If I insult you, then have to explain the insult to you, does it still count as an insult?

Mark Tyree has written an amazing review of Little Graveyard on the Prairie. However, it isn’t public yet, so I can’t point you to it. It’ll be at Horror World next month, though. He compares my little book to the works of Gary Braunbeck and John Little, though.

Work on all fiction has ground to a halt. Again. Too many student essays to read. Why, why, why can’t they understand they have to cite sources, use quotes and do a bibliography in a research essay? Hello. Research? Now I have a box of contest entries to read, too. Oh, I’ll make time for the writing again next week.

I’ve been dragging my English IV class (the same that attempted the essays) through Macbeth for the past week or so. I hate Shakespeare. Oh, I could read some of his plays on my own, but teaching his plays to inner city kids is a nightmare. When those kids are seniors in their last semester of high school … it’s even worse. Getting them to focus on anything school related is almost impossible. Maybe it’d be better if I wasn’t so apathetic about it, but … sheesh, I just don’t like Shakespeare. We’re getting him out of the way early so we can spend several weeks on Old English and Norse mythology.

I have discovered that I love audio books. I’m doing a unit I call Boom and Bust in my AP classes. They’re reading The Great Gatsby and will follow that up with The Grapes of Wrath. Because I’m also reading Grendel, I went and got the audio book of Gatsby. It was hard at first because I kept wanting to look at the page and follow along, but eventually I really got into it. I didn’t even like Gatsby when I read it in high school, but I loved it this time. Now I’m listening to Grapes and it’s so nice to be able to go around doing various things and have the book poured into my mind. And this one … one of my absolute favorite books (a fact that surprises many, considering its socialist message). I suspect I’ll be visiting the library’s audio book section a lot, as there are a lot of classics I’ve been wanting to read and never found the time for.