I may as well admit it: I am alive.
More than that, I am, by many measures, well. My family and I are busily engaged in settling into a house that will — barring any change of plans — be our home for the next two years. I am cycling a not-inconsiderable distance to school and back each weekday, and now that the bathroom scale has been unpacked I see that for the first time in what seems a very long time, I may soon get myself under two bills: a nice psychological boost whenever that happens.
I am a full-time student again this year, and now I can insert the word “graduate” into that statement. No equivocation this time around: I am in grad school, fo’ realsies. This is actually quite exciting, as life journey stages go, and I love being in class with students who are all, in one way or another, headed in roughly the same direction I am, or at least toward the same degree. It is, admittedly, a bit confusing entering into an entirely new discipline where even the citation rules are different, but I am feeling up to the challenge. Even the grammatical details of Latin are coming back quickly and easily so far, although it is early days yet, and linguistics is an area I am uncharacteristically reluctant to get cocksure regarding.
And writing? Surprisingly little in the way of organized prose will be demanded of me in my courses, at least so far (there is a seminar paper of forty-odd pages to be written by February 2011, but I shall start on that anon, probably not until early in the new year), so I am eager to get back to my own prosifying in what I will happily pretend is my spare time. First on my docket: the concluding seventeen stories in my summer 90in90 short fiction marathon. The planned break has been a bit longer than I had hoped, but it takes some doing to move a family of four into a home filled with other people’s things, so I think I can be forgiven. At least, I am going to forgive myself, and not lose much sleep over whether you forgive me or not.
So look for the stories to start rolling off the assembly line again for a couple weeks, and then… And then? I will have words for you betimes, I assure you.