Keith McCleary's Blog

Bruse Tarl was a rancher. He’d cut his teeth in Zendikar but now lived in Thunder Junction, as he had for some time.

Time worked different in Thunder. From the moment you arrived the time you’d been there flowed backward and forward. Being there a day felt like two days – the day you arrived, and the day before it. After a month you could remember the month you’d been there, and you still knew to the day (if you kept track) when you’d arrived, but you also remembered being there a month earlier (or a month longer, depending), even as also you remembered where you’d been before.

This meant that you could build yourself a new ranch and in a year it would look two years old. Point of fact, it might look older. Time was funny that way. The portion of time that stretched behind you in Thunder Junction somehow seemed to reach longer than the time you were living, like shadows at dusk. A ranch you’d built a year ago might look two years old, or five years, or ten years, and the oldness it might look could change with the weather and the light.

And that was if you kept good track of things. Which Bruse Tarl didn’t bother with. He’d arrived in Thunder Junction and noticed the funny things with time there after just a few days, said “huh” and went back to building his ranch from the ground up. Once it was built he began to populate it with oxen he found in the hills. He was a rancher and that’s how it worked.

Across the multiplanes, there were five kinds of magic.

White magic was life magic.

Black magic was death magic.

Blue magic was water magic.

Red magic was fire magic.

Green magic was plant magic.

If there were other kinds, they hadn’t shown up yet.

On behalf of some of our gracious contributors, I humbly present the official Best Comics & Graphic Novels of 2019 from @entropymagazine . Check out the full list at https://entropymag.org/best-of-2019-comics-graphic-novels/

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There’s a new review of CIRCUS+THE SKIN up this week at @entropymagazine , written by the generous and incomparable Ben Segal. I grabbed some of the best (and most Instagrammable) bits, but I highly recommend checking out the whole thing because it’s lovely and good. I’ve had a few requests for signed copies since this went up yesterday, and it just so happens I have a small box of them left from a signing I did over the summer. Feel free to hit me up if you’d like one.

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#horrorauthor #circushorror #tattoos #indiebooks #indielit #amhustling #getspooky

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This is the state of the ToC for my current work in progress – as of today, I’m 300 pages in on revising a manuscript that started out around 650pp, and is now just under 600. Just getting to this point has taken about a year, plus another 10 months writing a rough draft back in 2017. I know some writers are able to churn out a new book every year or two, or have multiple creative projects happening constantly, but it’s taken me a long time to accept that will likely never be me. It really frustrates me sometimes (a lot of the time) because I like to think of myself as pretty diligent, but when it comes to creative work (the thing I went to school for, uh, twice?) I’m at the whim of the part of me that doesn’t gaf how I like to think of myself, or how quickly I want to be done. My process feels slow and broken to me, but I do what I can with it, and that’s #writinglife too.

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#amwriting #amediting #writersofinstagram (at City Heights, San Diego)

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They found each other beneath the streets in this fervent place: I wouldn’t have looked for them but you know how I liked to party. Once we tried to stop them but we got as far as Bacon Street, watching while they waved flags and screamed at one another under the fire died; this was those times when I’d gone through about five tough times; the cat died, my mom wasn’t home and those keys under the house had been keyed. I don’t try much anymore but why would I; you wouldn’t and now look at you – shifting and becoming, dancing and climbing, a throatful of ambition and I’m towned; telling you, every night you spend couch-hunting makes you stronger; I should know, I was a strong right hook away from ground, and now my sound found a sidekick; I couldn’t tell you how but I knew them, and those flags showna. 

I won’t lie to you, there was a centaur in the loam fields who watched us as we passed. “You don’t come back from there,” he said. “Unless you come back as bodies, still and unbreathing, and I will pull you from yourself and dock your heads and ribs and skullcages on pikes and ride you through the soft low forests; and we shall sing your praises oh us satyrs; and we shall devour what is left of you and there will be nothing of left of you, that I grant you: and I shall plant your leavings in my garden and you will fertilize the flowers that grow for me, and I will weave those flowers into the hair of my mistresses, and when I mount them I shall smell the little pieces of you that is all that is left of you, and no one shall miss you elsewhile little children; you will not even be ghosts, glowing; you will’nt.” 

And we laughed at him for he was only a skinny, rotting centaur whose belly caved beneath his breast, and who stank of peat and sewer. No one listened to the old centaurs, who could not even walk like men; their time was so long past and even we only wanted to lay down deep. We left him there, calling after us, and we disappeared beneath, and as they walked ahead of me I turned and glinted quickly at him, and he would stay stone and no one misses him, and when I mounted my mistresses I would not think of him, no; no…

I had found her past the nightmarkets, digging in dirt, finding something beneath the fermenting topsoil. As she cleaned it I saw a sculpted heirloom made of stone, swirls of rock with something glinting beneath. Nearby her partner raised spores from the leaves where they rested; said spores revolved in the low light; sparkling. They nodded to one another, she and she, and then to me as I stepped from the rotting, seething loom. They told me they could use me and I hadn’t heard that one; we were off, us three, to find whatever left us; to discover what had been buried. I felt the needs swim in my fingers, wanting to touch and harden them, but I wouldn’t. No one had stopped and asked me to join before. No one had seen in me anything of value. Where I walked the streets parted; where I sought ignored. Now we ventured more deeply, and at night they slept near me, though my skin was limestone and opaque. We couldn’t have been more disparate. No one would see us as we disappeared between. They would never know us until we were piled; gloaming, a heap of tissue, eating; bomen.

We sold rot in the marketplace below ground, rot which was turned into the richest loam in the canopies of the overcity. With that we bought supplies of a kind we couldn’t find where we came from, and then turned – almost absurdly – back into the dark. She led us deeply, past the groam zombs and the ratchetforms, past the wakes and muddy waters, where something drove us downward, downward to find ourselves, down to find what was left of us beneath it, my feigned heart bloated; Worming Lows.

I hadn’t seen myself since I got older, but now as I looked
at myself I began wondering where I’d come from, where this person I’d sort of become
had been shaped, and if I was indeed a mystery to myself or if something inside
me had simply changed. I hadn’t known myself in quite some time and all the
pieces shifted, seemed to have become something else; something truly unlike
me. I could see how my bones moved beneath my muscles and everything seemed out
of place; it seemed like there was something that lived in me and used me for
its skin while I operated outside, carrying both of us. I was unsure if I’d
worn myself for some long time or if the person I was had simply formed around me,
and in fact I was inside myself somewhere, still making bones and putting them
in place; building a new form from the inside while the flesh around what I’d
been was remade, lumps in new places, until I was something different; until
the parts I recognized were removed and the something I had been shaped itself,
its eyes sharp, blinking my eyelids, shedding the last pieces so it turned into
my home, this house, looking out.