One of my new year’s resolutions, as urged on me (not really) by Al Gore and the repoweramerica.org mailing list I signed up for sometime in December, was to move my various internet assets to a carbon-neutral hosting provider. So I did a lot of research into green web hosts, and I settled on Green Geeks–they’re among the highest rated “green” hosts, despite the fact that they pay for carbon offsets rather than actually running their servers on wind or sunlight, because they offset three times as much carbon as they produce and are talented and reliable too. It’s only been a couple weeks, but I’ve certainly found that to be so.

So now The Mossy Skull and The Homeless Moon and various other internet projects of mine are carbon-positive. You, gentle reader, need not bother about that so much, except perhaps in that you can feel slightly less guilty as you read. Sadly, I haven’t gained much benefit on that account myself–it still feels like too little, too late. I need to do more. But them’s my personal neuroses, gentle reader, and they need not concern you.

There has, however, been one more substantial change that may require your brief attention. The Mossy Skull has moved–it used to be at the slightly unwieldy, mildly counterintuitive http://mjd.joskinandlob.com/wordpress/, and now it’s at the the satisfyingly clean and transparent http://mossyskull.com/. If you would be so kind, please change your bookmarks accordingly. Those of you following via RSS, make sure you’re syndicating http://feeds.feedburner.com/themossyskull and you should be all right.

And thanks for reading!

I have a story out in the new issue of The Future Fire, a politically-oriented online SF magazine featuring a super-awesome ironical Nietzsche quote (perhaps the best kind of Nietzsche quote) about the value of escapism.

To invent stories about a world other than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, belittling, and suspicion against life is strong in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of another, a better life.

—F. Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung

“Maryann Saves the World” is a piece of full-on, unapologetic, angry environmentalist escapism I sat down and wrote in a huff after watching some of my favorite woods in the whole world (in Westwood, a little town where I grew up, named for its awesome, under-appreciated, steadily vanishing woods) get knocked down and dynamited and replaced with landscaping and mcmansions. Writing it was a wonderful catharsis, which will completely justify that Nietzsche quote—and in by-no-means ironic fashion—unless, by some miraculous stroke of wish-fulfillment, a few complacent armchair environmentalists find their way to it, read it, and are re-energized to change their evil ways.

If you fit that description, please go read!

Here’s a little piece of the super-cool angry mansion-eating thicket illustration the story got from crafty artist Carmen:

The newest entry in my occasional blog series on homebrewing is live on the Small Beer Press site.

In this one, I go on a pine-needle eating spree, brew some beer with spruce tips in place of hops, and then proceed to party like an 1830s New England housewife.

And by the way, just in case anyone is actually syndicating these, the location of the Literary Beer RSS feed has changed to the following:

http://www.smallbeerpress.com/?tag=literary-beer&feed=rss2

is tonight, at the Barnes & Noble on 1741 Willow Street in Manchester, NH. Four of the five writers who make up the Homeless Moon will be there, plus a whole bunch of other clever and hilarious people, each of whom will tell a story in five minutes or less. It’s great, silly fun.

And I’ll be reading a new William-O story. Woo!

William-O the Pirate King, if you are unfamiliar, is my swashbuckling, one-eyed cat hero, who battles foes both real and supernatural in defense of his farm and family.

If you can’t make it, fear not, I’ll probably post an mp3 of the new story here in a couple of weeks.

For the stories in our second chapbook, each of us at The Homeless Moon chose as inspiration a fictional setting. Here’s the first scene of mine, “The Cannon and the Prophetess”:

One Kestrel pronounced the last phrase of the sonnet he had been reciting for the Duchess of Ennasin, and the crowd of loungers who made up her court erupted in applause. Acknowledging their flattery, he lowered himself to one knee.

“No, no,” said the Duchess, twiddling her manicured fingers to indicate he should arise. “You mustn’t prostrate yourself. Your primitive origins are of no consequence—you outrank me, Your Majesty!”

The assembled nobles tittered at their hostess’s kind condescension.

With an abruptness inappropriate to tact—but which he had come to know would be expected, secretly desired, of an educated savage such as himself—One Kestrel surged to his feet like a predator ready to strike. The bones and beads sewn in his robes of state rattled satisfactorily, the brilliant feathers of his royal headdress rippled, and he allowed his eyes to flash just so.

