Author: michael raven

casting runes — 07mar26
uruz
```
iron pierced these & thistle,
in nettle & thunderhead

dredge of horn furrows
over open & naked hand

lost teardrops
lightning shatters sky
```
A rune poem, based on an Elder Futhark rune selected at random.
Today’s rune is uruz. The rune is named after the now-extinct aurochs, a wild ox and has become associated with standing up to challenges, having both confidence and courage, stubborn tenacity, and boundless strength and health. Uruz is alternately associated with the more raw elements which include rain, primordial potential, and the slag/dross cast away during the making of iron.
Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.
07 Mar 26
Half-penny thoughts — follow-up to 05mar26
For those who are interested, I discovered the problem with my scheduled tasks (but not the weird refusal of Google’s search engines to crawl the site for indexing).
I’m probably going to make a hash of the explanation. That said…
(more…)
06 Mar 26
Sunny Day Parasol Co. — Case File #6: Between a Gallow and a Hard Place
an episodic Vivian Locke noir
Image generated by Gemini, with direction by Michael Raven
This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.
I pushed the door open.
The office was exactly as I’d left it, only wrong. The air was thick, like cheap cigarette smoke, and the silence was heavy enough to cast a shadow. The ceiling fan was frozen in mid-spin, a broken promise of a breeze. A water droplet hung suspended in the air, halfway between the scarred ceiling tile and my rust-stained bucket. The dust motes in the shaft of street light weren’t dancing; they were stuck in place like insects in amber — a still-life of a dead moment.
And sitting in my client chair, looking like a statue carved out of gray meat and bad intentions, was a man in a rubberized trench coat. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t blink. He was just a shape in the gloom, a problem I hadn’t ordered.
(more…)
06 Mar 26

long hours

no one hears pain
grind teeth clutch ache 
bone taste of dry leaf
of die want long hours 

knives drive nine
slice tendon night
sleepless sleepless razor
of die want long hours

06 Mar 26

casting runes — 05mar25
dagaz
```
i seek you in umbra
slipping 'twixt & 'tween
between bone & meat
there, in the hollows
where twin shadows meet
```
A rune poem, based on an Elder Futhark rune selected at random.
Today’s rune is dagaz, which has been translated as “daybreak”, that transitional moment between night and day. By extension, it might also be interpreted as “twilight” and is representative of liminality, transformation, the space between worlds, and suggests walking in both the material world and otherworld.
Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.
05 Mar 26
Half-penny thoughts — 05mar26
There are days where I ask myself if I’m going about everything all wrong when it comes to having a web presence for my writing.
The wonder spans from formatting to content to design to SEO to paid vs free vs subscriptions vs donations… So it goes.
Even something as simple as a domain name has implications. I just discovered that a published author uses “Ravensweald” as his fantasy series collection’s series name, the series published almost at the same time that I double, triple, quadruple checked to make sure there were no apparent conflicts for the site name before acquiring the domain. So it goes.
And, I should have known that updating a plugin should have been deferred — it broke it’s own cron jobs, so I see errors and I cannot revert because they removed the old version from the plugin repository. The errors are minor and non-critical, but irritating all the same. And I guess Google decided this winter to stop indexing the site for search and yet the console tells me everything’s just ducky. No errors. Just… not indexing. So it goes.
I’m tempted to wipe everything and reload the content with a fresh install of WordPress in case there are lingering ghosts in the machine. So it goes.
Are y’all contemplating any overhauls on your sites? What are some critical key things that you wish you had done differently? Or could do? Do you think you are underpaid for your content? Or do you think there must be a non-traditional approach to deriving/providing benefit to content.
So it goes.
05 Mar 26
casting runes — 04mar26
hagalaz
```
as stiff as storm &
as sharp as bone
a burr joins them all

i stand at hollow
arms outstretched
a wight without a stone
```
A rune poem, based on an Elder Futhark rune selected at random.
Today’s rune is hagalaz, which has a core meaning of “hail”, which was associated with potential, transformation, renewal and change; hail is imagined a seed from which change will arise. Hagalaz is also seen as representative of things beyond our control: a clash between fire and ice.
Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.
04 Mar 26
Sunny Day Parasol Co. — Case File #5: A Permanent Tuesday
an episodic Vivian Locke noir
Image generated by Gemini, with direction by Michael Raven
This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.
Kogan threw a heavy velvet cloth over the retort, a gesture that strangled the light and the visual connection. “Dredge wasn’t moving ordinary stolen goods for the Johnson who hired him, Locke. Not by a long shot.”
He walked to the door and worked the locks with the practiced care of a man who didn’t want unexpected company. The deadbolt slid home with a weary sigh. The second lock clicked like a rat trap. Then the heavy iron bar dropped into place with a definitive, bone-jarring clank. He flipped the sign in the grime-stained, chickenwire-reinforced shop window to “Closed,” turning the world outside into a dull rumor, and dimmed the lights, making the room a cave of shadows and secrets.
(more…)
04 Mar 26

scrawl

*Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash*

here is me writing heartletters
with bare finger; my page, your skin
words flowing over rolling hills
and scrawling your valleys, too
all through gloaming to night
to taste shadows growing long
with each and every bite
every syllable song ringing
rhyme with euphoric firefly

03 Mar 26

casting runes — 02mar26
algiz
```
come ride the snake
into the cave &
under the wood —
what historic futures
might we find?
```
A rune poem, based on an Elder Futhark rune selected at random.
Today’s rune is algiz, which may mean either “elk” (there is some uncertainty if this is the case) or yew (Old Norse). It is associated with the Otherworld, protection/sanctuary, and with guardian spirits/fylgja. The unconscious mind is also sometimes associated with algiz.
Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.
02 Mar 26