Hello! I’m Mark Taylor, a fiction writer based in Manchester in the UK. My stories ‘Dan and the Dead Boy’ and ‘The Double’ have appeared in The Fiction Desk. My story ‘All Seasons Sweet’ was longlisted for the 2021 Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize.
At the moment, I’m experimenting with writing a tiny story every day. I’m also interested in the ways literature and technology influence each other.
On this site you’ll find info about fiction I publish here and elsewhere, any thoughts I cobble together about the books I read, and very occasional other thoughts.
You can email me at hello@markiswrit.ing – put “bees” somewhere in the subject line so I’ll know it’s not spam. I like bees, and people rarely try to sell them to me.
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Recent posts
Wounding Ruthlessness
Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks )
There is a small, unimportant detail in Use of Weapons that caught me more than perhaps it ought to have. In hope of extracting a favour from a university, the Culture tracks down a set of wax tablets on which the legendary lost works of a great poet are inscribed. They are held in the wall cavity of a monastery, and are almost completely intact, except for three or four that have been damaged by a fire lit by a passing shepherd.
Story recipe
Cavity
Doing Good Is Always More Praiseworthy Than Doing Evil
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Edith Grossman )
Daily stories
I stop to pick a flower. When I pull on the stem the ground pulls up with it, flips all the way over, sends me tumbling through a trapdoor. I am still holding the flower, dangling from it in the dark over who knows how vast a drop. My skin turns to silk. I drift, petal-like, on the currents of the earth.
This is how they do it. They arrest you on a 72-hour security hold. While you’re in the cell, they put up a speaker that plays state secrets on a loop. Knowing state secrets is a strict liability offence, so as soon as the hold is up, they give you the recognition test. You fail, and they bundle you off to the hole for the rest of your life, which is brief. The test results are published, and everyone applauds what a good job the security services did of dealing with you.
To beat them, you have to keep your mind far enough out of the room that the knowledge doesn’t go in. I had been practicing, so I knew I could do it. Let all that noise pass me by in a blur. At last, a use for sitting through all those literature lectures. So after 72 hours plus the long wait at the testing facility, they let me go. When I got home, there was a letter waiting on the mat, informing me that my name had been classified as a state secret.
The urge was always there in me, to be eaten by a sea monster. A kraken or a giant squid. Something unknowable. It would pull me down to deep places unfelt by human skin, and make me a part of itself. I am ready to throw myself into the ocean. But most of the time, we are pulled apart by ordinary fishes.
When the hot air balloon started plummeting I didn’t think much of it. The pilot didn’t seem concerned. She was hardly even moving. I had never been up in a balloon before, and it was such a strange experience that the sudden drop might have been perfectly normal. Someone in the basket screamed. How embarrassing, I thought. The ground rushed up towards us.
It was in the shed the whole time. Everything I ever needed or wanted, right at the back of the shed. I could get my fingertips to it, even. But it was really jammed in there, and I couldn’t tell quite what was pinning it. Still, there it is. All I need to do is clear out the shed.
Next weekend, maybe.