my psyche). I almost refused to buy the new combined 2000AD featuring Starlord, as it was obvious to me who was the shark here, eating up the little fish.

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However, nine-year-olds are fickle with their grieving and 2000AD’s editor, (who it was alleged was a green skinned alien from Betelgeuse but was, in fact, Steve MacManus who took over the job just as the two comics merged and did it for the next 10 years) knew exactly which strips he wanted to retain from the junior partner.
Two of the mainstays of the early years of 2000AD in Strontium Dog a space western and Ro-busters a thunderbird like a disaster team run for profit and staffed by robots started out in Starlord. Over the years they have morphed and changed, and driven by the storytelling 2000AD is famous for they became greater than the original workaday strips which fascinate the eight-year-old me.
Johnny Alpha, Strontium Dogs main character’s back story was developed into an epic that looked at racism and fascists through the lens of mutants and the Keelers. Doing that most subversive of things, educating young minds while entertaining them. Much of my own abhorrence of racism and the far right I can trace back to reading 2000AD and the long-running ‘Portrait of a Mutant’ Not bad for a strip that started bout as a bounty hunter western set in space.
Ro-Busters too took on a flashback story with ‘Hammerstein’s war memoirs’ telling the tale of one of the old strips two star robots. Hammerstein being as he was a hammer fisted first generation war droid fight a war for humans, against humans and despised by humans. This new strip further morphed over the years to become the A.B.C. Warriors, a strange mix of the ‘Seven Samurai‘ (or Mek-nificent seven) and weird techno-sorcery. Once again this opened up a young mind to some strange concepts, with a cross-dressing but hyper cool sniper Joe Pineapples and techno-sorcery wielding robot monk Dreadlock were at once both utterly weird and utterly wonderful.
Thrown into this mix of my two favourites from Starlord were the king of British comic book characters, Joe ‘old stoneface’ Dredd. A strip which has never short of a bit of subversive satire. Staring a Character that has lived long with me ever since, replacing even Johnny Alpha in my fertile mind as my favourite character. Dredds world has always juggled satire and action with hard-hitting ideas, but its real power is and always had been in the storytelling. It’s not so much Dredd as the other characters that you encounter in hie world that make Dredd’s universe so compelling.
Take, for example, Copper the graffiti artist, a kid who see’s no future for himself as he sits in schools that teach him how to be unemployed, so he sets out on a personal mission to become the king of the taggers. Until that is Dredd manages to put him away, but not before he pulls off the ultimate tag on the statue of Justice itself. (which dwarfs the statue of liberty in Old-New-York…). Then Copper comes back a few years down the line as a sky surfer, making a bid to win a highly illegal race, before escaping to OZ to live in the out back. Only to return to surf once more a few years later, older, wiser and even more cynical about the world around him. He is just one of the hundreds of characters who come and go but draw you into Dredd’s world.
If you watch the Dredd movie from 2012 (and if you haven’t you should), you can see a chopper tag high on the side of one of the blocks. A moment of personal glee when I finally found it after watching the movie several times.

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Beyond Dredd and my old Starlord stalwarts, there was Rogue Trooper, Sam Slade, Nikolai Dante, Nemesis the Warlock, Slaine, Halo Jones, Sinister, Dexter, the VC’s and dozens of others ran through the pages of 2000AD and formed a backdrop to my imagination as a child. But more than this the comic grew with me as I got older. The simple hard fast action of the late 70’s gave way slowly to cleverer more reflective strips as the years went by. At the same time, I grew to look at the world through older eyes that looked for layers in story telling. I came to understand that you could talk about homelessness, depression, mental health, racism, sexism, politics, indeed anything through the lens of science fiction, fantasy or just good story telling. A story, in the end, could be about anything, but a good storyteller could work other things into it. Tell a ripping yarn and tell a truth or two about the world as you see it into the bargain.

Cider Lane, my first novel, was at heart a love story, but one that talks about depression, drug abuse, self-harming, bullying, grief and a dozen other ‘serious’ subjects at the same time. Mostly it does so by not talking about them directly.

