Hey, uh, did I mention that my haunted house novella Seven Days in Benevolence is finally available? Well, it is. Click here to spend money on me.
Here’s a blurb lifted from a recent review that ran in Hellhotes: “Let me warn you…this is not your grandmother’s haunted house novel. The story creeps up on you and grabs you by the throat. This book actually gave me a sleepless night or two. There’s one scene with a dark figure reaching inside the crib to molest the youngest daughter that actually gave me chills when I read it.“
Order from Amazon today and there’s a good chance you’ll actually see the book before I do. The missing package sent to me at Horrorfind still hasn’t shown up.
I’m going to run a little contest. You folks reading my LiveJournal and MySpace blog get to hear about it first. I’m going to give a signed copy of Darkscapes to the person who posts the most helpful review of Seven Days in Benevolence at Amazon.com. You know how that works — read Seven Days in Benevolence and post a review at Amazon. Send me an e-mail at author(AT)stevenewedel(DOT)com with the text of your review and the date you posted it. People will read your review and (hopefully) click Amazon’s link to say if the review was helpful or not helpful. Whoever gets the highest number of helpful votes wins the copy of my 2006 short story collection from Fine Tooth Press. Remember, though, you have to e-mail me; I probably won’t know who you are or how to contact you otherwise.
In other news, I had to show one of my classes today that I meant it when I said I wanted to become the teacher lazy kids fear. That’s never fun.
Also not fun is reading student essays. Some of the things these kids have seen in their young lives is just … Well, it’s pretty damn sad sometimes.
I’ve tried very hard to use the Socratic method this first week and a half. I think it’s great, but it only works when you have students who actually want to learn. It doesn’t work so well when most of them are talking amongst themselves. You spend all your time trying to get their attention back and not enough talking about the subject matter.
I have one class that’s presenting a problem I haven’t faced yet — Nearly everyone in the class is at a post high school reading level, and they’re bored with the curriculum so far. It kinda boggles my mind when students actually argue with each other over who’s going to read aloud first and when there are several kids raising their hands to answer every question. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but I’m going to have to find some way to make the work more interesting to them, or scrap the idea of keeping them at the same pace as my other section of the same subject.
Steven E. Wedel 
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