I have hundreds of photos of trees. In that regard, I’ve turned into my father. When we went camping, he’d bring rolls and rolls of film and fill them up before the end of the trip. Family night meant sitting down with the home projector screen and watching slideshows of all our past camping trips. My father has apparently passed the torch to me and the accessibility of digital storage means that there is nothing stopping me from taking eight photos of the same tree. I may not be good at photography, but I figure if I take enough photos, one of them will turn out well.

But please don’t think all of my tree photos means that I’m great at The Outdoors. The truth is I haven’t gone backpacking since I was a kid. Camping these days is driving up and unloading the car. That’s just how things sorted out with my social circle. While there are things I absolutely miss about hiking a week out into the mountains, the great thing about The Outdoors is that you don’t have to go that far to see some incredible things.

There’s a lot of amazing 30-60 minute hikes that’ll take you to some spectacular places. And even if you don’t have a convenient gorge or a mountaintop….

…there’s still a lot of really beautiful things you can find in nature without going very far.

Anyway, if you do go hiking somewhere this summer, you should absolutely tag me on social media with the cool things you found. Just remember: stay on the trail, don’t disturb the flora or fauna, and take your trash out with you.

I wish I had more progress to report, I really do. But you might have seen me mention very briefly on like one social media platform that I had some health issues recently. I basically spent the latter half of May sitting in doctor’s offices. The good news is it got resolved. The bad news is not a lot got done with my writing.

Book three is starting to wrap up, I think. I wrote the acknowledgements and somehow managed to introduce yet more word repetition in doing so. Book four is with my editors, and I’m looking forward to working on it with them.

And I did make some progress on Hemlock Hollow! I’m really looking forward to digging in now that I’m feeling better.

I’ll be at the Dublin, OH Barnes & Noble on June 27th!

This is the last scheduled event for The Lady In Chains. At this point, I’m going to start thinking about what I’m doing for The Ancient Things because that’s just a handful of months away!

Obligatory “you should pre-order The Ancient Things, there are links below” goes here.