Hal Duncan's Blog, page 7

Anselm's Dream: A Drabble

Anselm dreamt.
He dreamt of a being of ultimate monstrosity, a beast nothing worse than which could be imagined, manifesting as some dread horror might in the imagination of an artist commissioned to paint a fresco of Hell.
He screamed at the beast that it was not real.
-- I am the being nothing worse than which can be imagined, it laughed. If your dream of me were all that was, you could imagine

How to NOT Cut Adjectives

It's an oft-cited Rule of Writing that adjectives are bad, that overuse will lead to a godawful purpling of one's prose. Who needs an adjective when the right noun will do? Aren't these (along with adverbs) pretty much the most-often redundant part of speech? Cut them! we cry. Take a cut-throat razor and flense that fat from the bloated corpse of your dead and rotting prose! And this is not

Rhapsody Cover Art

Designed by Matt Cresswell, cover art by Stijn Windig:



Coming April 2014

No, WE Pardon YOU

THE ELDERS OF SODOM, by the Grace of Cock of the Celtic Union of National Territories of New Sodom and Elsewhen and of our other Realms and Territories, QUEERS, Heads of the Cocksuckery, Defenders of the Flounce, to all to whom it these Presents shall come,



Greeting!


WHEREAS Alan Mathison Turing at Knutsford Quarter Sessions on the 31st day of March 1952 pleaded guilty to and was convicted

Price Slash on Escape from Hell!

The Kindle edition of Escape from Hell has been price-slashed, just so's ye know. The Kindle Countdown Deal I ran at the start of December boosted the sales by a not insubstantial factor, so I was intending to lower the base price after anyway. There's a fourteen-day lock on the price though after such a deal. That lock is now over, so it should now be available to buy for £1.53 or $3.02 (I think

A Scruffian Christmas

To get yez all into the mood for Christmas, I figgered ye might fancy a wee fireside tale, eh? It'll be up till Christmas Eve, like, so you get yerself some eggnog, me scamps and scrags, me scallywags and scofflaws, cosy down with yer crib-mates, and hark to me fabble.

It'll warm the cockles of yer heart, says I, sure it will, or me name ain't Gobfabbler Halyard-Dunkling, Esquire!

A Movie Pitch

When a redneck reality TV star is kicked off his show for homophobic slurs, he threatens to sue the network for discriminating against him as a Christian. The next day an idealistic young civil rights lawyer turns up to take on his case. Unbeknown to the star though, the lawyer is gay and has a cunning plan: to set a legal precedent establishing homophobia as a core tenet of Christianity, and

Sodom! The Musical

Being an Adaptation and Modernisation of "The Farce of Sodom, or The
Quintessence of Debauchery," by Lord Rochester, Libertine &
Rakehell, as Versified and Perversified by THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!
(sic)


Rochester's Restoration Farce may be the most notorious work of
bawdy fun in English Literature, scandalous when it was written and
still gloriously filthy even by today's standards.

Fabbles: 0.5 and The Taking of the Stamp

Meet the
Scruffians, workhouse tykes and street arabs scrobbled by the Waiftaker
General, dragged to the Institute and put to the Stamp that writes your
very soul into your skin.

Meet the waifs of Ripper Vicky's Empire, Fixed forever as they are,
never ageing, never starving, ever bouncing back to exactly how they
were Fixed... the perfect child labour.

Meet the scamps and scrags,

Blog Refurbishment

Apologies if you've been following the blog, btw, and all the recent postings seem like promotional overkill. Actually, with some of this stuff--e.g. the immediately previous post on "Die, Vampire, Die!"--I'm not so much pimping as just getting entries up for linking from the sidebar or the bibliography. Once we've got everything set up with a page each for whatever, and Amazon buttons on it, and