I want to be a good teacher. I want to be the teacher students think back on with good memories. But, after today, more than that I want to be the teacher slugs fear. If the student is a lazy, smart-mouthed bum, I want them to groan deep, deep inside if they pick up their class schedule and see they’ve been put in my class. I want them to transfer out.

Yeah, it was another bad day. My second class is the worst I’ve ever had. Even when I was a sub at Jefferson Middle School. Today we read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” one of my favorite short stories and one I used extensively in my award-winning article Horror’s Hearth and Home: The Use of Setting in American Gothic Fiction. It didn’t go well. (I just deleted several paragraphs of ranting that I probably shouldn’t say publicly.)

In other news, Scrybe Press sent the page proofs for Seven Days in Benevolence the other day. Unfortunately, they were created from an old version of the Word file, so they have to be redone. Long story. I should have new ones by Friday. The book will be a trade paperback, priced at $9.99.

Over the past few days I’ve made pretty good progress on The Puppet King. I’ve finished editing Part Two (of three parts). My word count is only at about 67,500. Most fantasy publishers want a minimum of 70k words. Part Three is the shortest part, and I’ve added 5k words as I edited the first two parts, so one would think adding another 2,500 words to the last part wouldn’t be a big deal. We’ll see. This part has the most action in it, and features one of my favorite villain creations, Bolkar the death merchant. He’s a bounty hunter.

A while back The History Channel showed a documentary about the mythic elements of the Star Wars films and it made me want to watch the whole series. I started that yesterday with Episode 1. Damn! That movie blows. I can’t decide which is worse, Jar-Jar Binks or Jake Loyd’s “acting” as Anakin. If not for the Darth Maul fight scene the movie would be unwatchable. I can barely remember what happens in Episode II, but I do remember Christopher Lee is in it.