about

Michael Raven (a nom de plume, on the off-chance you thought it might be real) for some guy who spends most of his time outside of writing down words and coming up with something that isn’t quite music:

• Reviewing scientific data
• Being a newshound
• Herding, feeding and tripping over six seven six cats
• Herding, feeding and tripping over three girls
• Pretending to sleep
• Other useless and sundry things

He writes, though. A lot. In fact, you should be warned that it is not uncommon for him to post as many as ten poems or ten stories or ten posts of dubious quality throughout a given day. His primary pastime is murdering words. If you are the type who prefers a little less activity throughout the day, or think it is cruel to annihilate so many syllables, he’s probably the wrong person to follow.

He can’t help it.

Sceadugena is his newest collection of mental masturbation. There is poetry (assuredly), and short fiction (frequently) and more than a few “deep thoughts” (that are really shallow ponds). There are westerns, science-fiction, new weird, erotica, angsty verse, immature verse, doggerel, tripe, ambient, postpunk, cyberpunk, steampunk, so on and so forth. Eventually, he changes gears. So if you don’t like what you see, you can give it a spell and he’s probably moved on.

Michael has been writing since first grade. It was largely poetry until sometime around twenty-five when he moved on and embraced prose. He’s decided he is probably not a novelist, though he has written a few that he didn’t get around to trying to edit and publish. The main driver for his poetry is the ecstatic experience and he prefers to ignore rules and conventions completely — not because they aren’t useful — but because he doesn’t much care for them after being constrained by them over the years. He wouldn’t mind being “discovered”, but he doesn’t write for fame, notoriety or fortune. He writes to write in the same way a Zen master sits at zazen to sit — he writes to write. If he admitted a goal, he would say that he’d probably be able to quit writing if, just once, he could invoke a shamanic experience in most of the people who read something he wrote.