Well, it was time to report back to work last week. Not just the as-needed excursions I’d been making off and on all summer, but back to school for real. Students return this coming Thursday. I have a pretty sweet schedule this year, with two sections of AP Language, two sections of AP Literature, and two sections of English IV. One of the English IV classes has 30 kids in it, but in the other classes there are no more than 15 per class. I’m a little nervous about the AP Language class since it’s my first time teaching it, but I figure if I’ve won awards for the kind of writing we’ll be studying, surely I can teach them something about it. Right? Right??

Overall, though, as I get ready for classes to resume, I’m just stunned that the summer is already gone. I had plans to get a whole lot of writing stuff done. Nadia’s Prayer is not finished. The Fetch is not rewritten, and The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date isn’t revised, either. Granted, I hadn’t actually planned to write another novel with Carrie Jones, and we did that in about 20 days. I got quite a bit of writing done on Nadia’s Children. I’d say it’s two-thirds complete. One-third of The Fetch is rewritten, and I’m trying to come up with a new name for the book. Didn’t even touch The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date. That one, however, is a pretty easy fix, but there’s a reason it’s at the bottom of the list.

Currently, I’m making an editing pass over the new one Carrie and I wrote. It also needs a title. The working file is called Summer Howl. Pretty lame, huh? I hope to finish that this weekend so I can get back to the other two. Rewriting The Fetch is mostly tedious, although going first person present tense is making it a much, much better book. My goal this year is to bring home as little school work as possible so I can keep up the bit of writing momentum I picked up this summer.

Here’s hoping …