First three chapters now available!
Chapter Three of my podcast version of A Time and a Place is up! This says Chapter One below, but you can actually check out the first three chapters here:
Tag: A Time and a Place (Page 1 of 14)
This is hideous slime monster Jacques the Necronian telling the insignificant fragments of Earth where to find my novel A Time and a Place. Jacques is terrible at marketing. I would say that he means well but he really does not.
Yes, you can find A Time and a Place in libraries, as Jacques suggests. You can also find it here.
Video clips courtesy of pexels.com. Also thanks to Daniel Narinian and New Zealand for the use of their video clips.
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Here’s a slightly more positive “frankenreview” (hey, fair’s fair…)
Once again, this “frankenreview” is comprised of direct quotes from existing reviews found on Goodreads, Amazon, Librarything and elsewhere. I did not change a single word, though I did omit some words (as indicated by ellipsis) and added others (indicated by parentheses) in the interest of readability.
I encourage you to visit any of the sites mentioned above and post your own reviews. Not just for my book(s), but for any you’ve read. Whether the reviews you leave are positive or negative (or somewhere in between) you’ll be doing your favourite writer(s) a huge favour.
Et voila… A Time and a Place “Frankenreview” Part Two:
(Click here for Frankenreview Part One)
What a story! Unlike any other sci-fi you’ve ever read. Non-stop action. It… had me hooked from the beginning. I really enjoyed this novel and recommend it for those who like their science fiction stories to be quirky, human and compelling. I loved this book!
Mahoney relates a pretty rollicking Fantasy-Science Fiction adventure story with a lively, imaginative degree of world building. There is a veritable smorgasbord of funky ideas at play in the novel and passages of sneaky thoughtfulness cheek by jowl with subversive goofiness. With wry, tongue-in-cheek similes and metaphors at his disposal, Mahoney seems to be both winking at the tropes of the genres he is engaged in while encouraging us as readers to give them another look with a fresh set of eyes.
This book was both comic and tragic, sad and funny, with a hero who tries to do the right thing but always seems to stumble. The protagonist is an endearing sad sack. I… found the characters to be sympathetic and memorable. Mahoney… deserves credit for taking a passel of relatively archetypical supporting characters and either spinning them off in unexpected ways or giving them much more nuance and depth than expected. Beings of all stripes enter the field of battle, the most charming being Jacques, a one-eyed tentacled Necronian who will engulf you unless you have something he wants. I greatly enjoyed the chapters in which our time and dimension travelling hero finds himself in the body of an alien, purple-furred cat with opposable thumbs and then a seagull. The T’Klee were my favorite bit. I love the idea of large cats with opposable thumbs, their own language & culture, and having to fight the technologically advanced Necronians.
The magic of A TIME AND A PLACE resides in its rich description of places we’ll never see—not even in dreams. The author has a great imagination. His ability to evoke imaginative worlds and alien creatures is what makes reading this book such a pleasure. The vivid descriptions and wit kept me hooked from beginning to end. A Sci-Fi Fantasy with literary notes, there is so much to love about this book.
The writing is so polished that if it were my hardwood floor, I would be able to see my face in it. Quintessentially Canadian, beautifully written, displaying the dry humour that made Stephen Leacock a national treasure. By turns droll and exuberant, this novel reels you into its strange world with as much pull as the portal that sends Barnabus through time and space. This book sprawls, wildly (I didn’t mention the shapeshifting demon Iugurtha or the sentient artificial intelligence Sebastian or the warrior cats), yet it all fits together. Through its unflinching depiction of conflict, this book packs a surprising emotional punch. But – mark my words – this doesn’t disqualify Joe Mahoney from being the next Terry Pratchett… the author has a decided knack for humorous word play which brings some levity to otherwise serious situations. Mahoney writes with a practised wit. In A Time and a Place, the humour sneaks up on you and results in under-your-breath chuckles. This all interweaves into Joe’s style, which is actually quite pronounced for a first novel.
This is the first time—in this lifetime—I’ve read anything by Joe Mahoney, and it won’t be the last. I enjoyed the book tremendously and appreciated how the background story unfolded in stages. (It) was so well written and intriguing, I did not want to put it down. A page turner. I stayed glued to it until late into the night. With questionable allies hiding in every closet, layered characters and a plot that kept the pages turning, you won’t regret adding A Time and a Place to your shelf. By the time you reach the end, you’ll be sad to leave this crazy universe behind.
