I’ve been spending most of this summer, well…the way a lot of people wish they could spend summers, until they actually are spending them that way, at which point they realize how much it really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (oh damn, there’s a stock phrase).  Which is to say, doing nothing.  That’s right, the employment gods of Kalamazoo have not smiled on me (at least not until the end of August), and yet I have also been too lazy and preoccupied with such things as, oh, NHL07 and the burgeoning love I have for Tiger baseball, to write much outside of blogs.  My trusty moleskine, though, is ever being stocked with ideas that I will someday force myself to become prolific enough to use.

That said, I have a few things going on right now:

• Finny (and by association Jordi) has convinced me to partake in the Seventy Days of Sweat challenge.  Having done NaNoWriMo for three years (and finally saying no to it last year), 60,000 words in 70 days sounds like something so remarkably easy I shouldn’t have a single bit of problem with it.  Except that this would require me to have a plot on hand, which I don’t.  Jordi gave me suggestions involving Prague, hot Czechs with names suspiciously similar to a certain NHL player, and chinchillas, but I’m not quite sure how likely I’ll be to go down that road.  I would like to keep the Prague setting but I think I’ve switched over to a slightly disgruntled travelog writer as my protagonist.  Let’s see where that goes!  Finny checked in with me tonight and it sounds like she’s prevailing gloriously (and hilariously) on her piece – I, on the other hand, solemnly swear that I will start for real tomorrow.  I will, however, be cheating, because as fun as spending 70 days writing only a light-hearted, fun novel would be, I also have to contend with…

• Lit Mag Submission time!  Most magazines I’m looking at don’t start accepting submissions for the year until August or even September – but my goal for this academic year is to rack up some publications, and with only two pieces properly put together, edited, (“Fever” and “Chinook”, both of which I’ll probably post excerpts of in the next few days, and both of which, I have realized, shamelessly steal the names of hockey players) and ready to be sent out, that might get tough if I don’t get back to work on my current two projects in the short story (which, for the record, is my current favorite medium) department.  So um, I won’t tell anyone I’m quite possibly counting words I shouldn’t if you don’t!

• And lastly, my Honors Thesis, which is posed to be a collection of short fiction, is due at the end of this academic year.  I’m hoping I can overlap this with the lit mag submissions some, as I can hopefully draw all of those pieces together with some form of theme that is strong enough to defend so I can properly graduate.  However, this also entails a bunch of work the likes of writing about writing and from what I hear it is more work than you think it’s going to be.

This Friday sees me going in for jury duty – I can only hope that winds up as boring and thus potentially good for writing as I imagine it will be, because with a list like this, I might need to hide away in seclusion to get it all done.