Hey, Your Nose is on Fire!

I've just discovered:      That a magazine that was supposed to come out in October with one of my stories in it actually did in fact come out!      Since 2023, I've had a story in every issue of the twice-yearly anthology Journ-E: The Journal of Imaginative Literature . Several of the stories started life as pieces of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic fanfiction, but I made a lot of alterations. All the characters who were unicorns in the original Pony versions, for instance, become cats in my rewrites, all the "earth ponies" become dogs, and all the pegasi become crows, hawks or eagles.      In the process of conversion, though, the dogs, cats, and birds began taking on lives of their own, as it were. And by the time I was planning the 4th story in the sequence, I realized that it wouldn't work as a Pony story at all. It's called "Jinx," and it's a whole new story featuring characters who are but ...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Well, wasn't it nice of the pastor to stop by for spell? Even if the spell was apparently necromantic in nature...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      The last week of the year! And yet? Our story continues!

The Terebinth Story Archive      It's always nice when everyone takes part in the conversation.

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Have I mentioned my two recent poems here? The longest of them is " Perilous Stare & Friendship Fair ," and the other, a bit shorter but still pretty long, is called " What Water Says ."

The three tunes here :      Didn't form a "set" on the recent Solstice, Christmas, Etc. episode of my weekly radio program. I did play all of them, yes, but it wasn't till afterwards that it occurred to me how well they'd fit together. So here they are.      We start with the British musicians Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden playing guitars and fiddles and singing their way through "I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In" backed up by the snappiest little brass band I've heard in a long time. The second tune is from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky by way of my favorite trumpeter/composer/arranger of the Big Band era, Charlie Shavers. This isn't Shavers' group performing it here, though, 'cause Don Byron's Sextet puts so much more bounce into it: "The Bounce of the Sugar Plum Fairies," Shavers called it. And the set wraps up with Bela Fleck on the banjo with his band the Flecktones and the Tuvan ensemble called Alash merrily mashin...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Christmas Eve, as usual around here, means singing and playing at 3 masses and a carol service. Christmas Day, though, I get off, so hopefully I don't have to do too much talking.

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      No second guessing! We're driving onward, onward, ever onward toward the end of Act III of our current five-act melodrama!

The Terebinth Story Archive      I prefer walking to hiking myself. Fewer bears on the road between here and the library, I've found...

Everything's:      Flooding out here at the end of the year!      And I'm not writing that just because this poem's called " What Water Says ," though I'm never one to turn down a pun if it comes wandering by.      This one's about water rats poling their barges down mystery-shrouded rivers, and the form is one I've played with before . You take a sestina , see, and you insert haiku before, after, and between the stanzas. 'Cause I'm all about the mix 'n' match!                                                        Mike

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      So many eyes...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Because I don't think we've had an unsettling clergyman in the comic yet...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      These days, whenever I venture to draw somthing more complicated than a couple characters strolling along, I'm astonished that I managed to do 15 years of this thing here as an actual comic. Just utterly astonished...      But at least we're maybe gonna get some zombies here or something. I guess we'll all find out together!

The Terebinth Story Archive      Let's see how Lamont and his party're doing. We haven't seen them since page 1,846 , after all!

When I first wrote this poem:      The title was "A Game of Snake and Chicken." I was thinking of Cordwainer Smith's classic short story " The Game of Rat and Dragon ," but in the poem here, they're dealing with a cockatrice instead of a hideous space monster. Hence the "snake and chicken" part, y'see.      I sent it to Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, the webzine who published my short story " Collaborators " back in December of 2024. They liked it, bought it, sent me a revision, and the title had changed to "Impossible Eggs." Cockatrice eggs figure into the plot, y'see.      I rolled it around in my head for a while, but that title seemed too focused on a single aspect of the story. So when I sent in my revision of their revision, I changed the title to "Scrambled Expectations." That got the eggs in, but it also addressed some of the larger themes I hoped the story was addressing.   ...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Pirates... Why does it always come back to pirates?

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      I can only assume things'll be bursting into flames here any minute now.

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Reckon they must be in Kentucky, what with the grass there being blue and all...      I told myself I'd only use that line if I couldn't think of a better one, and, well, here we are.

The Terebinth Story Archive      There's so much violence in comics these days! And I'm not so sure about rhyming "ephemeral" and "well," there, Esther...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Now I'm wondering if that map's to scale...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Ah, the wonders of personal connection...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      I think I've only ever ridden in a taxi cab two or three times, so I hope I'll be excused for not becoming the drivers' life-long pal and/or confidente...

The Terebinth Story Archive      Esther does love her triolets...