Yikes—I haven’t updated this place since August (August)! An apology is in order, and with it the usual bevy of excuses: school, work, baseball playoffs, hockey season, laziness. Seriously though, school. This is my last semester, you guys! So, you know, I’ve felt obligated to try to be more involved on campus. It’s hard, being a commuter student; typically I drive to campus, go to classes or work, go home again. But this semester I’ve been to my first UWG football game; I’ve been to History Department panel discussions; I’ve been to Foreign Language Department film events. It’s been fun (and I kind of wish I’d been making this effort to get involved all along) but all the same I am so ready for it to be December already.
Of course that means thinking about afterward. You know—career stuff. What I’m going to do with my life. And right now an opportunity seems to have presented itself. Nothing is definite just yet, but there’s a slightly-more-than-slim chance I may get to go back to Japan starting in March of next year, taking up a teaching position in Sendai. (!) Of course I’m hoping it will work out, and would appreciate your thoughts and prayers in that direction. It’s not what I’d expected I’d be doing, but (at least right now) it really seems like what I’m meant to do.
You may have noticed that my WIP progress bars haven’t, well, progressed very much lately. For now most of my big writing projects have been shelved; I’ve just been too busy with other things to devote much time to them. I’m still hoping to do NaNoWriMo next month—in fact, my plan is to pound out a decent draft of the long-overdue sequel to His Own Good Sword. But Aquae has, for the moment, been put on hold.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing at all. I’ve actually just finished a new short story, which I’ve submitted to the War Stories military sci-fi anthology—fingers crossed! I’m excited about this anthology and doubly excited about the possibility of being included in it. My story is a sort-of cross between Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and—whether or not it gets accepted for publication—I look forward to sharing it with you in the near future.
That’s all for now. Hopefully future updates won’t be so few and far-between—but I know better, by now, than to make any promises.
