Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

Overload launches at Kapow!

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

Look below for further proof that Margaret Thatcher is an evil, rotting carcass of a woman. Bereft of soul, bereft of empathy and heart and emotion; naught but a gluttonous, feeding machine eager to devour the hopes and dreams and flesh of the electorate.

Overload #1 Cover

Seriously though, that is an incredible cover by Graeme Neil Reid.

Overload is edited by Martin Conaghan. He’ll be reviewing portfolios at the Kapow! convention on Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th of May. 1pm both days at table 34. Potential contributors, both writers and artists, should drop by.

You can view a small preview here.

Lots of good names in issue one, and me. I was lucky enough to team up with Graeme Howard for a six pager called Staring Into The Eye Of A Blackbird, You Can See The Things He Likes And The Things He Doesn’t. Surely the longest and most convoluted title to ever be mentioned on Bleeding Cool.

Here’s a little peek at one panel . . .

Blackbird p4 crop1

Paul McLaren did the lettering.

Lovely stark artwork from Graeme Howard.

Graeme and myself are currently working on something that will hopefully turn into a three issue mini-series. We’ll be sending it out to the usual suspects soon.

In the mean time, beware Zombie Thatcher.

New story in FLURB #13

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

Rudy Rucker just released the latest issue of his webzine Flurb. Thirteen new weird stories, including one by me called A Bigger Piece of Nothing. You can read it here.

It didn’t used to be called that. It used to be called something much worse. And the original ending was, thinking back on it, awful. But Rudy set me on the right path and I rewrote the thing and now it’s much better. Thanks Rudy!

image

Coming soon, the announcement says

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Project Luna: 1947. My collaboration with the infinitely talented Jim Boswell.

Look at that cover!

Project-Luna-1947-674x1024

88 pages of retro pulpy science fiction goodness. Out from Markosia in 2012. Here’s to hoping those Mayan bastards were wrong!

Immune System Response

Friday, August 12th, 2011

I recently submitted a short story to the science journal Nature. It would have been my fifth story to appear in the magazine (my fourth will be appearing in the Futures section of an upcoming issue). I knew the story was a little odd and that acceptance for publication was a long shot, and, indeed, it wasn’t to be. But I did enjoy and appreciate the response from editor Henry Gee.

Dear Martin – I loved ‘Immune System Response’ and agree with every word of it. Unfortunately it’s less a story than a cry of inchoate rage, so probably isn’t for Futures. I like cries of inchoate rage, though, and look forward to seeing it on your blog.
H

A more diligent and assiduous writer would no doubt rework the story, make it better, make the inchoate choate, and try to sell it to another magazine. But it’s been a long, grey, dreary summer and I honestly haven’t got the energy for any of that. So, here you go.

Immune System Response

By Martin Hayes

It began in London at 9.42am during an Agony Aunt segment on a mid-morning television call-in show. A worried mother had just phoned in to ask for advice about her sixteen-year-old daughter who wanted a breast enlargement operation for her next birthday – all the girl’s heroes from magazines and tv seemed to have had one. There was a stirring in the audience, subtle at first, murmurings, people shifting uneasily in their seats. Call it a rush of blood to the head, or just the unexpected realisation of how utterly deplorable and bereft of hope their culture, their society, had become – suddenly a large section of the audience stood up en masse and began to forcibly rip their seats from the floor. Muscles strained and eyeballs bulged as the plastic seats were torn from their steel brackets. The concrete steps crumbled as rawlbolts were ripped out. The audience then hurled the seats at the presenters and guests, killing one and injuring three. By 10.10am there were reports on the news channels calling it an outbreak of mass hysteria and/or a possible terrorist attack.

The next recorded incident took place at 10.33am at a race track in Wilthsire. Three presenters from a popular motoring show were racing their wackily inappropriate cars around the loop when a crowd of approximately 350 people broke down the chain link fence that surrounded the property and crowded onto the tarmac. The wacky presenters had no choice but to stop their cars. They were dragged from their vehicles, bound and gagged, tarred and feathered, gutted and garrotted, and left to rot like the dogs they were on the waste ground in the middle of the track. Before he was gagged, the biggest one cried and pleaded with the crowd that he wasn’t really like that, that it had all been just an act, he did actually recycle and he was worried about the environment, he just said that he wasn’t for money and the applause of idiots. The smallest one, a coward in his heart, had tried to bargain with the crowd – if they would only let him go, he would help them to kill and torture the other two. The medium sized one just looked resigned to his fate. He seemed grateful, if anything.

Just after midday a fifty-two year old man whose daughter was missing, a presumed victim of a serial rapist and killer, was door-stepped by a reporter from a low-end tabloid. She asked the grieving father how he felt and if there was any comment he would like to make and she looked utterly surprised when he punched her in the face. Neighbours, cheering, spilled from their doorways as she fell into the flowerbed that separated the driveway from the crazy paving path. Seven of them clambered over walls and hedges and they carried the reporter to the end of the street where they threw her into a skip. They bludgeoned her to death with stray pieces of building waste before burying her under a large mound of household detritus.

At 2.14pm in London, an ex-glamour model was proudly signing copies of a novel which she had not written. The bookstore’s large front window shattered as she was shot in the throat by a forty year old man with a hunting rifle from a rooftop across the street.

