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Just a quick post, since I’m barely getting this one in under the wire. Where did July go anyway? That’s a picture in the hills just outside Brookings, Oregon, on the most southern end of the Oregon coast. We decided to make a quick foray into the Oregon Redwoods Trail, the only forest in Oregon with any significant number of old growth redwood trees. It’s not the California Redwoods, to be sure, but it’s still worth a visit … if you don’t mind the four miles of narrow, windy gravel road into the hills at the end.

With temperatures bumping up against 100F in the Willamette Valley, Heidi, Rosie, and I escaped for a week to a fun Airbnb just north of Cape Sebastian, literally connected to the Pacific Coast Trail. The temperatures there hovered around 60F, with heavy fog that came and went, so it was a pretty stark difference. (When it’s that hot in the valley, it’s a good bet it’s going to be foggy on the coast.) Some days we were perfectly comfortable in shorts and T-shirts; others we dressed in multiple layers. In addition to just hanging out and reading, we also hiked Thunder Rock Cove down to Secret Beach (something I’ve wanted to do for a long time), saw Arch Rock, the Natural Bridge, Pistol River, Chetco Point, and even kayaked out of Brookings into some ocean coves near the bay, where we made friends with playful seals, black oystercatchers, pelagic cormorants, and plenty of other wildlife. A few other pictures are below, at the end of this post.

Right now, I’m working on the third Karen Pantelli book, as well as a few other projects. The second Pantelli book, Lethal Beauty, is now available in audio, once again narrated by the fantastic Jennifer Pickens. Speaking of audio books, I’m doing a few experiments with narrating some (and only some) of my own work. The good old WIBBOW test (an acronym I coined years ago that stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing?) has generally kept me from attempting this, since I used to manage a university digital media center and have no illusions about how much time it takes, but I finally decided I wanted to at least try it. If I enjoy it, and feel it also might help me become a better writer, then the trade off in time and effort might be worth it as long as I feel like I’m giving my readers (or in this case, listeners) a quality product. We’ll see how it goes. 

Stay cool out there!

Belle, our Boston Terrier, passed away on Monday.  She was fourteen. She was a faithful companion, especially to my daughter, for many years. With Rosie so much bigger and more energetic than Belle, and with my daughter away at college, Belle spent much of the past year with my in-laws, where she was heavily doted on and spent many wonderful months. As far as “lap dogs” go, she was about  perfect, since she seldom wanted to be anywhere other than on someone’s lap. Like most short-snouted dogs, she could be bit . . . stinky sometimes, but then, her “tootiness,” as my family liked to call it, was part of what made her who she was, just as the clicking of her nails on our hardwood floor was also distinctively her. She will be missed!

As far as writing news, the short book that became a long book that became a shorter book again is done, as much as I ever consider a book done, but I’m letting it sit for a bit. Sometimes I do that, especially when a particular work was more of a challenge. While whether a book was easy or hard to write for me seems to have little bearing on its eventual quality or its reception from readers (you’d think it would!), a little distance from it can sometimes help me see it a bit more clearly.

I’m well into the third Karen Pantelli book, and while I’m enjoying it, I have to say that recent events in Uvalde, Texas made it harder for me to feel as enthusiastic writing in the crime fiction genre. What helps me get over that is that I love this character, and for me, for all of my stories, it’s always about character. About people. Their hopes and dreams. Their failings. I don’t write to glorify violence. I write books that sometimes deal with violence because violence is part of the world. That doesn’t mean 19 children have to die because a lonely, desperate young man self-radicalized by wallowing in hate online and thought he could make himself  feel powerful by killing innocent people. That happened because the United States makes it incredibly easy for people in this country to not only own guns (far easier than almost any other modern nation), but also to own weapons of war (and an AR-15 assault rifle is a weapon of war). Countries that don’t do this, don’t have this problem, at least not even close to this magnitude.

So it’s not complicated. Better background checks and the requirement to take a class on gun safety and pass a test would help, of course, but not allowing average citizens to own weapons of war would make the biggest difference. Don’t think it will work here? It worked in Australia, and, to somewhat paraphrase The Princess Bride, that’s a country founded by criminals. And anyone who quotes the Second Amendment to me, I always say 1) it wasn’t intended the way you think it was and 2) even if it was, which it wasn’t, the Constitution was always designed to be an evolving document; otherwise black people would still be counted as 3/5th of a person, and 3) do you believe individual people should own thermonuclear weapons? To that last one, if they say no (and only a moron wouldn’t say no), then I say, “Then you already agree that while the right to bear arms should not be infringed, you do agree that there should be limits to the kind of weapons people can have. Now we’re just arguing about what those limits are.

That was bordering on a diatribe, so I’ll leave it at that, but it does illustrate how easy the arguments against sane, reasonable gun regulations are so easy to dispel with. I’m not anti-gun. Of course I’m not. But I’ll probably get a few emails now from readers telling me I should keep politics out of my writing. And to them I say this: When you tell a writer not to write anything that might be construed as political, what you’re really telling them is not to write about anything that matters, because things that matter sometimes upset people. If you’d rather only get updates on when my next book is out, avoid my blog and just subscribe to my newsletter, but I have to tell you, I’m the same kind of writer in my books as I am here. That doesn’t mean I have an ax to grind; it just means that my point of view, and my beliefs, do permeate my fiction. That is the kind of writer I want to be. It doesn’t mean I’m always right. It just means I’m at least trying to be true to myself, and if I can’t at least do that as a writer, then I’d rather not write at all.