Back to life

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

“Back to life, back to reality, back to the here and now,” lyrics by Soul II Soul, has been running through my head since I got back to Reno.

My girlfriend Kelly and I went went down to Napa-Sonoma for a few days for spring break and to celebrate my 52nd birthday. My time off was awesome; great people, great wine, mud baths in Calistoga, seafood stew on Bodega Bay. I slept like a baby every night, a partial recharge to get me through the next two months until summer and gardening take the pressure off.

You'll recall those stories I did a few weeks ago, “Who watches the watchers?” and its followup “Who shot Darcie Latham?” and our associated website, fatalencounters.org. Well, that blew up on Tuesday, the day before I went on vacation with a story on Truthout by Bethania Palma Marus, at http://tinyurl.com/npabth9; the Truthout story had like 1,700 “likes” in Facebook. A lot of media outfits called and emailed while I was tipsy in Napa, including, “Reel” Talk Radio with Brother J., The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, even Brooklapping, a TV production company based in London.

Needless to say, I sent carefully worded, sober emails thanking them for their interest, expressing my own, and saying I'll be available this week. We'll see what comes of all that. I hate to think I missed any opportunities. Being an editor for an extremely local weekly newspaper doesn't really prepare anyone for any of this kind of attention. I'm just trying to keep my head on straight and focused until the next story comes out.

The Twitter site, @fatalenounters, was also doing pretty well after the Truthout piece came out, with some pretty interesting twits contacting me and retweeting. Lots of emails of encouragement and offers of help from activists, journalists, law enforcement—even a professional GIS analyst wrote to offer help. It's all pretty overwhelming, really.

Here we go: Back to life, back to surreality.