Wow, it’s been a LONG time since I posted here. This will likely be a brief post. I’m sorry about that. Let’s try and sum up, shall we?

My Favorite Daughter is doing AWESOME with her volleyball. The team had a rocky start, but they’ve really pulled it together and dominated their last few games. They’ve got another game tonight (2 a week) a tournament on Saturday (the second of two) and should end up with a winning record at the end of the season. I couldn’t be more proud at how well she’d advanced over the past year with her playing. As for school she’s taking honors classes, AP classes, has an incredible workload and combined with volleyball is keeping very busy. Even with all that going on she’s holding up an ‘A’ average and, again, I couldn’t be more proud.

The wife has gone back to work. She took her mandatory time off over the summer and is quite happy to be back at H&R Block. She doesn’t do taxes, she does a lot of admin type work so her busy season in now versus after the 1st of the year when people want their taxes done. She’s in charge of things like setting up the hiring interviews, making sure the tax pros have done all their training, setting up the offices, working with the office leaders, and so much more I lose track at times.
My work is about as busy as it can be. I had one major project wind down and another wind up. I’m knee deep in a project that I started two years ago. The first iteration fell into the swamp. Last year we had new requirements and did the same project again. That one burned and then fell into the swamp. This year we’ve taken on more requirements and we’re building on the foundation from the previous two years and hopefully this one will have HUGE tracts of land…er…be successful for what the clients are looking for. Fortunately that issues have never been from my end, but rather due to issues with one of the systems we’re trying to interface with. I’ve got my fingers crossed this will all come together.

On the writing front. Well, I took a good break. I didn’t intend to stop writing, but I did have a large dip when I stopped doing the daily updates. I don’t know that I’ll do them daily, but I might start doing them more now that I’m at a better place with my fiction writing. I didn’t want my blogging to be a major portion of the words I wrote this year and that was happening. I was blogging a lot, and not writing any fiction. I’ve reversed that trend and I’ve gotten so things in the works.

In the time I’ve been silent I’ve written 3 new short stories and have submitted those to pro-level magazines. I’ve also re-written a couple older stories that I loved (one around 15,000 words) and submitted those to pro-level magazines as well. In all I have 7 pieces out waiting for replies. One has been short-listed (meaning it might get picked up) and one has been accepted by an anthology. The others are in various stages of waiting, a couple have been rejected at least once, but I’m keeping them out there until they find a home this time. I would love to self-publish them, but I think I want that validation that my writing is something others are taking seriously and being that I see lots of downloads of my works, I see almost no comments. If you’ve read something of mine, I’d love to hear what you thought.

An interesting note. I had thoughts that the lack of my posting on this blog would mean a complete lack of traffic on the site. I’m amazed to see that people are still stopping by and checking things out. That warms my heart more than you can know. I’ll try to keep posting on a slightly more irregular basis. I have words to write before I start work so…
Until Tomorrow (or next time)!

WOO WOO!