Writings | The Mossy Skull

Literary Beer

On October 22, 2007 by Michael J. DeLuca in Beer, News, Writings

Well, this is some exciting news for me.

Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press (the publisher of INTERFICTIONS, with whom I have been volunteering the occasional day’s work for about two years now and learning a great deal), has invited me to do a guest author series on home brewing over at the SBP blog, Not a journal. Episode 0 is up now, in which I ramble a bit about the relationship between beer and literature. To be followed on an occasional basis whenever there are new developments to report on the brewing front.

Boy do I love rambling about beer.

I’m thinking I’ll syndicate some excerpts in the sidebar somewhere, rather than having to add new posts here everytime I add new ones there.

Alas, Such Caves are Few and Far Between

On September 25, 2007 by Michael J. DeLuca in Writings

More bandwagon-jumping. This particular spree of idle self-indulgence originated here, with a post by Liz Hand at Inferior4.

So yeah, this is my desk. I would say it is equal parts decadent and utilitarian. Yes, I like it that dark. The important stuff, of course, is the books, but there are too darn many of them for me to be copying out here. So instead…

List of my distracting trinkets (tour of my writerly unconscious):

A Farnum Hill Cider bottle full of dimes.
A tupelo honey jar currently stuffed full of ten-sided dice and foreign coin.
A figurine of the maize god I couldn’t work up the brazenness to pitch into the sacred well at Chichén Itzá.
A handful of red clover and lavender blossoms, preserved in olive oil.
Magnetic building blocks.
A sphere of solid jasper.
Another of scratched glass.
Two small centaurs.
A lump of coal I found washed up on the Maine coast from a sunken freighter.
A chunk of volcanic rock from Mt. Fuji.
A one-ounce sample bottle of frankincense.
A rusted keyhole I found on the top of Mt. Toby, the former site of a hotel destroyed by arson at the turn of the century.
A pint glass from Buzzard’s Bay Brewing Co., complete with buzzard.

After this, a real post, I promise.

Beyond Fields We Know 2

On September 12, 2007 by Michael J. DeLuca in Banner, Summer, Trees, Visions, Writings

I ran into a sprite today in the meadows of Sunderland. She was lying on her belly under a tree, bouncing her heels in the air and looking off at the mountain, in the middle of a field of lady’s thumb and grass gone to seed. My path took me between her and the object of her vantage. I was eating an ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles on the verge of melting, and wouldn’t have seen her at all if she hadn’t waved.

I couldn’t be sure if the wave was meant for me or the mountain, but I took a chance and returned it. It was breezy, and her wispy auburn hair danced up around her face like a little tornado.

“It’s a nice day,” she said.

“Lovely,” I said, and went on.

I’m not the sort to meddle in the affairs of the Otherworld.