Getting them book learnins

So it’s official and on paper: I’m going back to school at six months shy of thirty. You know those commercials for crappy vocational schools you see on American tv during Maury and such? There’s actually a lot of truth to their sales pitch. I’ve been considering this for years and if I hadn’t been so disorganized about it, could have already been done by now.

Part of why it took this long is this: I can’t stand school. I couldn’t as a kid either, and that’s probably why I’m having to redo a couple of high school courses. I wasn’t pushed as much as I could have. So let my example be living proof: even with a smart kid, a totally hands-off approach has a big downside.

I’m going to do my best to finish the first installment of the serial I’ve been working on. I’ll probably just post it. Selling this stuff just takes way too much time, and if there’s going to be time to devote to writing at the moment, I have to spend it actually writing, not messing around on duotrope and trying to pitch a strange niche fantasy serial. On one hand, I don’t want to loose any credibility by releasing stuff that hasn’t gone through the usual process. On the other, I can’t really afford to treat writing as a serious career at the moment. It’ll be some weird reflexive thing where I essentially become a fanfic writer of my own original work. The only thing I can really care about is the story, which is pretty damn neat . . . Shouldn’t that be what writing is all the time? Ideally sure, but for me at least, having a novel out there for real changes everything.

Part of the complication comes from that I also have to renovate a 70s condo while this school stuff is going on. And work. And stay fit.

Anyway, just for the curious–the working title is Veta’s Death Angels, and this cycle will follow a fighter pilot in the same dieselpunk fantasy world as Blightcross. It’s a lot of fun to get even deeper into a highly industrial slant to heroic fantasy.

Taking an engineering program, like I mentioned earlier, is in the end still related to writing, even if it makes me stop for a while. In addition to having real-world skills that make real money, I can’t wait to have the skills to crank out a real autocad drawing of some of the aircraft and monolithic buildings in my books. See? There’s a method to my seemingly disparate interests.