Where to find Michael H. Payne's stuff throughout that magical land known as the Internet!

Ongoing Projects:

Daily Grind From 2005 till 2020, this was a Monday-through-Friday webcomic following the adventures of the serpent Howlett Creager and his talking-animal colleagues at Daily Grind as they hire themselves out to anyone who needs help. From 2020 till today, it's been a series of illustrated novellas updating every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with the same characters doing the same sort of stuff.

Terebinth Since 1997--with a three-year break between page 122 and page 123, of course--this webcomic has put up at least one page a week telling the story of a bird, a lizard, a tree, and a rock along with other assorted folks and objects they encounter. The "story" part of the comic came to an end in 2012, but it kept going as an exercise in poetry and metatheater till 2024 when a new actual storyline began. We still manage to squeeze in a poem a week, though...

I also host a weekly radio program, The Darkling Eclectica, a mix of jazz, folk, and classical musics with stories and whatnot, heard every Sunday afternoon from 4PM to 6PM Pacific Time over KUCI, 88.9 FM, broadcasting from the beautiful campus of the University of California, Irvine.

Completed Projects:

Free Fiction: Just click and read!

• "Familiars," the first of the stories about Cluny the Sorceress Squirrel, originally published in Sword & Sorceress 19 in 2002;
• a reading of "Where There's Smoke," the eighth of the Cluny stories, on the Far Fetched Fables podcast;
• "Why They Call Me Mr. Goddamn Happy," a science-fiction romance short story, originally published on the Helix SF website in 2007;
• "The Super Secret Origin of She-Man," a superhero romance short story, originally published on the Helix SF website in 2008;
• "One About a Badger, Apparently," a villanelle included in the Write Like You're Alive anthology;
• "Dissociative Fugue," a pantoum that won the 106th Weekly Poetry Contest on the Poetry Nook website;
• "Not a Creature is Stirring," a little anapestic thing that got an "honorable mention" in the 111th Weekly Poetry Contest on the Poetry Nook website;
• "Attack of the Fifty Foot Doughnut," a set of limericks that got an "honorable mention" in the 115th Weekly Poetry Contest on the Poetry Nook website;
• "The Stars, Like Penguins," my first real attempt at free verse that got an "honorable mention" in the 117th Weekly Poetry Contest on the Poetry Nook site;
• "Foolish Consistency," a set of limericks that got an "honorable mention" in the 138th Weekly Poetry Contest on the Poetry Nook site;
• "On the Ontology of Glass Spiders," a science-fictiony sort of a short story in vol.8 no.9 of the webzine Aurora Wolf;
• "Coyote Yodel," a poem in issue #36 of Silver Blade;
• "Metaphysical Therapy," a fantasy short story in vol.10 no.1 of Aurora Wolf webzine;
• "Ode to the Artistic Temperament," an ode in terza rima in issue #42 of Silver Blade that tied for 3rd place in the 2020 Rhysling Awards for best long-form SF poem of the year;
• "'Twas Brillig," a fantasy short story in issue #5 of the Zooscope webzine;
• "Mirror, Mirror," a pantoum in issue #45 of Silver Blade;
• "Next!", a chant royal in issue #47 of Silver Blade;
• "The Sleep of Reason," a fantasy short story in issue #9 of the Zooscope webzine;
• "The Wreck of the Vigilance," a piece in iambic tetrameter in issue #49 of Silver Blade;
• Plague Year Poems: A Poem a Day for the Duration, a collection of 443 poems written one per day from March 22, 2020 through June 7, 2021;
• "Zombie Pirate Ghost," an ode in terza rima in issue #54 of Silver Blade;
• "Chant of the Insect Queen," a chant royal in issue #56 of Silver Blade;
• "A Scent's Assent," a sestina with haiku inserted between the stanzas on the Hey, Your Nose is on Fire website;
• "One Last Pie in the Face," a pantoum in issue #58 of Silver Blade;
• "Collaborators," a fantasy short story on the Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores website;
• A poetry reading I took part in for the Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series;
• The Wreck of the S.S. Wheeler, 33 poems in various meters written in remembrance of Traci Briery, a friend of mine who died suddenly in June of 2025;
• the Seattle Worldcon Day 1 Virtual Poetry Reading includes me reading some of my poems from about 15:45 till 26 minutes in;
• "Perilous Stare & Friendship Fair," a very long narrative poem on the Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores website;
• "What Water Says," a not-as-long-but-still-pretty-long poem on the Eternal Haunted Summer website;
• and hundreds of thousands of words of My Little Pony fanfiction and poetry under the pseudonyms AugieDog and Baal Bunny.

Purchasable Fiction: Just click and buy and read!

• Rat's Reputation, the sequel to my 1998 novel The Blood Jaguar, is available now from Sofawolf Press;
• my Amazon.com Author Page has several fantasy novels and a dozen fantasy and science-fiction short stories that appeared in places like Asimov's SF, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy, and Tomorrow Speculative Fiction;
• "Immolation," the second Cluny story, is in the anthology What Happens Next;
• the rest of the Cluny stories are in the Sword & Sorceress anthologies starting with #23;
• "Deep Down Among the Dagger Dancers," a talking animal short story in the Tales from the Guild: Music to Your Ears anthology;
• "Emergency Maintenance," a talking animal science-fiction story, can be found in the anthology The Furry Future;
• my 1991 novelette "Crow's Curse," 3rd place finisher in that year's Writers of the Future contest, has been reprinted in the collection An Anthropomorphic Century;
• "A Study in Sorrel," a short story combining themes from both Sherlock Holmes and My Little Pony, can be found in NonBinary Review #9;
• "The Precession of the Equinoxes," a talking animal fantasy story, appears in the anthology Gods With Fur;
• "To Drive the Cold Winter Away," another talking animal fantasy story, appears in the anthology Exploring New Places;
• 5 poems in The 2019 Poetry Nook anthology;
• Morning, Noon & Night, a fantasy novel inspired by the cartoon series My Little Pony Friendship is Magic;
• Neighbors, a completely different sort of fantasy novel also inspired by the cartoon series My Little Pony Friendship is Magic;
• Little Star: A Better Late Romance, an adventure-romance set pretty close to the real world;
• Too Long at the Faire, a fantasy novel of Fate, the Fae, and Festive Combat;
• Plague Year Poems, a print collection of the 443 poems I wrote between March 22, 2020 and June 7, 2021;
• E is for Eggplant, a collection of my science-fiction and fantasy stories published between 1991 and 2021;
• "Never Work With Animals," a short story written with Neal Shusterman in his collection Gleanings: Stories from the Arc of the Scythe;
• "Annual Report," a tanka in the Winter 2023 issue of Star*Line magazine;
• "A GMO Too Far, a tanka in the Summer 2023 issue of Star*Line magazine;
• "Queen of the Mushrooms," a fantasy short story in the fourth issue of Journ-E: The Journal of Imaginative Literature;
• 4 poems in Whispers from Beyond, an anthology of "dark poetry";
• "The Family Curse," a sonnet in Space & Time #145, Fall/Winter 2023;
• "'Twas Brillig," a fantasy short story reprinted from the website in Zooscape, Volume 2;
• "The Sleep of Reason," a fantasy short story reprinted from the website in Zooscape, Volume 3;
• "Lion Eyes," a fantasy short story in the fifth issue of Journ-E;
• "Multiversal," a triolet in the fifth issue of Journ-E;
• "The Ring of Destiny," a fantasy short story in issue #146 of Space & Time magazine;
• "The Affairs of Wizards," a fantasy short story in Tales of Mystery: Dead for a Spell;
• "Late for Sunday Dinner," a free-verse poem in Giant Robot Poems, Vol. 1;
• "A Ballade of Intestinal Flora," a ballade in Dreams & Nightmares #148, Sept. 2024;
• "It Takes a Village," a fantasy short story in the sixth issue of Journ-E;
• "Etiquette is Etiquette" and "True Love," and tanka and a limerick in the Spring 2025 issue of Star*Line magazine;
• "Cleanse," a fantasy short story in the seventh issue of Journ-E;
• Two Strikes and I'm Out, a short story told over the course of 63 poems in a variety of forms and meters published by Island of Wak-Wak;
• and "Jinx," a fantasy short story in the eighth issue of Journ-E.

• Follow Daily Grind and Terebinth, my two webcomics, either on their individual websites or on Blogspot;
• Peruse my three pieces of non-fiction writing at Strange Horizons;
• Link up with my largely-redundant Facebook page;

And if I think of anything else, I'll put it here, too.

Mike