Hey, Your Nose is on Fire!

"The Memory of Pie":      Is the name of the story in question. I wrote it several years ago now, but no one seemed interested in it.      OK, that's not entirely true. Neal Shusterman in my writing group quite enjoyed it, and a year or so after I'd presented it to the group for comments, he asked if I'd be willing to co-write a story set in his Arc of the Sythe universe. He said he wanted the main character of the story to be someone like the villain in "The Memory of Pie," and since his idea for the story centered around a dog who'd been genetically altered to have human-level intelligence, he figured it'd be right up my street.      So I wrote a first draft, he wrote the second, I wrote a third, and after his final pass, our collaboration "Never Work With Animals" was published in 2023 as part of the collection Gleanings: Stories from the Arc of the Scythe .      Three ...

They're both from:      The Science-fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association , so one would be correct in thinking that they're both for poetry.      The first is a nomination in the "long" category of the Rhysling Awards for my poem " What Water Says ," published on the Eternal Haunted Summer website back in December. And the second is a nomination in the "full-length book" category of the Elgin Awards for my short-story-disguised-as-a-collection-of-poems, " Two Strikes and I'm Out " that came out from Island of Wak-Wak last summer.      So far, only the Rhysling nomination is showing on their website if you page down to the bottom of the list of finalists. But I assume the Elgin Award one will show up eventually on their page devoted to those lists . We'll all find out together!                     ...

Because you can never have:      Too many poems about ants, here's one of mine called " All Work and No Play " that's up now on the Abyss & Apex website as part of their issue #98 for the second quarter of 2026.      Taking the link in the preceeding paragraph or clicking on the picture at the start of this post will let you read the poem, or you can click the little widget below the full-size illustration on their website to hear me read the poem in a silly, ant-like voice. Then, at the bottom of the page after the printed poem, you can read the couple paragraphs where I lay out how I came to write the dang thing. So much going on!                                                   ...

I've been working:      In the building pictured here for 37 years now. Of course, it's larger in real life, though not much larger...      That's one of the reasons the city'll be tearing the Balboa Branch Library down here in a few weeks and sending me over to work at the Mariners Branch till they get the new building built, a project that they estimate will take a year and a half. I'll miss the old place, but not the bugs that've been eating the wall, the leaks that've been trickling through the ceiling, or the lack of electrical outlets that've made things more and more interesting as folks've started bringing their own devices here, looking to plug in and use them or charge them.      February 28th is the last day we're open to the public as a library, then the next weekend, the Friends of the Library will be holding a big book sale on the premises, letting folks pay to take home armloads of books a...

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 ...

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

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.   ...

Ah, technology...      Right now, xepher.net, the computational device that nowadays holds all the images I upload to the internet, is having some sort of an issue.      I don't know what that issue is. But I should've been able to predict that this would happen this weekend. Y'see, the guy who runs that machine—whom I have never met and only know as Xepher—is, like me, a fan of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic cartoon series. If I'm recalling correctly, he's said in the past that it was my posting about the show on his machine that got him interested in it...      Still, one weekend every August, he and a bunch of other fans put together a big convention up in Bellevue, WA called Everfree Northwest . And it's become traditional that his machine breaks down in some way on exactly the weekend that he's away helping run the convention's writing programs.      Guess wha...

So last Wednesday:      I took part in a poetry reading at the 2025 World Science-Fiction Convention in Seattle.      Except I wasn't actually in Seattle. Through the magic of Modern Technology, I was sitting in my little garret room at the top of its narrow flight of stairs the way any proper poet ought to be and was still able to take part. It's a wonder of the age in which we're living!      Unfortunately, another bit of technological magic allowed a video recording of the reading to be made and said video recording to be uploaded to the internet for all and sundry to see . This means that you, right now in the comfort and convenience of you own garret room, can view my spasmodic twitchings and flailings as I read about 10 minutes of my little verses. It starts, I guess, at about 14:55 when the moderator begins reading my introduction and ends at about 26:20 when I fix the rictus of my grin for o...

