Hal Duncan's Blog, page 17

Helloes!

Yes, I'm still here. Sorry, I seem to have let the blog sit idle for a bit, but all's been busy as hell here the last few weeks. With the online sale of The City of Rotted Names, which turned out more successful than I'd even dreamed of -- with a huge thanks going out to one mate who donated big time and a complete stranger who, I gotta say, smacked my gob, dropped my jaw and took my fucking

Delany Interview

Damn, but I need to read Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.

Showtunes 4 Sanity!

A huge thanks to all those who bought their copies of "The City of Rotted Names" over the weekend, and to all those who spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, blogs or whatever. To celebrate the resolution of a cashflow crisis that would otherwise have been rather... awkward, let's say, have a wee (rewritten) showtune from Les Mis sung by some Broadway stars. Or not, if Broadway isn't your bag

STORYBUSKING: The City of Rotted Names

Evenfall in the Afterworld


A way away over fields of illusion is this city, far ago & now here, on the edge of blueblack night & sea. Under a louring blankout of clouds, goldmolten flames of Evenfall, flakes of sunset, flitter & fall as burning autumn leaves, flown in a breeze, down into deep ravines of twilight, riverroads of dust, slidestreets of ash & rust. The razing flood of shadows flows,

Defective Gods

A wee while back, in my critiquing for the Writers' Workshop, I had the pleasure of reading a rarity in that line of work: a novel that wasn't just publishable but actually, in my opinion, rather good. I found myself with little to say about it in my critical capacity other than tweaks and twiddles -- "a little infodumpy here, tenses a bit fankled there." My main suggestion was that the writer

Weird Words, Bold Images

By way of Juliette Wade, check out this awesome set of bold graphic interpretations of obscure terms, like the example below for "yonderly":

From the Department of WTF?

I'm not sure what's more WTF about this article from Zouch magazine by Ally Mookerjee, "Queer-Washing Fictional Characters" -- the handwringing over the projection of queer love onto fictional characters, the fact that this is done as if fictional characters don't have sexuality by default unless and until that sexuality is actively erased, or the fact that this is done by a writer who, judging

Goodies in the Mail

Just in from Lethe Press:

Tom Cardamome's Green Thumb




Described as a "post-apocalyptic, psychoactive pastorale." Works for me. Also...

Jim Elledge's H




An A-to-Z-structured sequence of prose poems with an emergent narrative by the looks of it. Gorgeously produced and most enticing. (Kudos to Alex Jeffers there, I believe.)

Furstratingly, I'm too busy with BFS Awards stuff at the moment

An Open Letter to Matthew Norman

Dear Matthew,

Let me start by agreeing with you on one fundamental issue in your Independent opinion piece, "It's Tom Daley's tormentor who requires the law's protection.". Where you say, "The freedom to cause offence is not one in defence of which many would march on Parliament, but it is a human right all the same," I couldn't agree more. I'd be on that march, right up front, banging the drum

The Actuality-Exposition Structure

As an addendum to the last post, I thought I'd give you another variation on that passage as a demo of a particular fault I often see in manuscripts I critique, a problem with the writing of action that I've come to think of as the Actuality-Exposition Structure. What does that mean? Well, here's the example redone:


Tal took a casual gander through his spyglass. Below him, over hoof prints