Here we are on the butt end of 2010. What a strange year it’s been! After 25 years of writing I finally got a big ol’ check for a book, and yet didn’t have a book published for the first time in several years.

Also for the first time, I’ve questioned my decision to become a teacher. The year began with constant threats of termination from the principal. Not directed just at me, but at the entire staff. That finally stopped about the time the burnout settled in. Usually the staff doesn’t feel beaten down and worn out until the fourth quarter. This year, with no raise, a stolen planning period, an extra teaching hour, double the morning duty, and no paid time for helping students after school, most of us were burned out by the end of the first block. It hasn’t gotten any better, and it looks like another morning duty will be added after the Christmas break because our ghetto kids won’t stop tagging the bathrooms. Yes, we might find ourselves stationed in the bathrooms for 20 minutes enjoying the sights, sounds, and aromos of high school students relieving themselves. Things like this, along with the constant flood of papers and essays to grade, assignments to prepare, all on my own time, makes me wish I was digging ditches and could just drop the shovel and go home and forget my job at the end of the day. Sometimes. Then some brat does something to remind me why I wanted to teach in the first place.

I used some of my money from the sale of After Obesession (formerly titled Ghost Sickness) to buy a new laptop computer. I bought a Gateway NV59C. I’ve had issues with it from the beginning. The touchpad is completely out of control. I’ve made every adjustment to it that I can, but still the computer randomly highlights and deletes text while I type, scrolls to the bottom of the screen, etc. When I’m sitting down to just write, I can turn the touchpad off and all is well. But any other time, including while I work on this blog entry, I’m constantly fixing mistakes caused by the jumping cursor … which makes me a curser.

I put aside The Fetch manuscript about a month ago. The tediousness of changing it to first person present tense was getting to me. I have so little time to write because of the school work, that when I do have time I needed the emotional lift of actually creating versus rewriting and cutting. So I finished fixing up the manuscript of The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date and sent it to my agent, then turned my attention back to my Werewolf Saga. I added about 2,500 words to Nadia’s Curse this weekend. The ordeal with Scrybe Press still isn’t settled. New, renegotiated contracts were supposed to be done before the end of the year, and they have not been delivered. That’s another reason the new werewolf book was abandoned for so long. But, I couldn’t stay away any longer. I need to finish this one. Will it be the end of the Saga? Maybe.