By Joe Moore

Each week, all the Kill Zone authors fly to a Denny’s in Wichita (chosen because of its central location) for a breakfast meeting to plan our upcoming blog posts. Some of us lean toward topics about life and how we equate it to our stories while others gravitate toward the mechanics of writing. There’s usually a smattering of rants, and of course we can count on Miller to have some great tales about his free-range chickens. It gives us an opportunity to chat while enjoying a tasty Grand Slam breakfast that’s always fresh and fruity.

At last week’s meeting, we realized that not only were we running out of 2009, we were also running out of new ideas to blog about. We agreed that we needed a break to recharge the portion of our brains devoted to posting at TKZ. We made the executive decision to repeat what we did last year and take two weeks off for Winter Break. So from Monday, December 21 until Sunday, January 3, the Kill Zone blog will be closed for the Holidays. That doesn’t mean we won’t be hard at work thinking up new and exciting topics for 2010. As a matter of fact, next year we will be announcing two really brilliant ideas in which all of you can participate. One involves the combined creative efforts of your seven Kill Zone bloggers and the other will involve all you writers out there. The end result of both should be very cool. So stay tuned to TKZ for two unique and (as far as I know) original ideas.

At this point, I bet you’re wondering why this post is called Conjugating Verbs? Well, just as the waitress was bringing my second helping of Silver Dollar pancakes, which I like with the strawberry flavored syrup, I declared to my fellow bloggers that I was so out of ideas, my next post would be about conjugating verbs. So here goes. This is my most cherished and only memory from four years of high school Latin: Amo, Amas, Amat.