alistairmather

This crawled its way up and out my brain the other day. Been thinking a lot about the tropes of children's literature and how they can apply to more adult fiction...


"The King of Veils and the Queen of Silent Screaming fear the Slumbering Duke."

They were the only words she had spoken in a decade. Dr. Vershenk was sure they provided the key to...
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Another excerpt from the novel in progress, tentavely titled "The Jack".


"...so what you're trying to tell me is that they're not really stories for children?"

She is sprawled across the bed, head hanging loosely, lollingly over its edge like the discarded handiwork of a satisfied hangman. Fronds of hair dangle and entangle in streaks and stripes of red and white and black. Briefly, something...
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Written a couple of months back after dropping off a relative at the airport and binging on drugs and alcohol (and why isn't that statement redundant? The fun tricks of New Speak at work again kiddies!). Been thinking a lot about social and ontological terrorism as art. I am totally going to jail soon, aren't I?


The crowds lurch around me like actors in a...
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An excerpt from the lastest chapter of the novel in progess:


Silence again, though different. The silence of incredulity, of disbelief, of the faintest glimmer of hope at riches unimaginable. Ledgers of souls, libraries of secrets, knowledge and possessions worth more than all the Mad King's realms.

An advantage on the competition.

"You can't be serious." humbled tones lacking accent and affectation.

"I just spent...
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A napkin falls, drifting quickly down with fluttering tumbles.


The Napkin in Close-Up: uneven surface of humped dunes, pasty white in uneven light. Ridges and runnels, sharp cliffs and crumpled ranges providing depths and heights to an otherwise two-dimensional landscape. Dark swathes of brown, sloping veins of blue, smudged regions of nameless washed out colours break the monotony of shadow and alabaster.


The napkin settles...
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The ballroom floor was a whirl of black and white. A twisting, writhing miasma of opposing color, merging and fracturing in a manner that makes the room take on dimensions and angles my eye can not follow. And through the rippling monochromatic array, visible in brief flashes amidst the optical torturings: crimson. A crimson so bright and vibrant against its swirling insulation as to leave...
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So, when I began running a journal on this site, it was in the hopes of propagating a weird little piece of fiction I was writing that slowly escalated into a serial experiment in an homage to pulp writing of the thirties and forties. Several years later, I am still obsessed with that periods literature and still hoping to someday bring the adventures of Hunter,...
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The whales went flying by today.
The sun was just starting to set when we first heard the air reverberating with their songs. The sky shimmered and danced with color and the soft white fuzz of pollen. Streamers of cloud reflected light and sound back to the earth.
And then the first of the whales broke across the horizon.
They swam and cavorted in fading...
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The world turns and turns unless its stopped, and it stops more than you would imagine.

A Dark Tower rises in my dreams, Auberon gazing from its heights as the flying saucers of the Fae folk skip across realities to settle in their master's realm.

Back to school, back to class, back to learn, but not to pass...

and every day I fall in love...
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I stopped and talked to a little black kid sitting on a porch stoop for about five minutes the other day. We talked about the moods of the city, and how you could always stand to learn something from Buffalo if you just listened to it long enough.

Someone came up behind me in the street and asked me who I was talking to. When...
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