(This poem is brought to you courtesy of one too many forage enthusiasts being Wrong on the Internet about the merits of nomming on random bits of black nightshade, which totally hasn't killed them yet - how do you like them beans, Mr Fancypants So-Called Expert!?!?) Nature's Bounty

The food we find in hedge and ditch
Is not to everybody's taste ( Read more... )

(This actually, or at least oneirically, happened the other week. No sheep were harmed in the production of these Zs. May contain traces of poetic licence.) And Dream of Sheep

I swam to surface, from the deep
And dodgy currents of a dream
Which I fell into, counting sheep
To rustle later by the gleam
Of moonlight on the haunted moor...
(The ( Read more... )

(Disclaimer: This poem is a work of fiction. Any actual or fancied resemblances to real people, products, events, phenomena, or yawning voids in the very fabric of customer service are purely coincidental. I WISH!) Waiting for Download

I buy a game, or just a tool
From someone on the internet -
And very shortly, you can bet
That I'll be ( Read more... )

The Gardener's Rubaiyat

The garden's getting brambleful again.
The Rat Command has launched its Spring campaign.
I bring out my machete and my cat -
And then the clouds deliver this month's rain.

Where once were roses, now their rambling kin
Rise up to hug me, kissing cheek and chin
And leaving bloody lip-prints, which my wife
Is wont to cite as ( Read more... )

The Bridge to the End of the Night: 475 words of, eh, bridging passage, summarizing a long and often hair-raising afternoon's conversation, whose details I don't want to dump upon the reader beyond giving the general context and flavor.

The voice of this story, like many others in the Kateverse, comes out rather more archaizing in the first ( Read more... )

The Bridge to the End of the Night: 750 words, and the second scene finished. Prologue is now three scenes. Selkish politics has been talked. Katy giving advice to people determinedly loyal to their lords is always going to be the skunk at the picnic.

Now I've set up what's about to happen, all I have to worry about is writing the pay-off.

( Read more... )

"These revolutionary posts will change the economic platitudes of a generation!" - Daily Stenograph

In these recessionary times, there's one thing that's never been in bigger demand - armchair economic punditry! Whether it's cutting through the forest of futilitarian facts with the trusty machete of timeless folk wisdom, or whomping up a super ( Read more... )

The Bridge to the End of the Night:  1,150 words.  It seems the Prologue is two scenes, not one - problem propounded, problem resolved, or at least problem resolved to be attacked from a newly promising angle.  Well into the second scene now.  The long summer evening is paling over smoky-tenemented Sellawick, and Katy's partner is showing us his ( Read more... )

The Bridge to the End of the Night: 590 words.  Katy is annoyed by astrology, and we get our first hint of how much even the 'happy' part of her genuinely happy 'ending' cost her.  There are reasons she is so adamantly defending the fairly nice life she has against the fairy-tale fulfilment she walked out on at the end of her Deed.  And I'm ( Read more... )

The Bridge to the End of the Night: 500 more words last night, of the bookend-story which comprises the Prologue and Epilogue. A respectable merchant's wife of Sellawick finds out what two uninvited visitors want from her. It is not exactly insignificant. There may be no rest for the wicked, but there seems to be even less leisure for the good ( Read more... )