After the holidays and enjoying a house guest (hi, David!) and spending a week out of town, I feel like I'm just starting to settle back into the post-holiday routine. I'm working on a small, low-paying, but easy freelance gig (the sort of thing I need to be doing much more of, only with bigger pay, since it doesn't look like I'm going to be getting any adjunct teaching this semester), and after finishing the latest "final" draft of the Norse book, I'm getting back to the actual writing of the YA weird beach book. Since I found last week's visit to the Museum of the Weird in Austin so inspiring, I'm starting the book right in the middle of the shrunken heads and the Fiji Mermaid and the What-Is-It???? in the box.

Made a nice reprint sale: "Far As You Can Go" to the audio anthology, mini-Masterpieces of Science Fiction from Audio Text, due out I'm-not-sure-when.

Speaking of routines, time now to strap on, change into t-shirt and kung fu pants and go smack big wooden sticks.

A sale! It's a collaborative hypertextual flash fiction thingamahoober called "23 Small Disasters" done with Christopher Barzak, Elad Haber, Meghan McCarron, Tim Pratt, Benjamin Rosenbaum (who conceived and organized the whole thing in addition to writing the parts he wrote), and Kiini Ibura Salaam. We sold it to Ideomancer, where it will take over an entire month's issue. Neat!

***

We had dark, rainy weather today. Aaaaaah, so lovely, and I holed up at the coffee joint and managed a couple thousand or so words on the novel and never wanted to leave. I've been awaiting another batch of work from the contract job, but it's been slow in coming, which isn't exactly good, but it has been nice having the extra time to write. Not sure how much longer I can keep this up, though. They've told me to expect work to start picking up Real Soon Now, but I'll believe it when I see it. Maybe someday I'll be able to combine writing and making money in such a way that they're less mutually exclusive concepts!

In today's cup/page ratio pic, you can see the vault behind my table. It's an actual bank vault, because the coffee joint used to be an actual bank. When it was the Gold Bar (favorite hangout of John Gotti's underboss, Salvatore "Sammy The Bull" Gravano, incidentally), they had a lounge in there with sofas and board games and the like. Now it's a quiet room with study carols. I like to be outside the vault where I can look out the windows that interfere with my shot. Maybe I should break out my camera's user manual.

Well, it wasn't till I got to the second-to-last paper I had to grade that I found an egregious case of plagiarism. Ten pages of cut & paste, with the exception of a "thus," which he changed to a "so."

I think I'm more outraged as a writer than I am as a teacher.

But I'm still pretty outraged as a teacher.

It hasn't been an easy semester -- my lack of experience, combined with taking over three classes only three days before the semester began, has been, to say the least, challenging. I was promised support from the department that has never materialized, and I'm frequently harassed by administrative needs. But for the most part, I do like interacting with the students. Yesterday's class was a lot of fun. The assignment seemed pretty simple: They had to write instructions for tying shoelaces, then trade their instructions with partners, try to follow them, and watch the hilarity ensue.

My hope was they'd gain practice with analyzing and documenting a process, writing clear and detailed descriptions, and come to understand the challenge of bridging the gap between writer and audience.

I don't know how much of that they got, but after some of them ended up with their hands tangled in their shoes, there was much laughter, which lasted throughout the class. They had fun with a writing assignment, and I had fun watching them have fun. Days like that are pretty much better than gold.

It's October, which means in the stores the mechanical lawn Santas are glaring impatiently at the Halloween decorations, waiting for them to clear the hell out so that we can all commence making with the hardcore Yule. It also means year-end fiction reviews are starting to come in. Rich Horton picks "The Osteomancer's Son" as one of his favorite short stories published by Asimov's in 2006. And in his rundown of favorite 2005 stories, Science Fiction Book Club senior editor Andrew Wheeler makes nice mention of "Gillian Underground", from Polyphony 5, the collaboration I did with michaeljasper and Tim Pratt. I do like getting some love, and I ain't much shy about it.

***

I played hooky yesterday in the sense that I didn't work on real-work work. No chipping away at the tottering stack of grading, no contract work (which is a bit sucky, because I would have worked on it had they given me any). Instead, I gave myself two trips to the coffee joint and wrote. I don't think I wrote anything very good, and I didn't tote up my word count, and I don't think it's a significant number, but it's more than I've written in a long time. It felt very, very good. I can't ignore my grading today, and I'm still hoping to get some stuff for the contract job (because if they don't start coming through with stuff, I'll feel obligated to, like, look for a different paying gig, on account of me liking the feeling of having money to put in accounts), and I need to at least walk through my Kung Fu forms and techniques (I'm a walking disaster with nunchuks still) ... but days like yesterday are so good for the craftman's soul. I'm lucky to get those.

***

While reading about new phorusrhacid fossil finds (the phorusrhacid being a 10-foot-tall scary motherfucking terror bird that could possibly run up to 60 miles per hour, had a head the size of a horse's, and could swallow medium-sized dogs), I came across this older article suggesting they used Kung Fu kicks to shatter their prey's bones and get at the marrow.

