Dave lowered his eyes, unaccustomed to being the center of the camp's attention. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket, letting his shoulders slump downward as he looked at the trampled, dirty snow that had just the day before been a pristine sheet of clean white filling the spaces between their tents.

I'm not much of a hiker. I admit that with a fair amount of shame given that I live in Colorado. It's sort of a "thing" here, so even though I'd rather be at a coffeeshop or record store, I do manage to get to the mountains occasionally.

Most of the tents in Camp Corona were variations on the same theme: hexagon or square-shaped floors with criss-crossing tent poles that bowed from one corner to its opposite side to form the structure's shape. Owen Mitchell's tent, on the other hand, was a bit like Owen himself: a little bit different than everyone else, a little odd.

Angela woke up first. She always did, her eyes popping open a full hour before the first rays of the sun would gather and tip-toe out over the crisp eastern sky.

She freed her hand from inside the heavy folds of her thick sleeping bag and reached up to rub a mitten-covered fist over her eye, feeling a chunk of soot-heavy sleep there as she worked her padded knuckle in circles. She switched to her other eye, grinding the knitted wool against it in a way that was almost pleasant, sighing into the darkness that still filled her tent as she worked to dislodge a similar clump that was trapped in the corner, too sticky to come loose, but loosening, starting to slip.

If you haven't already done so, please take a moment to check the Content Warning for the following. If you came across this in the middle and you're curious about what this is, you can visit this link to learn more.

If you haven't already done so, please take a moment to check the Content Warning for the following. If you came across this in the middle and you're curious about what this is, you can visit this link to learn more.

So, I've decided to do a thing.

I'm way overdue for an update here. It is both astonishing and embarrassing that my last post here was over three years ago. The obvious question is, what's going on? Or, maybe more accurately, what the heck happened?

I've still been writing, but the projects I have been working on haven't felt appropriate to share for a number of reasons.