Today I’m trying to get into the summer closeout rhythm, which is always a challenge given the overall jankiness of life. It’s been a solid summer on several fronts, and the past week has been especially lovely because a) I finalized arrangements for the cover of the game I’m writing to crowdfund next year, b) I received page proofs for “Tiny,” a short story that will soon appear in NewMyths, and c) I defeated the final boss in Shadow of the Erdtree, which made for a pretty intense gaming experience.

Seriously, though, just look at this beauty:

I’ll surely have a superpro graphic artist fiddle with the text, but the art is just what I’d hoped for when I commissioned André Simões, who is an absolute delight to work with.

That’s part of the challenge of summering, however–progress comes intermittently, and the writing life in general involves planting many seeds that take a long time to sprout. Chancers will be ready to crowdfund in the summer of 2025, but until then the folks at Backerkit will be periodically nudging me to build up my mailing list, which of course is not really in my control. All I can do is post the link to my peeps and hope that they’ll repost it to get it in front of more eyes. I’m working on revising my first novel, The Patch, which has taken/will take a couple of months. I intend to touch up a manuscript that has already been out in the world, a novella called The Shack, and I still need to draft another novella and hammer out the narrative logic of another novel project. This all assumes that I’m well behaved and a) don’t find myself inspired and enchanted by an editorial call for short story submissions, and b) don’t get swept up in some of the nonsense that academic flesh is heir to. Today’s tweak of the nose cone comes courtesy of yet another university asking me to do a bit of free work, evaluating the research portfolio of a professor at their school going up for promotion. For the low, low price of several hours of summer work I can add a sentence to my CV when it comes time to submit my own application for promotion a couple years down the road.

But what brings me here today are the two syllabi I’m working up for special topics courses down the road, one on romance fiction and one on fanfiction. I’m going against the grain of our recent attempts to recruit folks to our classes and the major, as we’ve spent a couple of years devising classes (Literature and Science, The Literary Interpretation of Sport) to appeal to one-and-done students who use our basic classes to check off a requirement and never set foot in an English classroom again. My preference is to try to catch the eye of folks who are already habitual readers and see if one glimpse of what our major has to offer will invite another. If all goes well, our special topics classes now (slotted in at the 300 level for the first go-round) will become 100- and 200-level intro courses a little ways down the road.

The catch, alas, is that the courses I’m pitching can be offered in 2026-27 at the earliest, since we’ve already got some folks hopping on the special topics train next year and the year after. Life these days is replete with such wanton acts of squirreling: planting acorns here and there, forgetting that I did, and seeing them sprout a long ways down the road.