The nobles gasped, recoiling; this time, the nervous laughter of the Duchess betrayed an underlying terror. “My dear Captain Saturno, you are to be commended on such a magnificent find! If only you would allow me to purchase him from you.”

Captain Saturno took a knee himself. Resplendent in his shining steel cuirass and waxed moustache, he made a flourish, and taking her offered hand, placed his lips to her ring. “Your praise is acknowledged most humbly—but I am afraid King Kestrel cannot linger, for he is called away on an engagement at another court—and I’m sure Your Eminence could not wish to sully His Majesty’s reputation by making him late.”

“At the very least,” the flush Duchess begged, “allow me to offer His Majesty a parting gift—a boon. Name anything! It shall be wrapped and placed in his flagship’s stateroom, where my court’s generous donations to his cause already await.”

One Kestrel drew back overeducated lips from filed teeth, and throwing a ravenous glance at his master and keeper, uttered that too-familiar entreaty with which he’d caused himself to be expunged from so many a court. “There is one small secret I dearly desire. I can only
further impose on Your Eminence’s hospitality in this: if you would, provide me with your military’s recipe for gunpowder.”

Amidst the ensuing uproar, Saturno clutched One Kestrel by the elbow and propelled him from the court. His face was bloodless, blank—but whether with rage or something else, One Kestrel didn’t know.

Once they were safe aboard the caravel Constança, Captain Saturno barked orders to throw off the moorings and get underway. He escorted His Primitive Majesty One Kestrel, King of America, to his sumptuous, gift-strewn lodgings in the brig, shoved him inside, and slammed the door.

And here are the relevant lines from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, from which I took my inspiration:

Pantagruel then asked what sort of people dwelt in that damned island. They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers. Catch me there if you can, cried Panurge; may the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows if ever you find me among them! Hermits, sham saints, living forms of mortification, holy mountebanks, avaunt! in the name of your father Satan, get out of my sight! When the devil’s a hog, you shall eat bacon.

I’m not going to make any attempt to synthesize one with the other; chances are it would turn out a disaster, and anyway I’d much rather just encourage you to read the story and form your own opinions.

So instead, I’ll close with Gustave Doré’s utterly demented evil jester illustration to Rabelais’ prologue, which starts like this:

Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings)….

The Homeless Moon is making another chapbook. There isn’t much to show for it yet except for nebulous intangibles such as this here non-final cover:

However, from where I sit, I am pretty sure this one is going to blow last year’s out of the water. Conspicuous absence of marauding robot spiders aside.

A chapbook, in case you were wondering, is an embodiment of the do-it-yourself spirit in ink-and-paper form with a long and storied past. The term may in the near future become obsolete, once all our short story reading material comes to us in the form of iPhone periodicals, but it’s been around nearly as long as the printing press, used to denote any cheap, loosely-bound, disposable printed material intended for the edification and entertainment of the masses. Basically, a chapbook is a step up from a pamphlet, a step down from a zine. Pamphlets, as I understand it, are designed to convince people of something—for example, that fire and brimstone await if they don’t change their evil ways. A zine, on the other hand, is art—of the underground, fist-clenching rebel variety. I think we of the Moon will be satisfied if our chapbook manages to entertain.

I hope that clears things up.

Just got my contributor copies of Murky Depths issue #5, which features my story “Misty Rain”, complete with a seriously creepy illustration by Wayne Blackhurst. I have to admit I am pretty blown away. I mean, I guess I knew it was a horror story while I was writing it, but damn…the art makes it ten times creepier.

Actually I’m quite impressed with the magazine in general. The production values are high, it is packed full of both comics and prose fiction and features some beautiful art—particularly the cover art, by Luke Cooper, of a besneakered, pistol-packing grunge angel—and best of all, it looks like a comic book. Yeah!

jsridler, the_slow_train, if you have not already submitted to them, I suggest you do so.

A very silly two-page comic titled “The Freddie Mercury Challenge”, for which I wrote the story (but did not draw the pictures), appears in the now-available Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 22. Which, if you pay a bit extra, comes with some phenomenal chocolate (not to mention the moral high ground).

Hey!

I just noticed that my story “The Urchin’s Dark Kite” is now live in the May 2008 issue of the online fiction magazine A Fly in Amber. Woo.

Please go read it, and enjoy.