Drought In October, Deluge In November?

Jim Goes to Prison … With Women
The Washington Corrections Center for Women doesn’t look much like a prison. The sprawling campus near Gig Harbor, built in the early 1970s, is occupied by comparatively modern single-story buildings. And situated alongside a major secondary road just off State Highway 16, it looks like nothing so much as a community college campus surrounded by razor wire.

A Little Housekeeping
Some odds and ends: — We do have a winner from last week’s drawing for a free, inscribed copy of my friend Craig Lancaster’s debut novel, 600 Hours Of Edward. From 11 scraps of paper in a baseball cap, I drew the name of Kristin Hanes, my favorite Seattle radio news reporter. Congratulations, Kristin … and thank you to everyone else who participated in last week’s

Jim Goes To Prison
My first thought as rains let up and the ferry drew me close to McNeil Island for the first time: Holy crap! The island is being attacked by giant mutated Slinky worms!

Guest Blogger: Craig Lancaster
Edward Stanton is a man hurtling headlong toward middle age. His mental illness has led him to be sequestered in his small house in a small city, where he keeps his distance from the outside world and the parents from whom he is largely estranged. For the most part, Edward sticks to things he can count on…and things he can count. But over the course of 25 days (or 600 hours, as Edward prefers to look at it) several events puncture the walls Edward has bu

It’s Been Nearly 31 Years Since Their Daughter Was Murdered ….
… and they’re still hurting, and they’re still angry. This morning, I spent a little over an hour on the phone with the parents of a girl who was killed in January 1979, when she was just 16 years old. Almost any journalist will tell you that talking to the victims of sudden, violent deaths — and convincing them to share their memories and reactions with the world — is the roughest gig in the business. I’ve done it before in my newspaper-reporter days, often just hours after somebody’s kid died in a car crash or somebody’s spouse went down in a plane — and it’s every bit as brutal as you might think. Even wo