Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:
- Reading Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. I brought a copy with me to Canada, thinking I would have time to read on the plane, and here and there during the trip. Turns out traveling with a kid eats into one’s reading time severely. My copy (the Penguin edition of Robin Buss’s translation) of is about 1200 pages long, and I only hit about page 150 by the end of the trip. (I’m just past 300 pages now, though, and briskly making my way beyond that.
- Working on edits for a novella we’ve translated. The novella is Kim Bo-Young’s “On the Origin of Species—An Unlikely Story,” which is the third in a series. It’s going to be published by Honford Star, and we’re just working through the edits sent back to us on the first draft now. I hope to finish that by the end of the week, but it’s a big job!
- Playing board games with our son. He got a bunch of them in Canada, including Scrabble Junior, Here to Slay, Sushi Go!, Ghosts Galore, and Uno: Show ‘Em No Mercy. Of the bunch, Here to Slay seems to be the biggest hit with him, though he played a lot of Ghosts Galore! back in Canada. I imagine I’ll be picking up the expansion packs for him for his birthday. Maybe even the monster expansion, though that’s a little harder to get hold of.
- Trying to do some writing. I have this flash piece kicking around in my mind that I want to write this week, and submit to a journal who asked me to contribute something, but we’ll see how it goes. The hard part is getting started, especially having not written fiction for a few years, but it’s a vivid idea and I want to write it, so I’m gonna push to get myself to do it. Who knows, maybe I’ll get back into the swing of things, even.
- Starting a new RPG. My Sunday night just started Wicked Ones, which is a FitD game in which you play monsters building and maintaining a dungeon in the face of adventurers and various local factions who may or may not appreciate your presence in their area. We’ve only done session 0 so far, but it was fun!
- Fall cleaning: specifically, cleaning out my wardrobe. I sadly have a lot of clothes that no longer fit me, and which I don’t imagine will ever fit me again, so I’m cleaning out my closet and getting rid of (most of) that kind of thing. Some I’ve just put into our apartment complex’s garment trash receptacle; a few pieces are in good enough condition to sell online, maybe; and I’ll probably try to give some away, too.
- Inputting old music composition manuscripts into Musescore. I’ve finished a short one and started on a long one. I’m prioritizing pieces with vocal parts, so I can subscribe to Cantai for a month, run the scores through it, and finally hear what they sound like “sung” (outside of my imagination, I mean), but I hope to get them all input eventually, and I’ll share the scores here. (As much so they’re backed up online as to share them, but hey, I’m still sharing them, once I have audio recordings of some kind for them.) I went through the whole pile, typing out titles, but then I accidentally deleted it, and I’m not typing it again—but I’ll update here when I’ve finished an few pieces. I’ve already finished inputting “Island” (a song setting a Langston Hughes poem, for soprano, piano, and snare drum) and am most of the way through the first section of the Latin Mass I wrote in 1995. Yes, a Latin mass. No, I was not religious at the time. It’s kind of a long story.
- Fixing this damned website. I’ve been repairing some of the borked comments and posts that were not fixed by the database overhaul I had done. I have about 50 comments and 100 posts to fix, which should take about two weeks if I do twenty at a time, which is about all I can really make myself do in a single sitting. Though I don’t think much of value has been saved so far, I’d prefer the archive of the site be as complete as possible instead of patchy, so I’m just doing it anyway.
Anyway, as you can see, I’m pretty busy these days.
I also have some school-related work to do—updating the class website in places where content is dated, and maybe changing some of the readings in my Science Fiction course—but I’m waiting till next week to tackle all of that. Whatever I plan to do needs to be done before the semester begins, because I have an unusually heavy teaching load for the coming semester.
Next week, I also plan to try put together a couple more tracks for the Veiled City game soundtrack that I’ve been working on. Listening to Lustmord and some of the sounds of Canada gave me some inspiration, and I think the soundtrack needs a few more long, atmospheric tracks to balance out the “songs” I’ve made for it. Score-inputting will have to be set aside while I work on that: I only have mental space for one music project at a time, but that’s fine. (The score-inputting is probably going to take months to finish if I do it properly.)
I’m also going to try put some time into Cyberpunk 2077 next week, having discovered that I can actually play it using my PS4 controller hooked up to my Mac. I’m going to call that “relaxing” because I will have precious little time for that during the semester.
Anyway, that’s about the size of it this week. Hopefully by the end of the week, some of these tasks will be done and I’ll be tackling the “relax and brace yourself” phase of summer vacation, because my teaching schedule will afford me very little time to relax in the coming months.