Well, school’s finally out—if not forever as Alice Cooper famously claimed (next fall I’ll be starting it all again), then at least for the summer. While high school kids and teachers still have a few more weeks left, I’m glad to have turned my final projects in and am looking forward to a couple of months of relative rest. This’ll be the first summer since I started grad school where I won’t be taking any summer classes, so I ought to (ahem) have more chances to update this blog regularly.
The past semester was a doozey, not in terms of my school workload per-say (which was heavy, but pretty standard for grad school) but in the combination of full-time school, more-or-less full-time work at the metal shop, and in the editing and publication of Pantheon. (Which, by the bye, if you haven’t bought it yet, you should. Click the link up near the top of this page. All the cool kids are doing it.) I’ve been running on pretty much all cylinders since early January, so having my commitments drop away one by one has been pretty satisfying. Work at the shop even came to a screeching halt this week (due to a broken welding gun) which has left me with essentially no responsibilities for the past several days. I’ve actually had time to read some things just for fun (a big deal for a student), play some computer games (unheard of when there’s homework to be done), begin exercising again, fiddle with my keytar, tidy up my desk area, and resume work on my children’s book illustration project (10 pictures completed, 6 more to go). In short, I’m breathing a lot easier these days.
Next step: get a teaching job for the fall. I’m sure that I’ll find one (I’m fully qualified now that my license has come in), but I’m not entirely sure where yet. Most schools are just now beginning to post their upcoming openings to the internet, so as they appear I’m applying to them. As I said, I’m not certain where I’ll wind up, but I’m confident that God will place me in the school where He wants me to be. I’m looking forward to having a classroom of my own at last.
Also, over the summer, I intend to work more on personal writing projects (another luxury I can’t allow myself when I have papers and forum posts to write for school). This blog will be an iteration of that, of course, but I also intend to crank out a few new short stories and put some serious hours into my next novel. More on that in the future.
It’s nice to have the chance to dig into those kinds of things again.