Marc Horne's Blog

To celebrate my birthday, you can get the satirical scifi of Automatic Assassin for free for iBooks http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/automatic-assassin/id456621707?mt=11 or nook http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/automatic-assassin-marc-horne/1103949090

Hey wait…1 star review on Nook???? They must think 1 means “best”… like #1

I have got some good reviews for Automatic Assassin. Here's a roundup. Read, then head to the Zizek Press book page to buy or over to feedbooks.com if you want a free sample.

In Horne's cunning for weaving social commentary into his plot…we see a contemporary beat writer at work, through brief, stark observations (on the cold logic of the free market, for instance) and broad sweeping story arcs (the beauty and slavery of Earth, the origin of blackwarps and so on) that add depth and intelligence without ruining the sense of fantasy and adventure.

'Automatic Assassin' has everything: black humour, death, un-death, resurrection, philosophy, technology – even a tiny hint of sex. It is a voyage of fun and repulsion, egomania and altruism… and so many other contradictions that you will disembark knowing that you love Xolo whilst never really understanding why. – beatentrackpublishing.com

Extremely funny and wild and poetic science fiction story. Lots of wit, interesting characters, wild locales, fantastic imagery, using and abusing (in the best way possible) old and tried science fiction clichees, while coming up with a lot of new ones. Like the main character's brain bomb, I couldn't help fall a little in love with the character and the story and the hilariously difficult circumstances he constantly finds himself in, and which he somehow manages to get himself out of. – Berit Ellingsen, Author of The Empty City

This book is a wildly inventive bed-time story told by a savvy poet to a precocious space-monkey.

It's got fast-plot adventure, whimsy and outright piss-taking shot through with gorgeous observations and fabulous horrordreams of future. It's a cool ride with an unnerving end.

Marc Horne delivers hilariously cheeky sentences, like this:

'The panties of victory started to ride up over the waistband of retreat'

and casually and persistently drops beauties, like this:

'Enormous bloated seconds passed like whales.'

Automatic Assassin is Far Out – "Outside (the outside of the inside of the underside of the real side) …" - Penny Goring, author of The Zoom Zoom

The rumors (that I started) are true. I am going full on Sci-Fi with my next novel, AUTOMATIC ASSASSIN which is coming out July 11 on Kindle, Nook and in paperback at Amazon. Keep an eye on zizekpress.com for updates or follow twitter.com/zizekpress.

It's the story of Xolo, a man who replaces his conscience with a machine. It's Star Wars (1977) meets Judge Dredd meets Never Mind the Bollocks. It's a cyberpunk space-opera.

So tell your friends, and if you want a review copy then let me know or contact zizekpress@gmail.com if you don't have my contact info.

I'm just doing some last minute tinkering now. I wanted to go for an over-the-top blockbuster feel with layers of literary special effects and weird set pieces. I literally have no idea how people are going to react to it, and that is fun.

All my recent short stories, with just those 2 bad ones taken out, for 0.99

From the author of This Unhappy Planet and cult classic Tokyo Zero comes a selection of short fiction, satire and poetry to unsettle then soothe your brain.

Punchy encounters with memorable people seeing odd things await you. Meet pithy French film critics, born again management gurus, slum tourists, girls with teardrop tattoos and what have you.

(13 chapters, plus an exclusive preview of Horne's next novel)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Collected-Shortness-ebook/dp/B0050KEHDG

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Collected-Shortness-ebook/dp/B0050KEHDG

From the author of This Unhappy Planet and cult classic Tokyo Zero comes a selection of short fiction, satire and poetry to unsettle then soothe your brain.

Punchy encounters with memorable people seeing odd things await you. Meet pithy French film critics, born again management gurus, slum tourists, girls with teardrop tattoos and what have you.

(13 chapters, plus an exclusive preview of Horne's next novel)

USA: $0.99 from http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0050KE...

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0050...

All of my books are now with ZIZEK PRESS.

ZIZEK PRESS is closer to a state of mind than a building with people in it opening envelopes, crushing hopes, refining crap and dreaming of cocktails.

There are multiple writers at Zizek. I am but one. We are doing eBooks now, print books later and maintaining a blog full of interesting nuggets.

Go check it out. And look out for Zizek to release my forthcoming SciFi book, which has pre-empted the other novel I have been talking about ["RAD"]

The SciFi book is threatening to be called "Automatic Assassin"

Man of many aliases, Oli Johns has written a fantasy pisstake book called Ljubljana Witch that contains his ineffable combination of bleak depressed humor, stunted sexuality, impending doom and short paragraphs.

(At least, a bit of Amazonian Detective Work tells us this is Johns as his other great book Charcoal is now described asa being by "Stavrogin writing as Oli Johns)

It's a fun book, like the work of  a more cynical, less lyrical, funnier Neil Gaiman. A writer called Billy catches the eye of a Witch who loves his writing, but the twist is.. he wants to have sex with her. I guess that's a twist. No… that's not a twist.

Anyway, very good. Recommended. Here's your sample.

I got back home, went straight to the window, kept the cigarette in my mouth and just stared down onto the grass below. I did this for about an hour. I wasn't sure why.

While looking at the grass, I started thinking about the future. About getting a job, about getting out of London. About getting picked up by aliens and flying to their planet and finding out I was physically stronger than them and it just so happened that they had an enemy that was bigger than them but smaller than me, and, shit, I was the only thing capable of stopping them. Or giving them a bit of a kicking at least.

Then reality again. The job, the escape…how? I wasn't doing anything about either of them. I didn't have any great scheme. Though I did have schemes. Lots of them. But they were all stillborn, and I didn't have the magic or the willpower to bring them back.

Krist, what did I have then?

I looked back into the apartment and saw the green man shooting a laser gun. Then in the corner, the boxes with a whole load more of him.

 

Buy at amazon , more details at ZizekPress.com

As of today both of my novels are available on Kindle around the world for 99 cents or pence or your local equivalent.

I think this is a great almost free price, and Kindle can now be read on Kindles, iPhones, Androids etc. so I hope this will be convenient for all. I'm not using any DRM and the books are still under a Creative Commons license.

TOKYO ZERO

One man goes to Tokyo to end the world. It goes fairly well.

"lyrically jarring", "wildly imaginative", "so good that, if you haven't read it, you may in fact be squandering your literacy."

A kindle version for Kindle, iPhone or iPad for $0.99 at  http://amzn.to/aY2UNj or for just 99 British Pennies at http://amzn.to/hUfykH (no DRM)

THIS UNHAPPY PLANET

A Spiritual Fitness Club seemed like a great way to make money, but reality is not always for sale.

"darkly, subtly funny","characters imbued with depth and shading"

Get the kindle version for Kindle, iPhone or iPad for just $0.99  http://amzn.to/b6gjkf or just 99 British Pennies http://amzn.to/eg8D76 (no DRM)

They are pushing and shaking the old caddy, made of angles 'cause it's from the old days.

They are Arabs or Mexicans. I am not a racist. It's dark and there is loud music coming from that hotel that men live in.

They are shaking the car and I see a man inside, who is not moving.

The mix of anger and joy in the three more-Mexican guys and one more-Arab woman's face is found mainly in riots. The stillness of the man in the car is that of the policeman who took the wrong turn on the night of the uprising.

He's actually a head.

Because it is very loud, and I am in a light-based reality, he is just a head.

It's the head of Harry Dean Stanton. Pickled. Then mummified. Then put in the trash because that didn't work. But then they found they had no other heads. "What? Do you idiots even know how hard it was to get the head of Harry Stanton?" So then they go and find it and frankly it hasn't got better. They bring it back. It ends up in this car.

If all this talk of Harry Dean Stanton has thrown you – perhaps you don't know the actor in question – just imagine instead a regular man who for his whole life was told that smoking cigarettes was food and who found out the truth about an hour ago.

But he is just a head now. And around his brow, and looped at the base of his neck, are LED Christmas lights of many colors. In fact not Christmas: Fiesta. If I had to guess, and I think I do, I would say he festooned them himself. They do not generate the intense white light that holds his face. I can't locate the source of that miracle.

I get closer and a new sound comes to the front. I think it is coming from the car, like a novelty horn. It is a digital arrangement. But it is still the lambada. The forbidden dance.

I almost knock over their child, who is 2 feet tall and with a towel tied around her head and who suddenly jumped out. I don't touch her. I touch no one. The whole little puzzle goes behind my head, where it belongs.

[a sketch of something I saw tonight]

2009, I started writing again. 2010, I started publishing again. I am now sitting on a train wondering how it went. So here is my end of year performance review.

Jan-March. I put the finishing touches on the book that I had started in Paris and continued back here in the North County San Diego that it cruelly lampooned. Surrounded daily by characters from the book, I didn't know if I could finish it. In the end, only by realizing that it was really all about me and different aspects of my perceptions did I finish it.

April. Publishing time: "This Unhappy Planet" ships. For my second novel, I didn't think even once about approaching a conventional publisher despite the fact that it is, in most respects, a fairly conventional piece of writing. Frankly, TradPub just seems a messed up place to be. Begging for agency, rewriting purely so the editor can keep her job, selling ebooks for ten frickin' dollars!

In a word: No.

I released via Feedbooks and Amazon Print On Demand as my main channels. I have achieved my twin goals of beer money and hitting 5k downloads this year.

Artistically I am proud of the book. The only thing I would maybe change is to be less restrained. It's very economical in the words it spends on its world, and every time I saw a seed of non-realism, I pruned it. I wanted to avoid science fiction. But the buds of other worlds are all over the book.

