Month In Review: January 2016

Trying something new for the blog: I'm going to review each month to see what I wrote, read, watched and did. So here goes.

January. The phoenix of the months. The time to start a new. But it never quite works out for me that way. It's actually kind of a metaphor for any activity I engage in: I stumble at the start, having to motivate my self to be consistent. Then I hit a stride and I'm real good in the middle. And the end...well let's just say I need a good eighth and ninth inning guy. So, here's what's up:

WRITING: Went pretty well. Not the ambitious 40k I imagined but a respectable 15k on THE FALCON AND THE CROW. Part of the delay was a check with the agent to make sure he thought the project was salable. It is and that makes me very happy. It needs some work. He wants me to think about the McGuffin a little more to make it sound more plausible, though for now I'm just sort of concentrating on the story. Plan for February: I've got FALCON planned at about 80k, so for February, factoring in Winter break, I'm hoping to make a real push at getting close to 50k done so I can finish it in March. If I use an old SAT style analogy to express March as a teacher: March:Teaching::August::Baseball. Plus my students will be engaging in a college level research paper, so I might not have as much time to write as I'd like but I hope to have FALCON done by then so I can work on revising LABORS and planning a new, very big project. But I'll talk more about March at the end of February.

READING: I read like gangbusters and my intent is to do some microreviews of January's reading. I read 10 books:

• Fit After 40
• Dreamland
• The Wicked and The Divine
• Saga Volumes 3-5
• Batman: Hush
• Star Wars: Before the Awakening
• Radio Golf
• Divergent (audiobook)

Presently I am reading:

• Lord of Chaos 
• Insurgent (audiobook)

I'm going to review Dreamland, Saga, Hush and Before the Awakening. I'm going to wait on Divergent until I finish listening to the entire trilogy. I have a lot to say about it. I'm planning a dystopia unit, so I'll be reading a lot of those in the coming weeks.

WATCHED: I'm only scratching the surface of streaming shows and the list is getting longer. I didn't watch much of those, but I did watch the following:

• Godfather Epic: Still haven't made it through all 8 hours, but what I watched is just amazing.
• The Expanse: If you aren't watching this, go...now....I'll wait. 
• The Avengers: Age of Ultron: Meh. Had moments but it was just kind of a run of the mill superhero movie, though it did plant some seeds that weren't awful.
• Grease Live: Fun. Not as great as The Wiz, but worth a couple of hours of time to watch.
• NBA on ABC: It's nice to see something that isn't football on a major network. I'm not a huge NBA guy, but LeBron and Steph Curry are fun to watch. 
• SNL: Funny in spurts. The Rhonda Rousey episode was funny in spots and the second Selena Gomez song left me feeling weird after watching it. But I'm a SNL nut and will continue to watch. SNL writer is still a dream job for me. 

The list of stuff I want to watch is long. We'll see what happens in February.

DID: Not much. Starting lifting again in earnest. More to come.