Readercon was pretty fun. It may have been the first con I’ve attended where I didn’t feel weird, awkward or out of place hardly at all. And to think, it only took five years…and some beer…to achieve! I appeared disguised in mutton-chop extensions and a false Scottish accent on a “Future of Short Fiction Markets” panel, drank a lot of fine beer (no Brick Red though, disappointingly!) with a lot of fine people, read from “Between Two Treasons” at a packed Beneath Ceaseless Skies reading, and sat sheepishly behind the Small Beer table taking credit by proxy for all their wonderful new stuff and repeatedly forgetting to give away Daily Planners and talk up Weightless Books.

We did in fact get The Homeless Moon 3 Chapbook out in time. Barely in time, but it happened! And they went like hotcakes. I printed about 200 and ended up with less than 50. And then I gave away a bunch more to the Odyssey 2010 class at the TNEO mixer. Not many left. Get one now!

Here it is in its natural habitat in our suite at TNEO:

Tomorrow night (sorry for the short notice—you know how I am with these announcement things), I’ll be reading a new William-o poem at the TNEO Flash Fiction Slam, starting at 6:00 PM at the Manchester, NH Barnes & Noble. I’ll be joined by other fine Odyssey grads including my pal Scott H. Andrews, Hannah Strom-Martin (whose story “Father Pena’s Last Dance” appears in this month’s Realms of Fantasy, Barbara A. Barnett, Rita Oakes, Ellen Denham and many others. Here’s a map. Please come by and say hello!

Dolichonyx oryzivorus, summer plumage. Upland meadow, Graves Farm Sanctuary, Haydenville, MA

You thought it wouldn’t happen, we ourselves are not unsurprised that it is actually going to happen, but it is. The Homeless Moon chapbook 3 goes to the printer tomorrow, and we’re releasing it at Readercon 21 at the end of the week. And it will no doubt appear online and in ebook form a little later on.

I’m going to deviate from the usual MO and not give away the cover art just yet. We’ve done something a little different with this year’s chapbook, both in theme and subject matter, which I think you will like better if it lurches suddenly up over the crest of yon hilltop, hits you with a targeting laser and says boo.

No, I did not just give it away. That was a reference to the Chapbook One cover.

What has not changed: I did the cover, Erin did the layout, and all of us did the editing, the proofing, and the kickass eclectic fiction.

Here instead is some other thing I decided not to use for the cover:

See you at Readercon. Most likely you’ll find me at the Small Beer dealers’ table hunched over a stack of unfinished TNEO crits. Or at the pub hunched over a Sam Adams Brick Red.

Mycena leaiana
On a rotten hemlock log across a brook, Mt. Toby Reservation.

The new camera, for those who care, is this, not a digital SLR but a budget 12 MP Kodak point and shoot the first thing I did on which was reset the resolution to 10 MP. It has a big long zoom that, without stabilization, shockingly works not all that well, and a wide angle that lets me be 3 inches from the mushroom, which is old hat to most people but is new and wonderful to me. I’m still learning the semi-klunky interface, but it takes a nice picture when I let it.

Time erodes all things, and new things, harder things, spring forth from their remains.

Old Maize God was made of orange-painted plaster. I bought him for a dollar from a wandering huckster kid at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá and couldn’t work up the guts to toss him in the sacred cenoté. For three years, he guarded my garden from the likes of hungry wabbits, storm-felled trees and marauding bands of centaurs. But the winter of 2010 wormed its way through his plaster flesh, and he crumbled.

Young Maize God is carved from green-black jadeite, heavy and resilient as iron. I found him among the mazelike convolutions of market day in Chichicastenango, in the Guatemalan highlands. He’s done his best to take up the mantle of the old god—but come August, he and I must bid farewell to our much-loved little communal plot in the valley and travel east, back to the city, where fecundity will be restricted to a forest of pots on the back balcony.

Who knows what other change may come? Not I. Not he.

Happy solstice.

Remarkable how much harder it is to muster the energy to blog when I don’t have lovely images lying around to fill up extra space.

You were probably starting to feel complacent and self-satisfied because I haven’t berated you about your carbon footprint lately.

Well, here I am to put an end to that.

This gulf oil spill thing is pretty depressing, no? It has put me back into that too-familiar mindset of paranoiac dread, wondering how I can wander around in my idyllic paradise taking photos of wildflowers and smugly watching the average miles per gallon meter on my fancy new cash-for-klunkers-mobile creep past 40, while out there in the world two thousand gallons of oil per hour are spilling into the Gulf.

Let’s just put that in perspective, shall we? Every year for the past 50 years, leaking oil pipeline in Nigeria has spilled more oil than the Exxon Valdez. Every year for the past 50 years. What are they (BP, Shell, etc) doing about it? Not a lot. Why? Because it’s not happening off the southern coast of the U.S.?

Meanwhile, my sister tells me, U.S. and Canadian concerns in the mountains of Guatemala strip mine for gold using blast streams of arsenic, which contaminates the water table, making it poisonous to all forms of life. And it all just flows downriver to the sea.

