Insert Scene Here

I know, I'm a terrible blogger, but I have returned! I would give you the usual song and dance about the various reasons/excuses I haven't blogged, but meh. Time to look forward to plans ahead! Later this week, we'll be heading to Westercon in Portland. I haven't had much time to look over the schedule, but the weekend will include at least one Powell's run (because obviously), and a potential meet up with a couple of members of the Kicksnarker Google Plus community. Beginning in July, I'll be starting Camp Nanowrimo round two: Camp Harder. I'm setting my word count goal for 30K, which is double what last Camp's goal ended up being. I'm still goiing to be working my way through Paranormal Investigations, but by gum, I intend to have a full draft of that sucker done, dammit. (And I said dammit, so you have to believe me.) Finally, I'm really hoping to get back into the blogging habit. I have the germs of a few ideas for blog posts floating a

I'm writing this on Sunday evening, and I'm still trying to make sense of things. The shooting in Orlando was the first thing I read when I woke up, and I'm still not sure how to move forward. I should be more angry. I should be in tears, railing against the hate of humanity, the senseless violence. I should be reaching out to everyone, getting comfort from the people around me and providing as much comfort as I can. Instead, all I feel is helpless. I feel like there's nothing I can do, nothing tangible that I can do to make this kind of thing stop. I feel like I don't have a right to be angry on the behalf of people I've never met, who are part of a community that I've never fully been a member of. I find myself paralyzed, and I don't know how to move forward. I can only pray for healing for the people affected by this tragedy. Even that feels like empty words, but I don't know what else I can offer.

Today is one of those days when I'm staring at the computer monitor, knowing that I want to get a blog post up, and yet...nothing. I probably spent my words on my fiction writing earlier (which needs them, obviously), but I have no idea if I have any thoughts anyone would be interested in hearing about. The world's not looking to be in the best shape, overall, but I'm hardly qualified to talk about what's wrong. I freely admit to not being the most informed person on a lot of different subjects - I basically just know enough to make myself sound like I might know what I'm talking about. As I told my coworkers on Friday, I am a veritable font of semi-useful knowledge. In truth, though, my head tends to be full of useless fluff and the occasional game-winning bit of trivia. Ah, well. Hopefully I'll be more entertaining later in the week.

It's been pretty quiet around here lately, but I'm still trucking away. Not as much writing is getting done as I would like, but at least there's something. Words written YTD: 28,300 on two projects (Paranormal Investigations & a short story set in the PII universe) Things accomplished in fiction: Not too much in the main Paranormal Investigations books. In the short story, Dr. Lobo encounters a patient who is behaving quite erratically, and is trying desperately to get some kind of referral for a specialist. This isn't what he signed up for. Writer-ly things accomplished: The original plan for the short story was to submit it to "People of Col(u)r Destroy Fantasy!", but the further I get, the less fantastic it is and the more it veers toward horror. My work tends to do that sometimes - not sure what that says about me... New books read: In the Labryinth of Drakes (Lady Trent Memoirs #4, which remains fantastic); The Elite (The Selection #2, which