Goalsetting

So, when I graduated in May, I said, "Self, finish this damn novel in stories by the end of the year. k. thx. bye."

Well, I haven't been doing all that well at keeping up with promises to myself. It all has something to do with timeflow. You see, there are only 24 hours in a day, and well, I can't convince my body that less than 5-6 hours of sleep a night is a good idea (despite my efforts). Plus too, Molly is cuter than buttons, unicorns, rainbows, and the entire cast of Morning Musuimi (Why I'm remembering a fabricated j-pop band that I only vaguely knew about around the year 2000, right now, I don't know). In any event though, Parenting is definitely high on the "need to do list."

In fact, there are a lot of things on the need to do list. Observe:

• Parenting (this one is worth 10x all others)
  
• Teaching
• Prepping for teaching
• finding insurance (or Why the fuck do we not have national healthcare yet, you government assholes?)
• fixing our basement (painting, organizing, remodeling)
• Downstairs toilet is broken
• Grading papers
• Recording Molly's cuteness via cameras/camcorders
• Prepare proposals for the PCEA conference very soon (I think it's a 11/1 deadline)
• Read and prepare materials for the Warrior Poet Group (I'm due to start teaching Nabokov's Pale Fire here soon)
• Oh and writing.

You know what I'm best at in life? Taking on more than I can handle. I'm downright awesome at that. And there are dozens of more things that need my attention that I haven't even bothered to list.

So,
I said to my self, "self, stop whining and do something about doing something." And so, I've decided that the best way to try to finish a draft of Not an Autobiography by the end of the year is to sign up for NaNoWriMo with the goal to bang out the last three stories or so that I feel need to be in the book.

Feel free to laugh at my audacity, stupidity, and plain ole inadvoidable ability to take on way too much at once.

Deconstructing Happily Ever After Now in Print

On Wednesday, I finally received my contributor's copies of Human Voices, an anthology put together by the folks that run the Kentuckiana Metroversity contest. It has all of the winning and runner-up essays, stories, and poems from the 2008 contest. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a website for them, so I'm not sure how/if folks can get copies of it, but I'd be happy to shoot the story to anyone that wants to read it regardless. "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" took 1st place in the Graduate Fiction section.

"Everything Ends" now in print

This week I received my contributor copies of A capella Zoo, Issue 1 where "Everything Ends" was recently published.

It's a very slick production, and looks to be a fantastic journal for us experimental types.