Hal Duncan's Blog, page 21

The Built World

You begin with the barricades set around the lot, the territorial claim staked by delimitation, plywood hoardings in a neat rectangle, right-angled as a blank page in a book, stockading this city-block where reality has been bulldozed, the rubble of actualities cleared away, a hole in the experiential earth gouged for foundations to be laid.

Erasure and enclosure is how you begin, every

Story at Subterranean Press

Sic Him, Hellhound! Kill! Kill!1.I wake curled up at the foot of the bed again, back snugged tight into the crook of my boy’s legs –tight enough to be on top of them really. He groans, slaps the alarm clock off, tries to pull the quilt over his head. Doesn’t work with me weighing it down, clambering up to lick his face. –Get up, I say. Get up get up get up. He shoves me away. –Get down, he

A Song for Easter...

... dedicated with all my heart to Cardinal Keith O' Brien, the opening number from the musical I would write were I to write... a sort of sequel, shall we say, to Jesus Christ Superstar. A sequel which would just have to be called, as far as I'm concerned...CHRIST: THE COMEBACKSCENE: A mountain in the desert. JOSHUA* sits on a rock, stage-right. Dressed in red, THE ACCUSER stands behind him,

The Tyranny of Tolerance

Cardinal Keith O'Brien writes in the Telegraph, March 3, 2012:We cannot afford to indulge this madnessThe Government is this month launching a consultation on interracial marriage, asking the public whether it should be introduced in Albion and Cymru.I hope many respond and consider signing the petition in support of traditional marriage organised by a new organisation, the Coalition for

Favourite Monsters at Weird Fiction Review

I have to go with a classic, Frankenstein's monster, because Shelley's creature doesn't just exemplify monstrosity, it interrogates it. What makes it visually monstrous is not a matter of cheap gimmickry. Shelley doesn't just snatch features from the animal world that naturally freak us out — mandibles, pincers, horns, tentacles, slime, so on — doesn't just push buttons to disturb us with

The Torchbearer, Václav Švankmajer

Via John Coulthart

Lego Space Shuttle

(I posted this, like, two minutes ago via the Torygraph, but I found it on YouTube, so fuck giving clickage to the Torygraph.)

Ebook Escape!

Now available on a Kindle near you:Buy it on Amazon UK or on Amazon US.

Rule 5 for New Writers

So, in dealing with PoV, Rule 4 of the Ten Rules segues logically to Rule 5, dealing with voice: Voice makes character. For the purposes of this post, we're not talking voice as in, "He's found his voice," but rather narrative voice, the degree to which idiosyncratic features of an articulation cohere and conjure a persona behind the words, cast it as an articulation of and by someone.When I say

How to Write a Point of View

In the entry on Rule Four of Duncan's Ten Rules-- PoV is not a communal steadicam -- I covered the basics of how an omniscient narrator can collapse to an amnesiac narrator, how multiple third person limited can collapse to muddled third person limited. But there I focused on theoretical pros and cons -- freedom versus restraint, detachment versus immersion -- and gave only a broad demonstration