Joe Mahoney was also a fine narrator. I have to say with a voice like that I would listen to anything he narrated. I loved this mesmerising audiobook with its non-stop action and adventure. Can’t wait for Mr. Mahoney’s next book.
CULLED FROM VARIOUS SOURCES SUCH AS GOODREADS, LIBRARYTHING, AND AMAZON
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As a public service, I thought it would be helpful to cobble together all the negative criticism ever written about my debut novel A Time and a Place (at least all that I could find online) and publish it as one single blisteringly harsh review. Kind of like ripping the Bandaid (TM) off all at once.
A “frankenreview“, if you will.
Every line is pretty much a direct quote from the original source review, though I’ve jumbled it all up so that my frankenreview follows a kind of twisted logic. I altered some punctuation and the occasional pronoun/noun in the interest of syntax.
I think the result is a fairly kick-ass review, though admittedly not one likely to help me sell more books.
To see more reviews of A Time and a Place (both positive and negative), or to add your own, check out its Goodread’s page.
I must confess that I am fairly conflicted about Joe Mahoney’s ‘A Time and a Place’. More than once I picked this up to read and simply could not do it. I didn’t like this one, and couldn’t get past the third chapter. It’s too much like too many other books and it is also very slow. Liked it but didn’t luv it, BUT NOT saying it was bad, just not totally my type or maybe the mood, but seemed as if in places it dragged a bit. Parts of the novel seemed a little rushed, and there’s questions left unanswered.
The novel is probably too strange for people who normally don’t care for science fiction. To list some points of criticism, which are meant to be constructive, I think that the author was a bit too ambitious. A Time and a Place is a complex story and an ambitious novel, but I found that the execution wasn’t quite up to the premise. Normally, this would take 3 books or more to cover. Compressing it into one book meant that it comes across rushed, and there is not enough time for sufficient character development, or exploration of the themes.
Mahoney clearly has a peculiar sense of humour and (for me) a protagonist who really needed a good smack upside the head! He saddles (his) world with one of the least likeable protagonists I’ve read around in some time. I would have given (the book) a higher rating if it wasn’t for the characters. The main character can be annoyingly obtuse at times. I feel like most of them besides Wildebear aren’t fleshed out and are just there for plot convenience. Even Wildebear, despite being close to 40 years old, was childish most times and I didn’t like the book as much because of him. Barnabus J. Wildebear is a strange character, at times willfully ignorant of the world around him, ill suited to the task at hand, yet still trying to act as if his opinions about almost any of the circumstances he is caught up in are remotely valid. Unfortunately, Barnabus seems pulled through the events of the story by external forces and lacks the level of agency I like to see in a protagonist. Much of the time he comes across as bewildered.
The second half of the book got a bit muddled for me. I felt I needed a diagram to keep track of it all. There were few female characters. Besides Swipe, there’s Barnabus’s dead sister, and then the scientist Sarah (who is always described by her awesome looks first and second and her mental abilities third). Perhaps we can count Iugurtha as a female character, but she’s really a mix of all the people she’s absorbed over the years. It would have been nice to have a bit more from the ladies.
The ending rallies a bit, despite occasional segments that distract or feel a little overdone. I was still confused about Iugurtha who I think becomes known as Jacques… but then there’s also Jack, right? These seem to be all the same ‘demon’ (or alien) at different points in time. But I’m not sure, which is what bothered me. I want to be sure about such things by the end of a book. Speaking of that ending, it gets rather sentimental and strives for deep thoughts. I found it a little sappy. I wanted a more definitive ending, perhaps following a rousing action scene.
A Time and a Place strikes me as quintessentially Canadian – oddly polite and mannered and stubbornly domestic, even while an absurd parade of characters, circumstances and magical beings marches through the book. So why didn’t it click with me? Because that’s just the way it goes with humour. If Mahoney had maintained the dry humor of Wildebear throughout the whole story he likely could have pulled off a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy vibe. But the humor gets lost at times and the protagonist’s point of view comes across more naive than anything else through the middle chunk of the book.