I'm doing a pre-test for brown belt tomorrow (the actual test is in November), and I'll be thinking about phorusrahacid when I do my bird form, believe you me.

This is one of those entries in which I attempt to connect something learned in martial arts to life in general. For the most part, kung fu is much simpler than life in general. But anyway ...

We do this form at my school that translates into English as "Short Stick of the Northern Beggar," which I have been translating as "What the Hell Am I Supposed to Be Doing With This Stick?"

I've been trying to learn it for over a month, but it's just been a jumbled, patternless set of moves in my head, an impossible-to-memorize bunch of random poking and swinging and whapping gestures. There's been nothing deliberate in my execution of the form. At best, there have been some accidental resemblences to the way the form is supposed to go.

But last night it finally clicked (due in no small part to the good instruction I got), and I was able to see the pattern, enough so that I could even write most of the form down from memory after class.

Not that I know the form. Not that I'm even sure all the moves I wrote down are correct. But discernable learning took place, whereas before all I had in regard to the form was discernable frustration.

I treasure those small moments of learning. I recently learned that my composition classes go much better when I just give my students a writing assignment and then discuss and analyze what they wrote at the end of class. I was making myself crazy trying to build hour-long lectures and hunting down good reading assignments. Now my class prep tends to take much less time, and I think the students are getting more out of the class sessions. I'm certainly happy about those things, but I'm also quite pleased to have learned something about myself as a teacher, amateur though I remain.

Things I learn that apply to life in general are perhaps the most rewarding, because they not only improve my life, but also those of the people around me. How long has it taken me to realize that action is so often preferable to inaction? That risking pissing someone off by doing something is so often better than pissing them off by failure to do something (as long as the thing you're doing is a decent thing to do, of course). How long did it take me to learn that I bite my tongue far too often? Why should it take decades to learn that simple thing? But I've learned. Or at least, I'm learning.

Writing is a little different, of course, because every time I sit down to do it, it feels pretty much like I've never written a story before in my life. But realizing that was a pretty valuable lesson, too.

Just a bit of reflection and rambling on a Wednesday morning. Gotta go print out stuff for today's classes. Do carry on, and have a good day.

So, the meeting in San Bernadino I was complaining about in a friends-locked entry turned out to be a good thing for the folks I'm working for, and through a complicated chain of events too tedious and convoluted to relate, I have ended up with the day off today!

Oh, I could ... should ... do all the grading and class prep I didn't do on Tuesday because of the meeting. But not gonna! Gonna loaf and write instead. Loaf and write! Loaf and write! Woo!

When I quit my 9-5 Day Job and took on a three-class teaching load and the contract job, I figured I'd be busy, sure, but I also thought my time would be flexible enough that I could dedicate maybe half a day per week to writing, plus random road trips during which I would see strangely beautiful or amusing places and drive great distances and think deep thoughts.

So far, not so much with the flexibility and the road trips.

Last night I dreamed of a road trip, though. I was in Monterey, which was not really Monterey but rather a dream version of Monterey, characterized by viscous sapphire waves and a really lovely little library, in which I was spending most of my road trip. My road trip was in a library.

I am determined to take one day off per week, and today was it. I'm having a hard time relaxing. I've got a brown belt pre-test Tuesday (in anticipation of a brown belt test in November, and, boy, is that ridiculously too soon in every way something can be too soon, but I must defer to my school's judgment on such matters) and I can't remember nunchaku technique #10, which consists of hitting oneself in ten places (yes, in this technique you hit yourself rather than your opponent, who presumably is rendered inert and vulnerable in wonderment at the spectacle of you hitting yourself) and I can't remember which ten places and in which order. I used to be much better at writing stuff down, but I've let myself get lazy, and now I'm paying the piper. Fucking piper. I should just hit him with my chuks.

Oh, also, I threw my back out. Exacerbated an old injury. About nine years ago, I was lifting a huge computer monitor for a pregnant co-worker and started losing my grip. I could have just let the monitor crash to the floor, but instead I wrestled it down and badly strained some back muscles. I was much younger then, and even stupider. And the injury acts up every now and again, and hopefully it will leave the stage in time for the pre-test.

I think I've already figured out what to do with my students this week, which will hopefully save me classroom prep time. I need to save all the time I can, because I lose my usual prep day (Tuesday) on account of I have to fly out to San Bernadino and back for a one-hour meeting.

Insane, just a little bit.

My new osteomancer story is going exactly the way the first one did, in which I spent a few thousand words getting my hero to the Big Action and then had to pause and wonder what the Big Action Was and What It Meant In Terms of Theme and Character.

In the last osteomancy story my hero Fought the Evil Wizard of Los Angeles, whereas in this one he's about to have a Confrontation With a Shadow Man Made of Magic Tar in a Parking Lot.

If I get desperate I guess I can just throw in a gratuitous nunchaku battle.

I think I may have had slightly too much caffeine.

Steak and eggs for lunch.

Not that bad.