At just before 3pm the über-bland presenter of a popular televised singing contest was accosted by a group of pensioners who set about kicking and punching him. A helicopter news crew caught the altercation on camera as the enraged septuagenarians were heard to shout, “Who is this charmless man? Why is he always in our living room?”

At 3.34pm, just as a press conference began in the PR suite of a league-winning football team, a reporter slowly began rocking back and forth with his head in his hands. He took a deep breath and knelt down; unable to listen to anymore dull-witted, borderline-incomprehensible witterings, he untied his right shoe and leapt across the table where he began to batter the overpaid and undereducated player’s large potato-shaped head in. A feral look of instinctive fear flashed across the simian faces of the other players. They tried to work out what was happening but their brains could not hold onto the thought for long enough to fathom it out, so full were they of petty racism, misogyny and greed.

And so it went for eleven more days, all across the globe, and it did not stop until every awful one of them was gone – the uninformed but opinionated, the toadying, the racists and the dumbers down, the selfish, the self-entitled, the utterly untalented, the greedy and the mawkish and the proudly ignorant. If you feed people a diet of shit washed down with piss, they’ll develop a taste for it, they’ll want nothing more. If you nourish them with beauty and sincerity, with genuine emotion and truth, they’ll soon strive to emulate those qualities.

It was as if the species had suddenly realised that it would never advance, never progress, if this infection was not combated. And rather than let it fester, nature deemed it better to cut out the putrid meat and cauterize the wound. The entire species had undergone a planet-wide immune system response against a virulent and insidious contagion.

And on the morning of the thirteenth day, the world was a slightly better place.

The end

© Martin Hayes 2011

_

This is the bio, which would have followed the story . . .

Martin Hayes hates your stinking culture. Kirby is King. Ditko rules, OK? Bring back Bagpuss. And Children of the Stones. Ted Chippington spoke the truth. Ballard for Dead President. Machen for Mayor.

Forthcoming, sooner or later, hopefully before we’re all dead in our beds.

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

Someday, Somewhere – short story in an upcoming issue of Nature.

Staring Into The Eye Of A Blackbird, You Can See The Things He Likes And The Things He Doesn’t – six pager in a currently beyond top secret and therefore unnameable anthology comic.

Get It Down

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

I’ve got a new story called Get It Down in issue six of Innsmouth Free Press. Glad to see this story finally creep into the daylight. The first editor I sent it to passed on it while stating that it was “frankly, mad.”

Which is fair enough really.

Click here to download the full issue as a PDF. Very nice cover by Jason Juta.

2011-02_Cover-e1295152739187

New story in Innsmouth Free Press

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Issue five of Innsmouth Free Press was released a couple of days ago. It includes my pulpy Lovecraftian story Beneath The Cold Black Sea.

Really nice cover by M.S. Corley.

2010-10_IFP_Fiction_01

You can grab the pdf or read online here.

Nature (again) (again)

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Sold another story to Nature yesterday.

Me Am Petri should appear in a couple of months or so, I reckon.

New story in Supernatural Tales

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Got my comp copies of Supernatural Tales issue 17 last week. Includes my short story, 13 Nassau Street.

Looks great. Very nice cover by Stephen J. Clarke. Lots of good stories in there too.

Available here.

ST #17

New story in Nature

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

My short story An Open Letter To Any Impressionable Young School Leavers Who Are Considering Joining The Space Corps appears in this week’s issue of Nature.

Nature cover

Another peek at Project Luna 1947

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

page-14

Unlettered. Top notch work as always from Jim Boswell, who has made me promise not to write any more crowd scenes.

New story in Flurb #8

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

You can read my story In The Beginning There Was The Machine in the latest issue of Flurb, edited and published by the mighty Rudy Rucker.

Plenty of other good stuff in there too.  And all for free!

Crowley – Wandering The Waste

Friday, August 7th, 2009

I signed contracts with Insomnia Publications last week to write an original graphic novel based on the life of Aleister Crowley. This has meant I’ve had to crawl around the attic like some kind of giant, malformed silverfish to gather up all my old Crowley books.

It will be done in a similar style to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s  magnificent From Hell – as much as possible based on historical fact but with some fictionalised elements to provide a framework for the story and to really make it sing. Crowley wasn’t averse to fictionalising his own life anyway, so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind too much.

Crowley – Wandering The Waste will be published under Insomnia’s Vigil line of historical graphic novels, probably in 2010.

Not sure yet as to who the artist will be.

2012: Final Prayer

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

I heard from Nic Wilkinson at Insomnia that Robert M. Heske was putting together an anthology book featuring both comics and short stories based around the 2012 myths.  He specifically wanted a short story about what would happen the day after the cataclysmic events of the 21st of December, 2012 . So I knocked up a story and he’s bought it for the book.

The Seeds Of Time will appear, along with an accompanying illustration, in 2012: Final Prayer.

Due out sometime towards the end of the year. Should be a good book.

Nature (again)

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Just heard that Nature have bought another one of my short stories for their Futures section.

When I sent it in I thought that this one was a real long shot, but I thought that when I sent the first story they published too.

Out within a few months I should think.


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