Sorry for the silence.

Some fun stuff, though.

Your Review is a Forest

My favorite living poet reviewed my book!

Mind if I say that again?  My favorite living poet reviewed my book! (She actually beats out W.S. Merwin, by the way).

And she had nice things to say about it!  But mostly, damn.

My favorite living poet reviewed my book!

Your Face is a Discount

Sorry.  It’s 2am and I’m working a graveyard shift in a residential facility for formerly homeless folks and an alarm went off and someone threw a cup of water at me and I’m on hour 17 or so of overtime, so I’m a bit punchy.

But yeah.  The book.  I forgot to undo the discount on Lulu, and actually the book’s sold awfully well since then, so I’m leaving it indefinitely.

When it goes on sale elsewhere it will be the list price, but it will always be cheaper for ye’ on Lulu.

Apologies, by the way, for those who’ve been awaiting an eBook version.  I…hmm.  I suck at technology and cannot figure out how to preserve formatting in .epub.  A friend’s gonna help me, and I’ll update ye’ when that’s all figured out.

 

The Melissa, Rising

So, remember that thing I did in Newgrange?  That one thing, you know.  Involved a piece of cloth and the light of rebirth and stuff and then giving something to some guy outside?

So…this article’s kinda funny.  Apparently graffiti bees have been showing up everywhere in one of the neighborhoods in Dublin.

Not guilty, I swear.

Kindness to Ravens

That reminds me, though.

Know how I said I asked some giants for help with something and they said yes? I also asked some corvids for help and they sort of said yes.

But I could use some help, because I want to do something for them.

There’s…this day coming up.  It’s my birth-day, which is pretty cool.  I’ll be at Pantheacon giving a talk with Alley Valkyrie on Radicalism and Paganism that day in California, far away from the corvids I know personally.

Also, that day?  It’s the day of a beheaded saint.

Headless saints are an interesting lot.  There’s St. Denis, for instance, supposedly beheaded by Druids on a mount in Paris.  Denis is a derivative of Dionysos, and that mount is Montmartre (the mount of the martyrs).  The Christians tell of how Denis and his buddy Eletherius (that is, “liberator,” of the titles of Dionysos) were beheaded, and Denis walked down the hill hold his head and prophesying for six miles until he finally fell down.  And then grapevines came out of his neck.

There are other headless saints, too.  Like Valentine.

And there’s, well–this god I worship who likes Ravens and Crows and Jackdaws and all that.  And he cut off his head when he was dying so he could give oracles and then protect people afterwards.

So….yeah.

I was kinda thinking that it’d be brutally awesome if lots of people were to feed their local corvids on Valentine’s Day.

‘Intention,’ I’ve noted, is a little overrated in Paganism.  It gives us the illusion that our wills are somehow supreme and other things must obey us, including, say, crows and ravens.  Or gods.  Or children.  None of that really works as much as we like to think.

So–if you were thinking it might be cool to help some tea-swilling punk druid writer guy by feeding crows on Valentine’s Day, you don’t gotta go do it with ‘intention’ or spells or rituals or anything.  Mostly, just throw some unsalted peanuts within sight of some black-winged friends.  You can say ‘hello’ to them if you like.  They like that, I think.

You might not have noticed any corvids in your neighborhood.  They’re probably around (they’re around most places).  If you’re game, it’s a good idea to start looking around your neighborhood to find ’em.  If you don’t normally do that sort of thing, you might be kinda awed to see how many birds there are around you, even in the winter.

And then buy a bag of unsalted peanuts.  They gotta be unsalted.  Also, awesome if they’re still in the shell (it makes it easier for them to hoard them safely in danger rather than eating ’em all at once).  Why peanuts?  Well, they like them.  Also, it’s a legume native to the Americas.  And legumes are associated with the dead in all sorts of places.

If you’re not in the Americas, I’m not sure what to recommend, but there’s probably a suitable native-ish bean in your area they’d like?

So, yeah.  You in?

We got’s a month.