Hal Duncan's Blog, page 13

The Longest Con

The morality of the penitent.

The dogma that you can be a total cuntfucker and yet still earn eternal bliss if only you perform the prescribed rituals of obeisance.

To the honest man, it is surely baffling to see the pious cleave to a creed of such transparent ethical bankruptcy. But as any hustler knows, the softest mark is the amateur hustler. The easiest rube to grift is the rube who thinks

Story's End at the Edinburgh Fringe

Click through for the trailer cut together by Johnny Barrington from footage of the CCA gig, including some shots of Yours Truly from my film debut as Naked Crazy Pictish Hobo Writer. Don't worry, all the shots used here are SFW. But yes, that's me standing naked on a moor. On Skye. In January.

No doubt I'll link to listings and prices and places to buy tickets as and when, but for now all

Cardinal O'Brien on Craggy Isle

Good friend and GSFWC cohort Phil Raines pointed me to this news story on disgraced anti-gay Cardinal "Handsy" O'Brien leaving Scotland to do penance, with a joke about him ending up on Craggy Isle from Father Ted. All I can think of now is a scene playing out like this:

KEITH: Look, Dougal, remember what I told you... those handsome young men over there
are far away. The ones over here are

ERRATA: OUT NOW

A way away over fields of illusion is this city, far ago & now here, on the edge of blueblack night & sea...


Built by bitmites in an afterworld of myth & history, the city has been known by many names in its time—Urauk, Enoas, Babalon, Atlantium, Byzantis, Arom. Its truest name though is Errata, an apt name for a city in which language itself has been unleashed to shatter & reshape

Dummies Indeed

Just a quick note to help clear something up publicly for a writer who emailed me earlier today, anxious about an accusation of plagiarism. As you'll see on the LiveJournal post linked, Alley Maxwell is a poet with a collection recently self-published via Lulu, THE FAULT OF NARCISSUS. One poem in this collection, "Auditory Hallucinations," contains the lines "where angels shatter angels / down

Performative Morality

“Personally, I don’t believe that you can live an openly homosexual
lifestyle, or an openly, like premarital sex between heterosexuals. If
you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says you
will know them by their fruits. It says that, you know, that’s a sin. If
you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just
homosexuality, whatever it maybe, I

Queers Dig Time Lords

Table of Contents

Introduction, by John and Carole E. Barrowman
Editors’ Foreword, by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas

The Monster Queer is Camp, by Paul Magrs
Time, Space, Love, by Emily Asher-Perrin
Seven Ways of Looking at Captain Jack, by Mary Anne Mohanraj and Jed Hartman
Born Again Whovian, by David Llewellyn
Queer Doctor vs. Straight Trek?, by Paul Cockburn
Sub Texts: The Doctor

Coming Soon...

Cover art by Cat Ingall, the talent behind those gorgeous title cards on Story's End. All done meticulously with one sheet of paper and a very sharp scalpel, with Teh Modurn Teknologee used to add gradient, texture and layout stuff. The result is, I'm sure you'll agree, absolutely stunning. It perfectly captures the stories in the chapbook, and as cover art for a strange fiction work where the

Da Vinci's Demonisation

The Original Hudson Hawk


"The act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions."


-- Leonardo Da Vinci


So, a few weeks back a link to the trailer for Da Vinci's Demons did the rounds on Twitter. Oh dear, I thought, even before clicking on it. This is coming from Starz,

A Tribute to Thatcher

"Children who need to be taught traditional moral values are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay." -- Margaret Thatcher, 9th October, 1987.

At the age of fifteen, two weeks from my sixteenth birthday, I was one of those children.

Let me tell you what it was like... or try to, at least.

I don't think it's possible for me to conjure the darkness of that period, the bleak