There and back again

I’ve been a little scarce here on the blog over the last two months. I’m running a little—okay, a lot—late on the latest Frontlines book because I have to fit a lot of action between the covers, and it’s turning out to be a little trickier than I had anticipated. But it’s coming along, and I think it will be the best book in the series when it’s done.

I turned 50 at the end of October and went over to Germany for a quick family visit. (My mother’s birthday is on the same day as mine, so it was nice to not only see her again in person for the first time since 2015 but also celebrate a birthday together again for the first time since at least the mid-1990s.) It was a fun week that was physically exhausting but mentally rejuvenating, if that makes any sense. My siblings had a pretty full program for me, but it was great to get out of the house and do some international travel again.

While I was there, my siblings took me to a soccer match. I hadn’t been to a stadium in a long time, and this one was the first match where they were allowed to have a full house: 57,000 people attending. (The team is Schalke 04, our household team, and they scrubbed Dynamo Dresden 3:0, almost certainly solely because of my presence.) This was my first big crowd event since the start of the pandemic, and it felt a little strange at first to be in a big group of singing and shouting people, even if the stadium is open-roofed and everyone attending had to prove their vaccinated status. Maybe this will feel normal again to me at some point, but I suspect it will be a good long while.

I’m home again and back at work, finishing the draft for CENTERS OF GRAVITY. There are also a few other things in development that I can’t mention yet, but I think you’ll like hearing about them when I am free to blab.

2021 started out weird, then it somehow turned into a low-budget gritty remake of 2020, and now it’s ending on a so-so note, with a lot more stress and anxiety than I would have predicted when the year began. But I have my work in front of me, the family is healthy, and I’ve had my booster shot, so I am as ready for 2022 as I can be. Let’s hope we all get a bit of a reprieve from the flood of cortisol that’s soaking everyone’s brains constantly.