OK, kind of a gratuitous, self-centered sort of post, but after posting about my friend Tiff’s recent short story, and with a new year coming up for me (ie, impending birthday), AND considering that this would be my ONE HUNDREDTH POST, I felt like going over my different projects the last 9 months or so. Maybe more for myself than anyone else, but you are welcome to listen in.

The last of my 12 The Grim Bunny pages–though hopefully I’ll be continuing this with a second series of 12 one of these days.
With this year off from academia, I was hoping I’d be working on my writing a lot more than I have, but between a family emergency and starting a super cool but super intense translation project (I’m a third of the way through the initial translation now), I haven’t gotten as much done as I’d like, and what I have done has in large part gone towards revising and adding to a novel draft that will probably never be published (because I started it as a naive, silly, childish undergraduate), and towards my art, the latter of which has turned into a decent internet presence/following, including a not-quite-webcomic of 12 installments, and about $60-80 or so of profits from my DeviantArt and Redbubble stores… hm, might need to pick up the pace if I want those to make a bit more of an impact on my financial situation…
I have had a bit of progress getting myself back in gear fiction-wise– I received an honorable mention a few months back for a short story that I submitted to the Writers of the Future contest, and I’ve currently got that on the submissions circuit. I’ve been slowly pulling together ideas for another short story that I’ve got high hopes for (have gone through a number of plot mutations at this point, but feel like I am progressing rather than spinning wheels–have also done some brainstorms for further stories, but am not really pursuing those ideas yet). Have started revising more of my poetry and fragments (have written mostly fragments the last couple years), and while I haven’t had much luck with the places I submitted them (OK, I was overly ambitious with a couple target journals), I got some great comments on two of them from the poetry editor at Ideomancer, where my poem “The Cabin and the Stars” was published in 2011. Her notes reinforced some of my own thoughts, and to be honest, I’m feeling pretty interested in going back over these and some other poem-sketches and revising them fairly thoroughly–something I have always hated doing, as poems seemed too tightly wound to meddle with, but right now it just feels like it would be nice to have some raw material to work with…
At the intersection of my academic specialty and my creative work, I took an hour or so this week to start a preliminary translation of a short Old Icelandic story that I have been wanting to turn into a picture book for a couple years (some preliminary sketches are here). We’ll see what happens–I think it will have to be a one-step-at-a-time process, as there are a few different stages to deal with in the drafting and the illustration, and I need to stay on top of ways to make money NOW rather than later.
Meanwhile, please feel free to share any of my blog posts you like, my poems, my art, my Grim Bunny almost-a-comic thing, etc. While I haven’t been as productive as I’d like (life happens… and so does procrastination, I guess), I’ve been really happy to share my work-thus-far with the world, and look forward to putting some more things out there.