Joe Mahoney has narrated his own story. He does a decent job but needs a little polishing all around. There were a few mouth noises here and there. The pacing was just a touch slow. The female voices were pretty good though sometimes they could have used a little more femininity.
culled from Various sources such as Goodreads, Librarything, and Amazon
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Some of you many have observed that I’ve removed most if not all posts relating to CBC Radio, including my memoir in progress “Adventures in the Radio Trade” (previously called Something Technical).
Sorry ’bout that.
My apologies in particular to those who’ve written to me lately expressing appreciation for said posts, or who have posted links to the material in question on other blogs (including Wikipedia, for which I plan to restore some of the material).
Don’t worry, I didn’t delete everything. I’ve just moved the status of those posts to “private.”
I’ve done this because I intend to release Adventures in the Radio Trade as a book, and I can’t have the material posted publicly on a blog and in a book. Well, I could, I suppose, but nobody would publish the book. For example, if Amazon detected material from the book on a website, they would decline to include the book among their wares. (They threatened to do this with my short story collection Other Times and Places after detecting one of the stories online, which I had forgotten to remove.)
I’d also begun to notice excerpts from my online version of Adventures in the Radio Trade on other websites, which, although somewhat flattering, made me afraid I’d never get it entirely offline when the need arose.
I did like the online version, which included many links and photos which I’ll not be able to include in the book version. But alas. The online version could never be permanent, whereas the book version can.
I’ve submitted Adventures in the Radio Trade to a handful of agents and publishers, but I don’t really care if it’s traditionally published. I’m perfectly happy to publish it myself, under my own imprint Donovan Street Press. I’ve also discussed publishing it as a joint venture with my sister Susan Rodgers, under her production company, Blue Mountain Entertainment. We shall see.
In the meantime, the manuscript, which includes a fair amount of material I’ve never posted before, is being edited by one of my two favourite editors (and good friend), Arleane Ralph. And I’ve already secured most of the permissions I require from the CBC to publish the book, just a few more “t”s to cross there.
I’ve just returned from a highly restorative trip to Prince Edward Island where I saw several members of my family, many of whom I haven’t seen since before the pandemic. I would call PEI “the land Covid forgot” except I don’t want to jinx the place. But it was almost possible to forget about the pandemic there, where masks are not mandatory (we frequently wore them anyway). I loved it. I never want another summer to go by where I don’t visit PEI, which is where I grew up, and where much of my family still lives.
While there, I collected everything my dad, Tom Mahoney, ever wrote. One of my projects this fall will be to assemble it into a book, and publish it before Christmas, also under Donovan Street Press, in association with Blue Mountain Entertainment. His writing is almost entirely of growing up on top of a mountain near Johnville, New Brunswick in the thirties and forties. There are stories of ghosts, log drives, backwoods bullies, acrobatic dogs, and more. (One story was featured on CBC Radio’s The Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean).
Not only do I think it will be an entertaining collection, I think it’s of historical value, evoking a way of being largely lost to us now. Dad grew up with no running water and electricity. His father, my grandfather, wore his long johns all winter long to stay warm working mostly outdoors on their farm. There are crazy, memorable characters like Bob Tucker, a family friend and fellow mountain man who once crashed a locomotive, dynamited rocks in rivers to make life easier for himself, jumped off a train to avoid the first world war, got trapped in snow up to his neck, and whose first hot bath was in a hospital at the end of his life. I look forward to getting this collection out.
I’m three quarters of the way through a companion novel to A Time and a Place, called Captain’s Away, a straight up space opera set one thousand years in the future. It’s about the Doucette’s (descendants of Ridley Doucette) who are separated when their space station is blown out from beneath them at the onset of an intergalactic war. They have their own adventures while trying to find their way back to one another, each contributing to the war effort in their own way. It’s got spaceships and robots and evil emperors and princesses (or the like) and it’s a lot of fun to write.
Finally, while in PEI I had an idea for a mystery series that’s a bit of a departure for me, but that I also think could be a lot of fun to write. All I need is an extra twenty-four hours per day and maybe I can get all this stuff done (there’s still a day job, family, and de facto zoo to look after as well!)
That’s where I’m at these days.
How ’bout you?
