My short story "Tea with the Earl of Twilight" is now online at Nightmare Magazine.
It was written in late January and early February, which feels now like even more of a foreign country than your average past; at the time it felt almost bleeding-edge for my fiction, growing as it did out of that month's explorations of Broad Canal. Readers from that time may also detect echoes of ITV's Casting the Runes (1979) and my interest in the Precisionist art style, particularly the work of Charles Sheeler. I don't construct soundtracks specifically for stories, but I tend to gravitate while writing toward music that in some way resonates with the work in progress, and I wrote this one almost entirely to MGMT's "In the Afternoon," Desperate Journalist's In Search of the Miraculous (2019), especially "International Waters," and a potentially hazardous amount of Belbury Poly, especially "The Geography." I am indebted to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme for the title.
I didn't expect the hauntology of this story to bend back on itself, although I don't know what else I should have expected. As discussed in the author spotlight, the future I felt ghosting the city was gentrification and climate change. Now the year itself has become another yardstick of a future that never came to pass. I miss the Boston I could wander like the protagonist of this story. We live in formally, taxonomically weird times.
It was written in late January and early February, which feels now like even more of a foreign country than your average past; at the time it felt almost bleeding-edge for my fiction, growing as it did out of that month's explorations of Broad Canal. Readers from that time may also detect echoes of ITV's Casting the Runes (1979) and my interest in the Precisionist art style, particularly the work of Charles Sheeler. I don't construct soundtracks specifically for stories, but I tend to gravitate while writing toward music that in some way resonates with the work in progress, and I wrote this one almost entirely to MGMT's "In the Afternoon," Desperate Journalist's In Search of the Miraculous (2019), especially "International Waters," and a potentially hazardous amount of Belbury Poly, especially "The Geography." I am indebted to
ashlyme for the title.I didn't expect the hauntology of this story to bend back on itself, although I don't know what else I should have expected. As discussed in the author spotlight, the future I felt ghosting the city was gentrification and climate change. Now the year itself has become another yardstick of a future that never came to pass. I miss the Boston I could wander like the protagonist of this story. We live in formally, taxonomically weird times.