     Here's a couple odd things.      Last year, I had a story called " Collaborators " published on the Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores website. It's a story that started out as a 10,000-word piece of My Little Pony fanfiction before getting boiled down to the current 7,000-word piece of stand-alone fantasy fiction that it is now. And it's just been nominated for the WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction .      The award—and the $500 prize—will be handed out at Capclave in Rockville, MD in September, so who knows what'll happen?      The second odd thing is allegedly happening next Wednesday as I type this. That morning at 9AM, three other poets and I will be presenting a reading of our stuff as part of the 2025 Worldcon, happening this year in Seattle. It's all been rather confusing since the woman who asked me to be a part of the panel and who I thought was organizi...

The end of June must mean:      My new poetry book's out!      Not that it's anything as simple as a collection of poems. I mean, what'd be the fun in that? Instead, it's a 6,700 word story told from beginning to middle to end over the course of 63 poems written in a variety of forms and meters. Because that's what we do for fun 'round these parts!      I never intended for it to be a story, actually. In fact, I wrote the "two strikes" separately as part of Zoetic Press's Write Like You're Alive program, a challenge to do something creative every day for a month. So in July of 2018, I wrote 31 poems under the title "Abecedarian," and four years later during August of 2022, I did 31 more poems called "The Lure of the Mechanical."      A little thought, though, showed me that the first person narrator in both groups was the same guy, haplessly flailing after similar things in di...

Here's one:      That's running a bit late, but, well, better late than never, as the kids like to say.      It's the Spring Equinox 2025 issue of Journ-E: The Journal of Imaginative Literature , y'see, even though the larger world around us, observing that I'm posting this on the Wednesday after Memorial Day, might be inclined to believe that we've entered the unofficial beginning of Summer.      Still, I've got a story called "Cleanse" in the aforementioned issue, the third of the stories I've had published in Journ-E about the talking cats, dogs, and birds living in the magical Realm of Marigold. I'll add here my standard proviso when discussing these Marigold stories: any resemblance between the characters and settings here and the characters and settings of the cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is entirely purposeful.      The first of the stories, in cas...

The Speculative Sunday folks:      Still haven't posted the program with my poetry reading to YouTube, but they have got it up on their Facebook page if anyone wants to take a look at me flailing about.      I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, so I don't know how the audio quality is. But I can tell you that my part starts about six minutes in and runs till about the 24-minute mark. It's largely light and silly verse as one might expect from me.      After me, though, you get an actual poet. Known as upfromsumdirt, he's writing some very powerful stuff, so give it a listen.      Wednesday Afternoon Edit: And now it's available on YouTube! In this version, my stuff starts about 5:45 and runs till about 23:30, but it's the same stuff.                       ...

     Last month, I mentioned this online poetry reading I'm involved in . Well, it happens this Sunday, so I've of course caught a cold.      The disease appears to be progressing apace, as they say, and I've been sucking away on zinc lozenges since Monday night. I expect, therefore, to be more or less recovered by Sunday afternoon. After all, my watchword has ever been: What could possibly go wrong?      What I wanted to mention here, though, is that the thing will be streamed live on Facebook. I'm largely unfamiliar with the process, but this is where I think it'll be taking place within Facebook's vast virtual architecture at 4PM Pacific Time on April 13th.       DJ Gold Code from KUCI's Omakase program has already agreed to take over Episode 2141 of The Darkling Eclectica for me that Sunday, so the radio show will continue unabated. And if you can't stop by the banks of tha...

