— characters, motivations, voices, plot connections.  Their lives touch or intersect when an overarching mystery threatens them all.  I can hardly write fast enough to get it all down.

And yet … I can’t manage a single word of poetry.  Assonance, aliteration, metaphor … I reach and it’s just not there, which has never really happened before.

The human brain is a strange thing.

Anyway, alums … with the above, I am starting what I hope will be a set of five closely connected short stories — Mary Washington College will be in the backstories of many characters (i.e., college students on holiday break).