It’s yet another new year. It seems like the numbers were just changing from 2010 to 2011 (pronounced twenty-ten and twenty-eleven in my book), but I’ve long deduced for the reason in seeming increase in speed. As we age, the span of a single year progressively becomes a percentage of our entire lives. Thus, when you’re twenty, then length of 1/20th of your life is much greater than when you’re forty and a year is only 1/40th of your life. It’s why we laugh and roll our eyes when our children complain about, “Aw, dad, but that’s a whole month away!”

But I digress… it’s a new year and people become so fascinated with that flipping of the calendar that we have outrageous parties and citizens of New York freeze their butts off watching a lighted ball take one minute to drop. It’s a means to measure ourselves — where we’ve been, where we’re going — and we use it as a point to mark a new beginning and change things about ourselves. How many people have pledged to start trying to lose weight? I suppose I do that every year at New Year’s.

At the time of this writing I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Brecksville, Ohio, witnessing a white-out. Just one month ago I wouldn’t have fathomed being here at this specific moment in time. I figured I’d be in Oklahoma and starting my workout with Mick, Marcus, Kari, Billy, and Dave at the gym over our lunch break. As I’ve stated in this space before, the writing doesn’t yet pay for the bills so I keep employed as a web programmer. (Hint: If I sell more books then I can write more books and bring to everyone more of what they’ve been asking for from me.) However, my position at Wimgo and, well, Wimgo itself, are now gone. Oh, the site is still there and it still functions. But that is Wimgo essentially running in a sort of quasi-maintenance mode. The development of Wimgo and that core team has been dissolved, so I am out looking for work.

So… Ohio. The land of my birth. The state in which most of my family lives. And a place of which I have not been a resident of for some twenty years. Basically, I graduated high school in 1992 and two weeks later I bolted for the Air Force. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought of the Air Force as a sort of extended vacation, a device by which I’d get an education and learn some skills then bring it all back when I was through (and if I got deployed then, well, that what I agreed to when I signed the papers). Well, those twenty years I talked about, three states, a wife, and four children later I’m still not there. Well, that is, except for the fact that I’m sitting here in a Starbucks and witnessing the winter white-out.

Is a return to Ohio in the works? I don’t know. That depends on if I’m hired by one of the companies that I’m interviewing with. I have a few leads in Oklahoma as well, but these here are the ones that have jumped at my web programming services. Should we move from the Sooner state that does not me I will just forget it. I still have friends out there, Society of the Haunted is centrally located there, many connections and possibilities for signings and speaking engagements are in Oklahoma. I would visit it much the same as I’ve been for Maryland these past couple years. Speaking of, I could get back to Maryland much more easily from Ohio. There are pros and cons. The con of such a move always being that it’s challenging to promote and market a book when I’m not actually in the state. Fortunately, I was able to accomplish some of that while in Oklahoma, unlike Maryland in which I had to make special extended trips out there. We’ll see what happens.

On a completely separate note, Deadly Heirs is currently on a New Year’s special on both Kindle and Nook for just 99 cents. This special won’t last long, so if you’ve been thinking about picking it up on either now is the time. It will go back up to $2.99 here shortly. This is the revised second edition with extended scenes.