There is nothing more wonderful than written language.

2024 update!
I've come a long way as a writer since I first posted things here two decades ago. I didn't manage to get published in 2011, I amassed a neat little stack of rejection letters from publications like Asimov's, and then moved on to other endevours. And then, just this year, I did it! I self published two horror shorts on Smashwords! They're very different in both style and subject than what I was posting here in 2005-2011, but I'm a older and, if possible, stranger man than I was then.

Anyway, I'm here because I'm backing up all my FP works to a neocities site. Check out runekaster[dot]neocities[dot]org/old_stuff for all the same stuff with better paragraph spacing and indents.

A Note: I'm working hard on getting actually, honestly published. This means I won't be posting pieces here when I finish them, instead I'll be sending them out to innumerable magazines and publishers first. Anything that goes up here will either be too short or oddball to be sent to a magazine, or else it'll have garnered so many rejections that I get annoyed and want it to see the light of day. (November 2011)

A short biography: I'm still in my twenties and I go by the nom de plume of [redacted by future Runekaster]. I like things historical and things poetic. My writing style (and my entire being, for that matter) is somewhat out of date. I'm one of those rare few who still writes with pen and paper.

I sometimes emulate greater authors, but I've been influenced by so many that it's difficult to say where one author's voice ends and another's starts. I'm a bit of a linguist, a bit of a nerd, a bit of a historian, a bit of a hermit, a bit proud and I've a bit of a tendency to use the phrase "a bit" where "very much incredibly so" would be a bit more accurate.

A few of my favourite authors and poets are (in no particular order): Robert Louis Stevenson, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Keats, H. P. Lovecraft, Jules Verne, Bram Stoker, Lord Dunsany, Yuki Kaori, Cynewulf, John Masefield, John Donne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Beckett, Vernon Lee, Raymond Chandler, Æschylus, Neil Gaiman, Thomas Mallory, Aleksander Pushkin, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Stoppard, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, M. R. James and many more which I'll list later as time and space permit.

I've also a taste for our old epics, including Beowulf, the Eddas, Das Hildebrandslied, Das Nibelungenlied, The Kalevala and every bit of Old Anglisc alliterative verse I can get hold of.

The first pieces I put on this website I wrote in 2005; that was some time ago -- expect the stuff here to be of vastly varying quality.

And with that I bid you enjoy my pieces (or do not enjoy them, if you are so inclined), I'd be obliged for comments either way. And I'm not at all adverse to readers pointing out my flaws, as long as they're not asinine about it. Don't inform me that my old limerick "sucks", instead have the decency to tell me why it "sucks".

If my punctuation, spelling or usage seems a bit strange but not quite incorrect, assume I have absorbed an archaism without realising just how archaic it is.