Auteur: The Final Word: Thomas Keyton Interview

Thomas Keyton describes themself as Welsh, autistic, non-binary, and “resentfully human”. They are also the author of A Place Like Home, an original prose story in Volume 1 of Arcbeatle Press’s new Auteur series, The Final Word. Riley G. Boyd has questions…

 

Above: an exclusive full-colour version of Holly Lucero’s illustration for the cover of ‘The Far Planet’, a book-within-a-book crucial to the plot of A Place Like Home, Thomas Keyton’s story in Auteur: Volume 1: The Final Word — depicting the character of Tanaat.

 

Tell us a bit about yourself, your creative background?
A lot of my creative efforts as a child were devoted to sketching out big ideas: epic schemata for Transformers comics that failed due to my inability to script or draw, faces and enemies for Dr Whos number Nine through Thirteen long before The Curse of Fatal Death, Scream of the Shalka, or Rose were glints in anyone’s eye. In other words, I displayed a general urge to play with the ideas given to me. More recently there have been a few stories I’ve shared with friends, a short story in an anthology raising money for Trans Lifeline, and conlanging.

How did you first get involved with this project?
Aristide and I have similar tastes and they asked if I was of a writerly inclination. I was flattered — I’d read Horrors of Arcbeatle and really enjoyed their piece in that — and found ideas coming. 

What excites you most about being part of such a collaborative anthology
Partly the ego-boost of sharing a book with talented people I knew of and talented people I’ve discovered, mainly the fun of being part of a group project and being able to chat with my collaborators about our ideas and make stupid jokes.

What makes Auteur such an interesting character and premise for a creative to work with?
I think an obvious answer is that any writer can find a connection to the old egomaniac; he’s a way to explore some of our subcreational impulses in as silly or serious a way as we want. And as for the playground he brings with him, where all the cosmic truths have clashed and mutually annihilated to leave a broken universe where shoots of new potentials grow in the cracks — that’s both a prompt for themes exploring that, and a licence to write about anything we find interesting. Auteur himself has a similar versatility: anything you want to do in a story, he can do, all while giving your GCSE French a work-out and making things worse for your characters.

Auteur is a character tied to authorship, art, literacy — did you tie into those themes with your work?
Bien sûr! That was the first part of the inspiration — Auteur isn’t just a mad reality-warper, he’s a mad metafictional reality-warper; in fact, the original title of my pitch was an allusion to the Tolkien quote about the “purposed domination of the author”.

If your story were to be someone’s first encounter with Auteur, what would you hope they take away from it?
To never trust the French. I don’t particularly like pushing people towards interpretations or what I think they should get from a text I wrote, so all I’ll say is I hope they enjoy the aesthetic pleasures of the alien.

What were the biggest inspirations in the making of your story?
Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, Farscape, some of Grant Morrison’s ideas, and my longstanding frustration with Russell T. Davies’s claim that no one cares about Zogs from the planet Zog.

How would you describe the editing experience; how did your story change and evolve during the process? What were the biggest challenges you faced during the course of writing?
As regards challenges, it’s a boring answer, but it was probably just the bits when the writing dragged, when it felt like I was just writing connective tissue between the parts that actually felt alive. The actual shape of the story remained pretty constant from the pitch — but as I said above, Aristide and I have similar tastes and shared influences, so he was very good at seeing the bits that could be altered, built on, etc. in such a way as to better get at what I wanted. The commentary on the fictional story was their idea, as I recall, and he helped me properly get the hang of Auteur’s character at this point in his life.

Do you intend to return to Auteur in the future?
Absolutely. It’s so much fun getting into Auteur’s skull and imagining the most petulant response to a situation. And there are some ideas he’s perfectly suited for.

What’s your next creative project and where can our readers find you next?
I’m forever conlanging for my own amusement, but the next project anyone’s likely to see [crosses fingers] will be another Auteur story. The osseous bastard is in my head now, and it’s hard to get him out…

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