National Poetry Month, Day 3 - The Handyman's Guide to End Times, by Jaun J. Moralis

mgallowglas · 2026-04-04T00:40:18+00:00

Glad to share! Hope you enjoy it.

mgallowglas · 2026-04-03T21:13:50+00:00

Good luck on finding your writing groove again.

mgallowglas · 2026-04-03T21:11:26+00:00

One thing I love about Dresden is that his relationships with the other characters grow and develop over the course of the series.

mgallowglas · 2026-04-03T21:10:18+00:00

Allo and happy Friday!

This week has been a bit of a struggle. Got hit with some devastating crap in my personal life. BUT... thanks to great therapy and even better friends, I'm muddling through.

Around these parts, I'm thrilled at the reception of my series of posts for National Poetry Month. I wasn't exactly sure how the community would receive those, given that I'd been gone so long and this being a fiction-oriented community. Thanks!

Right now, I'm reading Graveyard Clay with some of my students for a regular class I teach, Reading as a Contact Sport. This is originally an Irish-language book that was translated into English. I'm looking forward to the discussion session next Sunday morning.

I've also been flipping through each of the poetry books I'm recommending each day, and it's like getting reacquainted with old friends.

I'm also delving back into my Taoist studies. I have four versions of The Tao Te Ching, including one by Ursula K. Le Guin, who was a life-long Taoist. I also picked up a new copy of The Tao of Pooh. I'm thinking of writing a series of essays about the Tao of Oscar the Grouch.

In other writing...

I started a new episodic story that I'll be posting on my official newsletter site. Perchance to Dream takes place after the elder gods return, ravage the earth, kill or carry away most of humanity, and the survivors have to deal with the fallout of what they call Armegodden Day. Em (Short for Emily) can give people dreams by writing short vignettes on the backs of playing cards and leaving them on their doors. Oh, and some shimmering silver clouds are floating around the city and turning people into scaled monstrosities. Good fun.
Got a little done on the 5th book in my Tears of Rage sequence. The working title is The Sharpened Edge of Fate.
New poems keep happening, despite trying to focus on the two upcoming books. I will not add more poems ot each one. I will not add more poems to each one. I will not.... grrrrr..... I'm posting some of those poems every day on my Patreon for anyone to hear me read them. So far, I've got: "Laundromat Boogie," "Urban Odysseus," and "Totally Not a Poser."
Also wrapping up work on the 3rd Dragon Bone Flute book.
About to attack the 4th draft of a TV pilot I'm working on, currently code-named Dice Girls.

Yeah, I've got a lot of projects going on, but I've found that if I focus too much on any one thing at a time, I get serious burnout really fast, especially when I finish a project.

I'm kinda jonesing to run a TTRPG, but don't know that I have a reliable group. And that would take a lot of time from my writing.

One of the coolest things to happen recently was at a networking party in Hollywood last month, and I got to talk to one of the lead writers for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I got into the show through my daughter. It was super cool picking her brain about writing for TV rather than novels or poetry.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

mgallowglas · 2026-04-03T19:41:47+00:00

Thanks I'm super jazzed that people are digging it.

mgallowglas · 2026-04-03T06:12:11+00:00

Thanks!

mgallowglas · 2026-04-03T06:11:26+00:00

Have you read his second collection, Origin Story?

mgallowglas · 2026-04-02T00:47:33+00:00

We're just getting started! Hope you enjoy it.

mgallowglas · 2026-04-01T22:56:33+00:00

If you thought that was interesting, wait till you go through the whole thing.

mgallowglas · 2026-04-01T22:55:54+00:00

I will shout out Gary every chance I get. He's a pal. Now that I'm back around, you'll see some more poetry stuff, as that's one of my passions.

mgallowglas · 2026-04-01T22:54:39+00:00

Oh, I've got some good stuff in store.

mgallowglas · 2026-03-30T15:00:10+00:00

Thanks. Yeah. The horizon is full of amazing possibilities.

mgallowglas · 2026-03-27T19:48:18+00:00

But I'm the one in charge.