I assume:      That I'm scheduled to be run over by a streetcar soon since so many pleasant things have been happening to me lately.      The most recent—I just signed the contract today—is a poetry collection of mine that's due to be published this summer by the interestingly named Island of Wak Wak Press .      On their website, they define a chapbook as "between 20 and 50 pages of poetry," something I didn't know till I began this whole process. What I ended up submitting has 63 poems spread out over 51 pages, but I guess that was close enough. The title is Two Strikes, And I'm Out , and it focuses on a hapless 1st-person narrator trying to make some sort of connection to the outside world. In the first half of the book, he reaches out to a talking animal, fantasy world, and in the second half, to a computer-driven, science-fiction world. I don't wanna give anything away, but the title perhaps foreshad...

Now that we've:      Signed the contracts, I guess it's official.      For nearly 25 years now, I've been writing stories about Cluny the Sorceress Squirrel and her assorted friends and foes. For an idea of how long that's been in internet time, you can read the first of her stories, "Familiars," for free if you can reach this old Livejournal page . Otherwise, you can try tracking down a copy of the 2001 edition of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress anthology —that was vol. 19, or XIX since they used Roman numerals most of the time. Or you can pick up The Ursa Major Anthology from Fur Planet Books. The story got reprinted there when it won the Ursa Major award for best anthropomorphic short story of 2001.      After that, I had more stories about Cluny in volumes 23 through 32 of Sword & Sorceress , then got one more into the final volume, #34, in 2019. There's also one more story, a direct se...

     First is an award I'm preliminarily nominated for, and second is an online poetry reading I'm participating in.      Back in September, I sold a poem called " One Last Pie in the Face " to the folks at the Silver Blade webzine. Now, it's apparently been nominated to the preliminary ballot for this year's Rhysling Award, given out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. It's in the "long poem" category, so it's near the bottom of the list on their webpage. It also still has to make it through the panel of jurors to get onto the final ballot. So more bulletins as events warrant.      Something that's more likely to happen, however, is coming up on April 13th. I've been invited to take part in the Speculative Sunday poetry reading series . The organizer asked me to have 16 to 18 minutes of poetry ready to read during the course of the hour-long Zoom session, and tickets are free, so well ...

     Just over ten years ago now, I wrote a piece of My Little Pony fanfiction called "Collaborators." Hopefully this news doesn't shock anybody too much.      I've actually got two pseudonyms that I use when writing what the kids call "MLP fanfic." The first one, AugieDog , is where I post the general stories I've put together in response to the fourth iteration of the My Little Pony franchise, the one that's subtitled "Friendship is Magic" and was created by a genius of the Western animated arts, Lauren Faust. And the second pseudonym, Baal Bunny , is where I post Pony items that I write as part of the assorted Writeoff contests, a writing workshop that, up until the Pony cartoon went off the air just over five years ago now, was quite a bustling little community.      Nowadays, half the time, I'm the only one submitting stories in answer to the prompts over there...      But ...

The one poem that's free to read:      Is actually seasonal, too!      Though technically, you can't read it. You can only listen to me read it.      It's called "Hallowe'en Weather," and it's up now as part of the 2024 SFPA Halloween Poetry Reading . It's a little more than halfway down the page and has the picture you see here beside it. I put the image together from a couple public domain drawings I found on the internet.      The poem that you have to pay to read is in issue #128 of the magazine Dreams & Nightmares . The ordering instructions , as near as I can tell, don't say how much it is for a single print copy of an issue, but it's $1 for a PDF. I haven't actually seen the issue yet, but a look at the table of contents makes me think the editor may have left my middle initial out of my byline. The poem's called "A Ballade of Intestinal Flora," and it's also kind...

     There's another poem of mine over on the Silver Blade website. It's a pantoum in iambic tetrameter if you wanna get all fancy about it, and it's also a story about cutting your losses when it's time to get out. " One Last Pie in the Face " is the title, and it's the 8th poem I've had over there since 2017 including " Ode to the Artistic Temperament ," an iambic pentameter ode in terza rima that tied for 3rd place in the Long Form category of the 2020 Rhysling Awards.      I've got a short story that'll be available for purchase in a couple weeks, too, but more about that when it happens.                                         Mike