The blush wears off the excitement of publishing a book fairly quickly, it turns out; which is probably a good thing. I now find myself pressing on, writing new stories, very few of which feel like the ones that came before. As a consequence I feel both liberated and doomed. This new batch seems more playful to me, less weighty. Whereas North American Lake Monsters drew a lot of genetic material from realism and horror, the next one will draw more from my rekindled love affair with weird pulp fiction. We’ll see how that goes.

Mia is a teenager now, and subject to all the high weather that comes with it. While I will be posting here again, I’ll have to be careful in how I choose to write about her. As she gets older, her life becomes more and more her own, and my right to discuss her inner life grows more limited each day. Which is only right and proper.

Meanwhile, the impulse to retreat persists. I’ve let the blog grow dormant while using Facebook more aggressively since the book’s release, which I think was an error in judgement. Facebook is an echo chamber, in which you link the same news over and over to an increasingly wearied audience. The blog will garner fewer eyes, but at least there’s space to be a bit more nuanced.

And maybe there will be room for some humanity to bleed through.