So I've been on vacation. Sue me.

Yep, I've been a rotten blogger. Normally after a hiatus like this, I'd feel a little guilty for not having posted anything for ages. At the moment, though, my conscience is clear.

About 10 days ago I came home to central New York for some leave. I hadn't been home since Christmas, and the family had been planning a beach-side vacation during August -- since that's about the only time all seven of us could get together. We headed down to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and spent the entirety of last week sprawled on the beach, swimming in the surf, or drinking the very tasty beer brewed by Rehoboth's own Dogfish Head brewery.

I'm now brown as a nut, my hair has grown far out of regulations, and my vacation is rapidly drawing to a close: I fly back to Louisville tomorrow afternoon, and it's times like these I dread. The last fleeting days and hours of a trip home are always melancholy, since I know that soon I'll be returning to Radcliff, Kentucky, which is a place God has forgotten about.

The good news, though, is that the break has given me some good perspective and focus in terms of this final year of Army service. I've visited some old friends -- one of whom lives in Ocean City, Maryland, and has a dock on the channel for a back yard -- and I've seen a little of what life will look like once I'm out.

I also got some ideas together for the zombie book, which I think will be a fun, violent romp through post-September 11 American schizophrenia. After the events of the past few years, how could a zombie apocalypse story not involve some systematic failure of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Write me now if you want to share in my millions.

It's really just an experiment, and I don't actually expect it to pay off in spades, if at all. But it'll be interesting to slog my way through the process of actually writing something that big, even if the content is going to be heavy on dreadful descriptions of undead cannibalism.

So, onward and upward, I suppose. I'll be back at the grindstone Tuesday, and while I'm not looking forward to it, at least it'll be the beginning of the last 365 days I have left in this business. After that, who knows?

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