Mark Hayes's Blog

This is a bit of a rant, you may disagree with it, and that’s fine…

There is a friend of mine, a good friend, a friend I like very much, and with whom I share a great many foundational moral principals, who I find my self snoozing for 30 day on Facebook every month. Not because I dislike or are offended by any his posts in general, but because they are relentless.

Utterly unbearably relentless.

At one point, while not snoozed, he put up a post say “If you are offended by the things ...

Currently I am typesetting a second short anthology of stories of the kind I oft refer top as Passing Place tales. That being stories of a certain kind, the kind that might appear between the pages of my 2016 novel Passing Place after which this blog is named. This has lead to me needing to redo the Also By pages. Normally this is black and white pictures of cover, with a small blurb or an edited down review. Or a simple list of books on one page.

In the kindle version thee would of course ...

Science Fiction is awash with tales of procession or bodily transference, not by satanic forces though they are plenty of those, but stories told by a protagonist who processed for a time the body of another. Often these processions are in an earlier or later time and place, or someone is fully transported to another time and place. There are many variations on the theme but the theme is very much the same each time. It is a stranger in a strange land, not sure of themselves nor the world they f...

For all the weather-beaten world-worn cynicism that I may occasionally be accused of by those that know me. A weather-beaten world-worn cynicism that our own Dear Edgar could have been said to share. I am at heart a romantic, which is to say while I do not believe there is such a thing as love at first sight, I wish to live in a world where such a thing exists. It has always struck me as somewhat unlikely however.

The Spectacles is not a short story about love at first sight. It is instead ...

Because one is as ever behind on reviews, as well as general book news here is a catch up in general on my book news and a few new releases form authors I have reviewed before and recommend.

Firstly this month saw the release of the sixth Harvey Duckman anthology 3 Turns Widdershins, a project I remain immensely proud of, producing high quality anthologies from a vast array of talented writers. There is of course more to come from Harvey and the next anthology is in the works , as is a spe...

Last week, because I don’t have enough to write, I started work on a project that has been kicking about for a few years. While it may never see the light of day, as it is in part a personal project, I have been encouraged through conversations with a few people to write a book on pagan mysticism, faith and quantum physics…

With that in mind, as I needed a distraction, I wrote an introduction piece for the book, which was going to be short and intended to be humorous, it got a tad out of hand...

A pre-warning, this is not really a post about cats, it does feature a cat, and some cat related jeopardy, so to put your mind at ease, Tommy the cat, who is the cat in question, is fine now. You don’t need to go worrying about the cat. Okay, moving on.

On Friday in the wee hours of the morning I got a text about my sons cat Tommy. Tommy was ill, and my son was in a bit of a panic. Mid morning on Friday I got a phone call from my son saying eh had taken Tommy to the vets first thing and thing...

There is a forth verse, I shall not repeat it here… To do so would seem unwise…

‘For She is Devine’ is the last story in the new Harvey Duckman Urban/Dark Fantasy Anthology. You do not need to read the other seventeen stories by seventeen other writers before you read that one, but you should. Its the only way to be sure…

Whom ‘She’ is, is a matter for your conjecture. She could be ‘The Sibel’ of ancient Rome. She could just be a woman who claims that is the case to add mystic to ...

“Man was made to mourn,” says the poet. But not so:—he was made to diddle. This is his aim—his object—his end. And for this reason when a man’s diddled we say he’s “done.”

‘Diddling’, or to give it it’s original title ‘Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences’ is by way of a humorous essay pretending to be an academic work, rather than a story. It is certainly a fun little read, as long as one accepts this central conceit.

The text exhorts the virtues of the diddler, by going...

The to-read pile on my bedside table is out of hand, it has taken on a life of its own, it sneers at me in the night and bides its time. I fear it has achieved sentience, or been processed by some forgotten old gods spirit* and one night soon it will take its moment and collapse upon me. Braining me with a copy of the complete works of Poe, two dozen paperbacks I have promised myself I will get read, several more hardbacks including one about pre-teen cannibalism, a history of dragon infestatio...