Unplugged

A week without WiFi. No laptop. No cellphone service. Spending every day swimming, kayaking, reading, and writing. Christmas comes only once a year, and so does my annual trip to Maine to visit my grandmother and get away from it all. Staying at our family's "camp" (a two bedroom cottage) on Sebec Lake is literally a gift from God. I'm so at peace there...

But I wasn't entirely cut off from civilization. I had to drive into town a couple times to restock our vittles, and I stopped by the local library to check my email. Good thing I did, because I received word from Fear and Trembling editor Lyn Perry that my story "Power Chords" had been accepted and will be published next month. Yahoo!

Here's how it opens:

Emaciated by time, the hollow-eyed wraith at the cash register drew on his smoldering cigarette and released a ragged cough.

"You play?" he croaked.

I glanced up from the book of guitar chords, a dog-eared paperback with coffee-stained pages, but at forty-nine cents a real pawn shop bargain. "Yeah."

"Bored with the standard crap? Those open chords and whatnot?" He spewed smoke like a dragon in its final throes. "Looking for more advanced stuff, huh."

"Something like that." I hadn't come in here looking for conversation.

In other news, I had some haiku published this week: one at Seven by Twenty, another at Trapeze, and one in a print edition of Scifaikuest. (If you told me twenty years ago I'd be writing poetry—even as brief as haiku—I'd say you were crazier than pigs in a blanket.)