Passing Place, which I consider more in keeping with 2000AD traditions, does much the same as Cider Lane, in that it works some big subjects into the thread of its story. Such as who we are and how we perceive the universe but it does so with a subtle touch ( at least I hope it does).
The point of this all is simple, without 2000AD there would have likely been no Passing Place, no Cider Lane, no Hannibal Smyth (who you’re yet to meet but sits on my hard drive waiting for a second draft) or Maybes Daughter (ditto). Because it was 2000AD as much as anything that taught me about stories. All the authors I later read built upon that fertile foundation it is true, but as a linchpin, 2000AD was always there.
I stopped reading 2000AD about ten years ago. Not for any reason other than I missed a few issues, made some changes in my life and never got back into it.
But next week there is a landmark, Prog 2000.
The 2000th issue of a comic which way back in 78 when it merged with Starlord in a desperate attempt to salvage something of the two titles looked to be dying.
It’s an institution, A great British institution of storytelling at its purest. Satirical, smart witty and wonderful.
Seems a great time to restart my subscription…

Update…. as the 4oth anniversary draws near.

I did update my subscription and I subscribed to the Judge Dredd Megazine as well. The storytelling is as good as ever. There has been the odd story where I have clearly fell a little behind by not reading the old girl for a few years, but on the whole, it’s like slipping into an old band T-shirt and going off to see a gig. You catch up, and if you’re a bit befuddled by a story you can check on the internet to get the history of the charcters your confused by. Still finding a giddy smile crossing my lips when I get home after a hard day to find the latest copy in the doorway. So my advice, worth little though it may be. If your a lax Squaxx dek Thargo, take a chance on the old thing. I certain have not regretted doing so.

Splundig vur Thrigg ….. Judge Hayes

f3c3f-dredd2bbadge

#2000AD #prog2000 #Dredd

Posted in 2000AD, fiction, rights, writes | 1 Comment

The thing I hate about self-publishing

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Mark Hayes

This is really just one thing. Which is asking people, I converse with on Facebook, if they will read and review my book …
Really, words can not describe how much I hate doing this… which is why I don’t generally speaking, do so. This is despite many of them been great reviewers who have both integrity and an intelligent, often humorous view of the world and of novels which make their reviews interesting in of themselves and I honestly would be amazingly pleased if they read and reviewed my book even if they decided they did not like it.
That’s the weird thing, I am not in any way afraid to ask them, worried about bad reviews, or anything as prosaic as that. I just hate asking people.
I am an introvert by nature, I’m a writer for god sake, it more or less in the job description, well it is in my case. I observe the world, comment upon it, try to help and advise people where I can. Leap to the defence of anyone and happily try to aid others in pursuit of their dreams, but I don’t push myself forward. I don’t say to people I know only by pixels on a screen ‘please read my book and review it I love your reviews and I want your opinion…’ the mere thought of doing so chills me to the bone.
Not because I am afraid of rejection, or even seeming a fool.
I just don’t like asking…
So I don’t.

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All of which leave me in a wilderness of my own making at times I suspect.
Reviews are important and while we are on the subject… Respected reviewers who have an audience of their own are a godsend to a writer looking to find new readers. There are hundred of pay review sites where you can pay people to review your book. I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them because they are as fake as it’s possible to be. After all, they make their money by reviewing and why would an author go back to someone who gave them a crappy review?
Where is their incentive to be honest?
And such biased reviews do no service to readers or writers.
Give me an honest review by someone who reviews books for the joy of doing so anytime. Though people I will not ask…
Occasionally, once in a while someone I don’t know personally reviews my work. Someone I know in passing, or who i completely out of the blue, and those are the best reviews of all, because paranoid as most writers are about their work, it’s only the stranger or the passing acquaintance whom reviews that you can know with certainty are completely unbias.
I hate asking people to review.
Doubt that is going to change anytime soon.

Posted in book reviews, Passing Place, writes | Leave a comment

in case anyone is wondering…

Posted on September 9, 2016 by Mark Hayes

Just in case anyone is wondering about the new banner.
The dragons name is Errol
More fully he is Errol the Bookcase Dragon, a rare and wonderful breed of dragon I bought at Gothfest in Whitby a couple fo years ago. He has been guarding the bookshelves in my house ever since. A task he seems to like, as it keeps him away from Boomer the cat.
Occasionally he moves around in the night to guard a particular first edition, and has been known to nest among the Stephen Kings and the Pratchetts. Though I caught him snoozing on a couple of Neil Gaiman’s last week.