It's Raining Poems

It’s finally warming up. We had the first few days of real sunshine and fair evenings this week. Last night we were at the Science Museum in London for one of their monthly Lates (highly recommended) and we didn’t even need coats.

I was in Boston for the Boskone convention in late February, where I met up with friends and met some great new people. Boskone was my second con, much smaller and more intimate than Worldcon, and I expect I’ll be back for future years.

I attended my first “kaffeeklatsch” sessions, where a small group of people have coffee and chat with someone notable. I met Neil Clarke (of Clarkesworld) and Scott H. Andrews (of Beneath Ceaseless Skies), and both were wonderful experiences.

After the con, me partner flew out and we saw some friends who are living abroad, did some sightseeing around Boston, then went down to NYC for a few days for more of the same. Now we’re both refreshed and have too many photos to bore people with.

On the writing front, apparently my poems sell better than anything else. I’ve sold another one! Any news is good news, so for now may it rain poems.

Table of Contents

• Links & Recommendations

• Writing News

• Where's Rolo?

• TV: Succession. I’ve only seen the first season, and I need to take a break from it because the family drama is a lot. There are some career performances in here, and Brian Cox is fantastic as the curmudgeonly patriarch of a media empire, setting his children against one another over their inheritance.

• Poem: Excerpt from “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Elliot

   This is the dead land
      This is cactus land
      Here the stone images
      Are raised, here they receive
      The supplication of a dead man's hand
      Under the twinkle of a fading star.
   
      Is it like this
      In death's other kingdom
      Waking alone
      At the hour when we are
      Trembling with tenderness
      Lips that would kiss
      Form prayers to broken stone.

• Podcast: The Midpoint with Gabby Logan. Logan interviews people who are at ‘the midpoint’ of life, generously ranged at 40ish to 50ish, about how lifestyles are shifting, new goals emerging, and new leases of life beginning.

• Books: Quiet by Susan Cain. Introverts, unite (quietly)! An exploration of introversion and extroversion, how society is geared for extroverts, and what introverts have to offer the world.

• Music: Dustin O’Halloran: Vorleben. I don’t remember how I first came across Dustin O’Halloran in my teens, but his music scored my first writing sessions. Vorleben is one of my favourites, but I recommend putting on an album and losing yourself in it.

• Some incredibly exciting news yet again that I can’t talk about for a long time—probably about a year. But I can say that I got my first commission! Nothing is signed on the dotted line yet, but things are looking good, and I’m hopeful.

• My fantasy story “Ten Thousand Years Walking the Godsroad” is still available for free this month over at Trollbreath Magazine.

• My fantasy story “Reflections on Discord” is now available in the Winter 2025 edition of The Colored Lens.

• My sci-fi poem “Martian Gardeners Paring Memories of Old Earth” is out in issue #20 of Solarpunk Magazine on 11th March.

• Another poem coming soon, to be announced.