My 101 students impressed me with their analysis of "The Pedestrian" on Monday, and today they'll be reading and analyzing Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry". Which will take us to the end of our Writing About Literature unit, alas. I could happily stand there and lead them in discussion about cool stories all day, but I suppose I should give them opportunities to practice traditional persuasive writing and argumentation and all that English compy stuff that's annoyingly written into the course competencies.

No way I can justify bringing fiction into my 102 class. That one's all about the persuasion and the argumentation and the research and all that MLA citation blah. Valuable to the students, not as much fun for me.

Their education should be about meeee!

Despite the fact that I'm teaching college composition courses, I figured out a way to justify teaching Ray Bradbury's "The Pedestrian" today. I think this makes me a very clever teacher. Not necessarily a good teacher, but perhaps a fiendishly clever one.

One of the two classes I'm teaching is an introduction to writing the research paper. I've found that guiding the class through analyzing model essays is far more effective than me clicking through PowerPoints and lecturing. The problem is, I have very quickly run out of model essays. Do any of you college composition or high school English teachers have links to good sources for model essays?

Right now, specifically, we're covering argumentative essays, but I could use any good example essays (I'm also teaching a more general intro composition course).

My thanks.

Emailed off two agent queries this morning (thanks to Ol' Mike Jasper for the tip!), and will be sending out a query and first 50 by snail later today. Which feels really incredibly good and productive, because that YA novel's just been loafing on my hard drive, not doing anything to advance my career. Get out there, ya lazy bum! Ya gonna spend your whole life watching cartoons and playing Pong?

And I've been thinking Norse stuff. Last night I listened to a BBC radio program in which British academics discussed Norse gods, and from the 45 minutes I gleaned the detail that the wall surrounding Asgard is made from primordial giant Ymir's eyelashes. Somehow I'd missed that in my readings of the Eddas. I think it's neat. Have also had one or two other thoughts about the book. Which is good, of course, but in general, it's not ideas that I necessarily fall short of. It's plot, which is different than ideas, and something that comes much less naturally to me. Learning is hard. But I have faith in my ability to learn. I emailed a subset of my writer friends about my difficulties with the novel, mostly a crisis of spirit and confidence, and they responded with a broad variety of solutions and suggestions -- just as I knew and hoped they would. Mostly what they gave me was faith, and I owe everyone of them a beer, at least. And I ain't talkin' no Gherkinbrau, either.

Alright. I gotta bunch of Flash pieces to develop or storyboard for others to develop. It's for the contract project I'm doing with a group from Cal State San Bernadino, for an online course teaching critical thinking skills. I should get me some of those skills sometime. I bet they're real handy.

It's possible I'm deluding myself, but I actually think I'm really ready for my classes today. I've only got one handout to photocopy so I don't have to head in an hour early, I've got enough material and planned activities to carry over into Wednesday if necessary, and I even got some fiction writing done this morning.

Enh, I'm probably deluding myself.

At Barnes and Noble, I spotted some copies of Year's Best Fantasy 6 (this is the one edited by Hartwell and Cramer), which includes in its table of contents "Single White Farmhouse" by Heather Shaw and "Robots and Falling Hearts" by Tim Pratt and yours truly. I look forward to getting my contributor's copy and dipping into the other stories.

It was a busy weekend -- grading a teetering stack of papers and assignments, prepping for my classes tomorrow -- but the stack no longer teeters, and the prep is done. There was even some time for leisure reading, a nice brunch at Four Peaks, and I even got some writing done. Hell, I even sent off a submission!

Still insanely busy, but not currently insane.

First two weeks of class gone by, occasional tinges of panic and despair when I contemplate my teetering stack of grading, but I'm still walking amongst the living. I'm such a trooper! Go, me!

And tomorrow's my last day at the Day Job, and the new contract gig doesn't start till next Thursday, so that gives me a few days to grade and plan lessons and that sort of thing before my next class meeting. And then, one hopes, these journal entries will consist of content more interesting than these laments of being busier than a termite in a toothpick factory.

Doodles! If I owe you a doodle, can you give me a little bit more time? I've drawn about half of the ones I pledged to, and I'll be getting back to them soon.

Email! Do I owe you email? Nudge me if I do?

Haircut! Need one. Will resist taking on the job myself.

Mantis! I like the mantis form I'm learning. It's kinda baby mantis, but still neat and fun and very difficult for the likes of me. It's the jumping and kicking. I'm not so good with the jumping and kicking at the same time.

I could always dress like a slob at my Day Job, but I feel compelled to tuck my shirt in at the teaching gig, for some reason. And I notice that my gut doesn't hang over my belt the way it used to. So, it does seem as though all those funny and awkward attempts to jump and kick have had some benefit.

I think if I were a handy hobby and crafts guy, I'd devote my life to making hoax Sasquatch fossils. Kind of a dirty trick, but what a hoot that would be!

Today I showed one of my classes the Monty Python argument clinic sketch. I made up some stuff to make it sound like I was discussing the art of argumentation in an essay, but I admitted that I really showed it to them because I believe you shouldn't be able to get through college without having seen it.

It's my class. I'm in charge.