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A cynic might say something cynical regarding the juxtaposition of these two stories about the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, both of which appeared in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune.

“BusinessWeek names Tinley Park best place in U.S. to raise a family,” by Kristen Schorsch:

Turns out there is life south of 95th Street, despite what some North Siders might think. And it’s a slice of “real Midwest Americana,” according to Tinley Park Mayor Ed Zabrocki.

“Tinley Park woman charged with hate crime for tugging on woman’s head scarf,” by Kim Janssen and Joel Hood:

A suburban Chicago woman has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly yanking the head scarf of a Muslim woman in Tinley Park two days after the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas.

Good thing I’m not a cynic.

I began writing The Price of Liberty while George W. Bush was still in office and war profiteering was still front-page news. Since the banking meltdown, however, the nation’s attention has turned from corporate malfeasance to more immediate concerns. And Afghanistan and Iraq still make the news, but the endless endgame of the “War on Terror” has become an abstraction or even background noise to Americans worried about their jobs and pocketbooks.

After the election of Barack Obama, as half the nation celebrated the dawning of a new era, there were times when I thought about abandoning my novel out of fear that it would soon seem out-of-date. But even though a new administration can quickly change the tone, actual change is harder to accomplish. Old contracts must still be honored, old appointees must be replaced, old business drags on and on. A promise to close Guantanamo isn’t as easy to deliver as it seemed. Political resistance aside, a proper location must be found (”Illinois the Next Gitmo?” by Christi Parsons, Chicago Tribune).

A near-empty prison in rural Illinois has emerged as “a leading option” to house suspected terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an Obama administration official said Friday.

Suddenly, my novel about a prison for terrorists in the American heartland doesn’t seem so eighteen-months-ago anymore.

It’s been a long time since I updated this blog. Yes, there have been some technical issues–a WordPress update gone horribly wrong–but the biggest technical problem has been my lack of initiative. Does that qualify as a technical problem? Technically, probably not.

But travel with me now, if you would, back to May 15, 2009, when the world was a little younger, a little less cynical, a little more ready to laugh, and a scrappy prepublication book-review journal called Booklist had just offered an amuse-bouche with its Spotlight on SF/Fantasy–a short story by yours truly, called, “The Read.” A loving parody of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with a book reviewer as its antihero? Yes, it’s all that, but it’s also so much more.

Well, a little more, anyway. Read on!