Saving the Gleeful Horse
Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 1:37 pmSaving the Gleeful Horse, a story I wrote for an auction last year, is online at Fantasy Magazine. Here’s the eponymous horse (which I’ve posted here before).
Writing update: I’ve got all but two of the collection stories to the “nearly finished” stage, which means I might have a fact or a quote to check, or a few lines or a paragraph to alter if I can think of better words, but they’re basically done. I hope I can get the remaining two fixed and the new story written by midyear. (I probably won’t finish the new story by then, but the midyear goal has been good for keeping me focused.) The Floating World continues to get written. I’m taking a few days off from story wrangling in order to concentrate on rock ‘n’ roll, porn, and de-lousing my golden cane palm.
March 23rd, 2010 at 9:04 am
I need to take more LSD before I look at that picture again. The colours, man, the colours!
March 23rd, 2010 at 1:02 pm
I can just see that image as a back tattoo on someone
March 23rd, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Caitlyn – and I nearly made the white another colour, too!
Colin – I think he’d be happy as a tattoo.
April 2nd, 2010 at 12:15 pm
I just finished reading it, and whispered, “That is weird as fuck” to myself. I LOVE IT.
I mean, what. A vacuously (literally) cheerful piñata being fed sparkly child souls by a giant river-scavenging man in the form of smoke? YES. I am currently reveling in the weird, and I hope I have dreams this motley and excellent tonight. And there’s something so unsettling and darkly resonant about the various exchanges of the “treasures,” and the way the Grinning Horse urban legend gets passed on like a secondary contagion. I don’t know what to think about all of it (in a good way).
It also reminded me of Jack Vance-y stuff, oddly enough. I think it’s the off-kilter folkloric feel, the sense that you just got pushed into the middle of a mythological world in transition.
Also, hurrah for collection progress!
April 2nd, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Squee! <3 So glad you liked it, and that you found something resonant in the treasure exchange. I tend not to know what to think about most things I write, but always hope it will work for some readers at some level. It was one of those stories where the characters just turned up and told me their tale.
May motley dreams fly your way!