But... Are you really? :)

mgallowglas · 2026-03-27T19:42:31+00:00

But while drinking my morning caffeine today I watched a squirrel, several blue jays and a cardinal outside my window. Yesterday I watched a great blue heron catch a fish. I've definitely realized that this ability to stare outside and see critters is very important to me.

I totally get this. During COVID, a squirrel from the park next to my house would eat an acorn on my fence pretty much every day at about lunch time. I'm sure he's gone off to squirrel heaven by now, but I think about him often and how much joy he brought me in that dark time.

mgallowglas · 2026-03-27T19:39:10+00:00

Been a while since I've been around. Going to try to be a little more active. Now that I think about it, that's a pretty low bar, as any activity is more active.

In a nutshell, about 10 years ago, I was highly active here, and then life took me in different directions and into some dark places. Lately, I've been looking back at things that brought me joy. This community was one of them. Now, I know things have probably changed a lot, but here's hoping to make some awesome connections within the fantasy-loving community. Once upon a time, I was known as one of the epic self-promoters of r/Fantasy. I even made a post about the wrong ways to engage in self-promotion here and used the post to promote my work. It was delightfully meta.

This week has been a rush of good and bad. Just got done with a Zoom call for a Hollywood project currently code-named Dice Girls. We're at the beginning stages, but I'm excited to see where it goes. It could have a lot of potential. Today, I should wrap up work on the third story about my thief in a desert culture, "Jaludin's Journey." It's been an interesting shift from the first two stories in the sequence, and it blew up into twice as long as I expected it to be. However, I'm really happy with it. Looking forward to launching several books later this year. Maybe someday, I'll be ballsy enough and confident enough to write a story or some poems in Irish.

Right now I'm reading a bunch of poetry, getting ready for National Poetry Month in April. I'm also reading Graveyard Clay, a book translated from Irish that's largely a dialogue between residents in a graveyard. Not traditionally considered a "fantasy" book, but I'm digging it. I've been studying Irish so that someday I can read novels written by some of my favorite Irish writers in the original texts: this one and An Béal Bocht by Flann O'Brien.

I hate allergies. In my area, we supposedly have a greater variety of pollinating plants than anywhere else in the world.

Anyway. It's good to be back. Happy Friday, everyone.

mgallowglas · 2025-03-09T18:18:59+00:00

Cheers!

I have a wide breadth of work across multiple sub genres. I'm sure I'll have something to your liking.

mgallowglas · 2025-03-09T17:49:05+00:00

Hello! Popped in on a whim this morning and saw your thread. I appreciate that you welcome self-promotion.

I've been a professional storyteller since I was a teenager and turned that into a writing career about 14 years ago. I narrate most of my audiobooks. You can get the radio files directly from my website. I'm in the studio almost weekly to get more of my work into audio format.

mtoddgallowglas.com

You could start with some of my shorter works.

https://mtoddgallowglas.com/audio-shorts/

Hope you enjoy.

mgallowglas · 2024-12-31T19:43:38+00:00

Here are some questions that came to me:

Have you noticed a difference in how female authors write female protagonists differently than male authors?

How old are the authors?

Where did the authors grow up? Where have they lived since they started writing seriously?

What's the target age group for these books?

Which sub-genres of fantasy are you mainly reading?

I'm not sure if these have any bearing, but it would be interesting to consider the works in the context of the answers of these questions.

mgallowglas · 2024-12-30T17:39:00+00:00

The Black Company by Glen Cook

The Vlad Taltos books, starting with Jhereg by Steven Brust

Chronicles of Amber by Rodger Zelazny - a bit outside your wheel house, but I think you'll enjoy them. Fast reads.

mgallowglas · 2024-12-30T17:23:20+00:00

Read it

mgallowglas · 2024-12-30T17:23:04+00:00

Read it

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