Then there’s the garbage patch. The 2.8 million tons of pesticides used every year worldwide. Those de-oxygenated ocean dead zones the size of New Jersey. The 3.7 billion dollar sunscreen industry (slather on, rinse off in ocean, repeat).

One starts to wonder why there’s any water in the ocean.

The only thing that’s working on our side, the only thing that keeps me lying on my back in the grass in the backyard eating soft serve with my legs up on the picnic table thinking of whimsical names for the clouds, is the fact that the earth is still, for the moment, bigger than we are.

There’s a certain little ditty that creeps up at the back of my mind at times like these and won’t go away–it helps me to remember I’m not doing enough, even when I really, really wish I could just get the damn thing out of my head. It goes like this (sung to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell”):

We’re f@¢king up the earth
We’re f@¢king up the earth
Hi-ho the derry-o
We’re f@¢king up the earth.

Everybody!

Wild columbine, Aquilegia canadensis, West-facing cliffs, Mt. Toby Reservation, Sunderland.

My camera died. Rest well, Sony Cybershot DSC-F717. You came from the factory with all kinds of defects, your autofocus algorithm was dated and finicky, but you were good to me. You let me recollect beauty in millions of colors. One time you pretended to be a handcannon to protect me from poachers. Curse the loose screw that killed you. I wish I had treated you better.

My old Powerbook G4 12″ has gone the way of the dire wolf and the dodo. Funes, you kept me alive. You ate through rechargeable batteries like a radio-controlled Mechagodzilla. Your touchpad didn’t work for shit, forcing me to wield a retro-aesthetically superheroic rubber ball mouse from my original iMac 233 circa 1998. I was ridiculously, unhealthily attached to you. I am beside myself at the prospect of letting you go—but all things must pass. With any luck, you will only sleep awhile and return from the shadows, like the coelecanth or the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Now I got me a handed-down white dual 1.8 MacBook, christened Ilom, for which I shall remain eternally grateful to parties who know who they are. It stands out less from the coffeeshop crowd than poor old Funes; on the other hand, it can run Illustrator and iTunes at the same time without destroying itself and has carried me forward into the video age. Will I ever learn to love it as much? That’s a question best put to Time.

“They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.”

—Robert Frost, In Hardwood Groves

I fear this may get mushy. If you’re not in that treehugging mood, look away.

The Holyoke ridge, looking west from Mount Tom.

This is maybe my favorite prospect in the valley, at my favorite time of year for prospects: when I’ve had six months to forget how beautiful the leaves are, and they come forth again as though for the first time in that pale, infant color and texture soft as skin. I think it has to do with contrasts. Over my shoulder to the right is Easthampton, with its towering old brick smokestacks haunted by nesting swallows. Over the mountain’s shoulder to the left, subsided metropoli full of factories similarly moldering and grey populate a long gradient into haze: Holyoke, Springfield, Hartford, New Haven. Behind me, the summit of Mount Tom, with its ruined Victorian hotel now surmounted by buzzing icicle cellular towers, satellite dishes and wry suicidal graffiti. But right here in front of me is this rippling swath of pastel-green, unpopulated nothing. What’s it doing there, looking like it just erupted from the fingertips of god? What right has it to go unlogged, undeveloped, undecayed?

Unlike pretty much every other place in this valley, I’ve never really had the chance to explore this particular nothing. Maybe that contributes to the mystery. Maybe I never will explore it, just so I can get this same feeling again every spring.

On the way back down across the sandy cut where the hotel’s telephone wires used to run, I ran into a Northern Oriole female–nothing special for most of you people maybe, but for some reason around here I rarely see them. I didn’t take a picture; there’s times when it just isn’t called for. But I crept up to within a few feet and we chirped back and forth at each other for awhile, heads cocked and frozen still. Then I thanked her and went on my way.

My newest centaur story, “The Circus of King Minos’ Masque”, went live last night at midnight in Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue #41–yes, those centaurs, the ones with the hallucinogens, the whiskey cellars and the lust for human flesh.

I read a little bit from this story at Boskone in February. It’s the second set in this world to feature Periphas, a human orphan raised by the lord of the centaurs. The third is purportedly to appear in Tales of Moreauvia #4 this fall.

It’s also the first time (at least that I’m aware of) that a story of mine has appeared for sale at the Kindle store–BCS has added a new feature where you can download individual issues to your fancy ereader thing from Amazon for a mere $0.99. Woo!

So many new and interesting ways for you to enjoy ye artfully airborne jewels of flying blood! How can you resist?

I’ll tell you one way you might resist–and that’s if you are not prepared to handle the goreporn and liberal guilt. These are still the same, bad old centaurs, and they are not for the squeamish.

This is Giambologna’s Hercules and Nessus.

Roaring Brook Falls, on the Mt. Toby reservation in Montague, MA. These icicles taste of moss and mineral salt.

Porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum. This guy lives on Graves Farm Reservation, the northwest side, where there is a maybe 100 foot deep ravine that has tons of broken rock and moss all up its sides. I love that ravine–I swim in the stream at the bottom sometimes–and I have met this porcupine there often. He never seems to like me any better, but he’s slow.

He is my mascot of the moment. Prickly!