Taking a forty day road trip break from my novel turned out to be….interesting. The good news is distance helps perspective. The bad news is that you vacate your character’s heads. So I’m back at it, and doing things to the story I probably wouldn’t have done before, using that perspective to my advantage. The working title is Without, and it’s chock full of poachers, private investigators, critters, mythology, and adventure. I hope to have the first draft complete by December 15th. Whew.

Oh, and I finally started a Facebook page. Why? Peer pressure. I couldn’t begin to count the scrunched up faces on my western trip when asked if I had a Facebook page. So at last I have one, as of three days ago. Feel free to stop by. I’m especially pleased that Grand Teton National Park featured one of my photos on their page. A good start to my Facebook experience. If you’re reading this, you know I love public land, especially national parks and forests. I’d place Grand Teton in a top five national park list, easily. Grand Teton was my introduction to the Northern Rockies many years ago, and the majestic landscape has inspired me ever since.

There’s a hell of a lot going on right now. I do feel tremendous pressure, but I’d rather have that than no pressure at all. The December issue of Penumbra Magazine will be out in a few days, and with it my story “Seven Fish for Sarah”, which I’m quite proud of. Beyond that, my eerie tale of a retired miner facing the Appalachian winter is due in The Old, Weird South Anthology(Storm Fronts).

As always my focus remains on novels. I’ll continue work on Without, while touching up two other novels.

And we can all agree that naps in the sun are underrated: