Author name: Treesong

I am pleased to announce that the first draft of my upcoming novel, Change, is officially complete! I still have some revisions to make prior to publication, but I'm very happy to have a strong first draft in my hands. I'm confident that the revision process will go quickly and smoothly. I've asked several people for feedback on this draft and look forward to hearing their critiques and reviews. In fact, I've already started receiving my first responses!

The Southern Illinoisan, the largest newspaper serving the Southern Illinois region, recently published an editorial titled "Believe in your future; vote for coal candidates". I believe in my future, and I believe in the future of Southern Illinois. However, I get the impression that the editorial staff of the Southern Illinoisan and I have somewhat different visions of that future.

Different visions are fine. However, the vision presented in this editorial is such a far departure from reality that I felt inspired to reply. Currently, I don't have any sort of public vision statement of my own on the subject. I plan on developing one soon. [Hint: I support Paula Bradshaw for Congress.] In the meantime, I'd like to share my response to the Southern's vision for the future of Southern Illinois (and the nation and the planet).

For the past few months, I've been working on an update to the design and content of my website. Unlike past updates, I decided to make incremental changes to arrive at a completely new look and feel. Now that the major aspects of this update are complete, I'd like to show you some of the features and invite you to help me test the functionality, update the content, and spread the word.

Early this morning, a heavily armed gunman wearing bulletproof body armor and a gas mask went on a shooting spree at the Dark Knight Rises premiere in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 and injuring a total of about 50 people. I don't write in this blog as often as I'd like to, so I'm ordinarily not too quick to talk about the latest big news story, even if it's a big tragic event that happened somewhere in the U.S. But whether it's rational or not, this one really struck a chord with me. Why? Because I attended the midnight premiere of Dark Knight Rises here in Carbondale, Illinois.