Hal Duncan's Blog, page 12

Nine Worlds GeekFest

I'll be down at Nine Worlds GeekFest, at the Radisson and Renaissance Hotels at Heathrow, most of Friday 9th to Saturday 10th August (arriving Friday afternoon, leaving Saturday evening.) It goes without saying that for the most part you will find me in the bar having a drink, or outside having a smoke. Actually, if there's any sort of area you can combine those two activities, that's far and

Acquital/Indictment

This is what happens with:


"a state of segregation in which black, queer and members of other abject groups are not deemed to belong as main characters. This is the segregation of not being able to sit at the front of the bus. They may be allowed in as an exception if it “serves the plot” (c.f. your reviewer’s expectation of a reason for the character’s gayness.) This is the segregation of

This Sunday 7th July...

... I'll be reading at Illicit Ink, at the Bongo Club in Edinburgh, from 8:00. Neatly, this kicks off a season of events in celebration of Iain Banks, produced by the City of Literature. As they say:


A wonderful author, with an incredible imagination and wit, his huge contribution to Scottish writing makes him irreplaceable. His final novel, The Quarry, was published last week and its

Bert and Ernie

In celebration of the defeat of DOMA, The New Yorker had a cover:






Needless to say, this was  "controversial"

The June Thomas Salon article linked in that HuffPo article (I'm not going to credit it with a link here) ends with a little gesture of YayGayz! ("whoever goes to Pride this weekend dressed as Bert and Ernie is going to gay heaven"--to which I roll my eyes.) But even as it does so,

This is Why We Can't Have Nerd Things

As you may have noticed, I've changed the name of the blog from "Notes from the Geek Show" to "Notes from New Sodom." Why? Because of shit like this. As of today, I'm officially done with geekdom, the entire notion of it and the way it enables cuntfuckers.

Harsh words? Maybe. Bear with me.

Truth be told, I was always playing more on the carnival sideshow sense of the term anyway, the geek as

Got a Feeling

Got a feeling coming into my heart--
Hot damn, I'm a man
on a mission to win your eye.
Got a feeling coming into my soul--
Yo, boy, got a toy,
gonna bring you some joy tonight.
Got a feeling from my head to my toes--
God knows, everybody goes
A little wild, now and then.
So if you wanna begin
if you wanna get down
to the music of sin
with the king of the town,
amen, motherfucker, amen!

And i

THE.... Five Rules of Writing!!

Did I say rules? I meant imperatives, divine imperatives, imperious decrees, holy writ handed down from on high. I meant DO NOT DEFY MY CORRECTITUDE. If you defy my correctitude, your writing will fail. You will fail. Not just as a writer, but as a human being. Little children will point and laugh at you when you walk down the street. Your name will become a verb meaning to fail. Generations

Response to an Open Letter

Hi, Nancy.

I don't think we've ever met at any of the US conventions I was over at--apologies for my bad memory if we have. So I hope you won't mind me addressing this to you personally from a public platform rather than generalising to a post on the topic in and of itself. As an implicit addressee of your own post, simply by dint of being part of the SFF community, and as a regular combatant in

Out Now...

I got my comp copy in during the week, this anthology containing my own short story, "The Origin of the Fiend," a queer supervillain tale, non-linear and in second person just to be thrawn.

Critique Groups: Open/Closed

Got an email the other day from a writer who's aiming to set up something similar to the GSFWC in their own town and wanted to pick my brains. He'd noticed it was an open workshop, run along Milford lines, but some of the people he's got interested in setting up a critique group are, it seems, a bit worried at the prospect of being swamped in dross--shoddy copyism and outright fanfic. So, he