Return to Regular Blogging

      After inadvertently taking off the month of January, I plan on getting back to regular blogging this year.  For better or worse, its one of my new year's resolutions, a series of commitments I've had distinctively mixed results in following up on.  It's also a good way to keep in the habit of writing, which is really needed now that I'm out of school and mostly stuck in the adjunct track.  I've been fortunate enough to get regular work at Irvine Valley College, but its not work that encourages writing, and I need to get back into the practice of putting material down.  I've been thinking about putting together a short entry on Charles Dickens' Hard Times, and perhaps at some point I will finally live up to my promise to put some material on Stephen King.  I plan on writing a lot more shorter pieces and perhaps putting some material together about the Hugo readings, a process I had planned to follow through on last year, but bailed out on due to employment stress.  I'm hoping to finally get back involved in some sort of activist project, which generally provides material to write about as well.  I don't see the basic format of the blog changing, though.  I'm probably going to still focus on politics, literature, and culture from a radical standpoint.

      Despite bailing on blogging during the final month of the year, it was still a pretty good year for my writing.  I managed to get two essays published in academic journals, an essay on Judith Merril, "Estranged Domesticity: Science Fiction and the Domestic Melodrama", is now in The Journal of American Culture, Volume 40, Number 4, December 2017, and an essay on China Mieville,“Extravagant Secular Swarming”: Space and Subjectivity in China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, was published earlier in the year and is available through Critique: Studies in Contemporary Culture, Volume 59, Issue 1, 2018. (It was published online sometime in August.)  It took me a long time to get the essays accepted and that probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the work of Eyan Amiran, Jo Isaacson (who also helped me with my first online publication), and Victoria Lamont. I can't say how much I appreciate their help.  In addition, I managed to put out more blog postings than 2013, the last full year that I had published the blog.  My hope is that I will have even more postings this year now that I've finally gotten back on the right track after a couple rough years after graduate school.  Incidentally, here are the rest of my new year's resolutions, which I'm putting up more for myself than any potential reader interest.

1. Submit three drafts for publication. (One of those drafts should involve new research)

      2. Read Capital Vol. 1-3
      3. Return to blogging
      4. Improve teaching
      5. Apply for non-composition positions
      6. More exercise
      7. Take care of hip
      8. Try to go to at least one more conference other than the ACA
      9. Keep in touch with people with more regularity
    10. Finish 100 books
    11. More networking
    12. Replace computer
    13 Return to activism
    14 Less irritability and yelling at machines