Having completed two novels I liked was a big deal for me. I started to think maybe I was a writer. So…

May. I joined up with the Year Zero Writers collective. Although on the whole, I think my writing is less extreme than what they do, a few of the best writers I have discovered in years are on this crew so when Dan Holloway invited me, I could literally not say no.

So, being on the team has made me feel like I should …y'know… write some stuff. So I have written a lot of short stuff this year. Some of it worked, some didn't.

Literary Valentine: I did this as a comment. I guess this was like my audition for Year Zero…writing short fiction in real time in a little comment box was a cool feeling. It felt really digital, instead of like writing in a little book then copying it onto a fancy electric typewriter like the novels do.

Higgs-Boson: I was physically [ha ha ha] excited by reading "Daisy Ann Gree's" piece about Higgs-Boson experiments. I was infected by the mood of the piece and so I did another comment fiction. It's like a reply, or an homage or something I suppose. I felt a bit vampiric, but I like the final result. Drink only the best blood.

Then I joined the group and thought okay I should write something.

I sat down on a bench overlooking the ocean with a little book and wrote what I would say is frankly a bit of a flop [Kirk.] Let's write it off as clearing my throat for novel number 3, which I started soon after.

My characters were ahead of my plot for novel 3. I decided to take the characters out to play.

I sent the American film-maker character back to the pubs of my teen years back in the Boro. This was a stress test of the character. I think the story ended up good, and the character passed the test of being someone I could write a lot of words with.

Oli Johns of Year Zero commented on my piece suggesting it was like no England he had ever known. Anyway, he suggested that I write something about Predators for his zine, Gupter Puncher. It was too far a drive to watch Predators so I did Inception instead. This turned out to be the most directly autobiographical thing I have ever written. It was well received, and in an obscure French bulletin board I got my favorite review of the year.

(I feel a bit under-reviewed in general frankly. I suppose that is the value of what Dan H is doing over at EightCuts…working for those reviews. I crave reviews, good or bad, I have to admit.)

Also at about this time, I wrote a screenplay with a pal of mine from my Colorado years. He had a lead with a studio, and the first third of a screenplay ready to go  about an American fighting the UK prison system. I dived in and finished it. I really enjoyed attempting Mamet-style scenes and writing only in sound and the minimal possible light and motion. We haven't sold it yet. Same studio were also not super-interested in our Tokyo Zero treatment. Turning my awkwardly paced first novel into a muscular thriller was a great joy though.

These are good screenplays I think: I don't mind trying to sell them in the same way I do for the books. I'll keep pimping them.

Oli pushed me the idea of writing about the Venice film festival for Gupter Puncher. Ok, so I sat down and did that with another character I was thinking about for Novel 3. I wrote for about an hour with no edits. That turned out great, I thought. I was starting to get an idea for the kind of extreme voice I could carry off for novel 3.

I was in L.A. a few weeks later, starting a period of being there a LOT, and thought I should write something about it. L.A. is interesting right? I crapped out a piece about everything I saw that morning. I don't really know why it didn't work. It's on Gupter, but I pulled it of Year Zero about an hour after I posted it there. I guess there is nothing behind the voice is why it fails.

Then I dove into novel 3. That's rolling well now. I am indulging my tastes: eating what I want out of the chocolate box. Maintain flow, and all will be well with novel 3.

I also wrote some twitter fiction: It would be crazy to write a lot about it, except that it was well received by some good writers and probably is actually my first poetry.

So, on balance a good year. Tokyo Zero is really getting read a lot with the ebook boomlet. This Unhappy Planet is starting to find its legs. And novel number 3, code-name R.A.D. is on track to drop in the first half of 2011.

I would like to make some money for R.A.D.: I think everyone who read Tokyo Zero [all 65,000 of you] would enjoy it. So I need to think about that. Except, I can't think about that. So I'll just write the thing and then see what happens…

Here is an exclusive excerpt! Happy New Year. Thanks for reading.

As I jump from the Pont Louis-Philippe, I realize that for a moment I am one of the most beautiful and remarkable things in the world. Anyone who sees me plunging past the white stone down to the black water will never forget it. Paris blurs until even the river below seems the more solid. And time does its thing. Gravity tries its best but time does its thing. I remember just taking a nice stroll in that 11pm heat, the heat the day shrugged off, the heat the day left on the plate. I was trying to just wander and take in the city, but I had been here just a bit too long.

[…]

 

And I'm in. Everything in me screams 'get out' but nothing in me can do anything about it. My speed pulls me down way farther than I ever thought it would. It pulls me down into archaeology. It pulls me down into statistics. My senses take a cigarette break, except my vestibular system that tells me I am doing something wrong wrong wrong. I am going down down down when I had hoped to be bobbing. A current flips me over and the black water plays with me listlessly. Across the ocean, a couple of dozen journalists are getting out of bed and they don't even know yet what fun they are going to have writing about me later today, when they fish me out. "Award winning film-maker goes out like a sucker. In France!"