Fodder from DC

Every time I travel to the DC area I see new sights, and I gain more fodder for future stories. Here are some of the places that especially struck me on my latest trip there:

The Carlyle House in Alexandria is a good place for ghost hunters to see orbs.

The clock tower of city hall in Alexandria where justice was served in days long past by displaying the decapitated heads of criminals.

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial didn't open until 1997! Set along the Tidal Basin, it's a peaceful series of fountains and statues and some of his timeless quotes.

A blind selection of remains inside identical coffins led to a single unknown soldier for each of three wars, WWI, WWII, and Korean (there are no unknowns from Vietnam) (and... the unknown from the Revolutionary War is buried in a churchyard in Alexandria).

Robert E. Lee's home was seized by Union soldiers and eventually became the site for Arlington National Cemetery.

Writer on the Road

Washington DC is a national treasure, and not just because some of my family lives there (although that's a good reason!) I just returned from two weeks there, babysitting my 6-month-old granddaughter. I write every day, even on the road, even if it's only a paragraph, which is about all that I managed to do while baby was cutting her first tooth. Boy, did my biceps get a great workout!

Then, exciting writer news: a request for a rewrite for one of my short story submissions. It only took three days of baby catnaps to finish the changes. Thanks to the internet, the story is now approved, never mind that I was on the road.

New Story Coming Soon!

Any day now, my novella "Crawlers" will appear in the anthology Infradead, to be published by Sam's Dot. You can follow its status here:

http://www.samsdotpublishing.com/

The theme of this anthology is the end of civilization, and my story explores how this might happen in connection to explorations on Mars. The Mars connection coincides with a massive burn-off in our Rocky Mountains. Here's what this might look like, from a recent hike I took in an area of pine beetle kill: