He knows how to lighten the mood. My other teaches are interesting, but he’s downright funny. If only I knew his name. I should get on that.

“The two hardest courses you’ll ever take are Freshman English and Freshman Calculus. Freshman English because if you don’t right well, then people will make fun of you behind your back, and nobody wants that, you have to learn to be a good writer, know your grammar and all that.

“And Freshman Calculus, well, I had a student once who went off and got a job working for some big company, General Motors or General Electric, something like that. When they hire people, if the person got an A in Freshman Calculus, they let them name their salary. Great deal, right? Sounds pretty good!

“He named his George.”

Priceless, right? I love learning Calc from this guy, even if I don’t understand it all yet. More practice, more work, and I’ll have everything down. Exams aren’t far off - next week, in fact!

My other article has been getting a lot of attention, or at least traffic. That’s cool, maybe I should write more of ‘em ;)… but not right now. I’ve got a short story to finish and then a novel to write! I’ve switched up the short story I was talking about earlier; it’s now the usual short story prequel I write for my novels. I didn’t think I would be able to expand the idea I came up with for that short story into an entire novel-length adventure, but it looks like it might end up being longer than last year’s Spawn.

There’s no main character yet, but the world is set - a Steampunk-style world that sits next to our own world. In the short story, a normal twenty-something almost-college-grad guy working as a camp counselor stumbles into the world, which rests conveniently next to the camp. In the world, he tries to find the missing camper he followed to get there - unfortunately, the camper’s gone missing, and our protagonists is lost in a forest of smokestacks and ashes. As the plot unfolds, he discovers the worlds and all its strange intricacies, and a strange government plot that will be expanded upon in the novel, a plot that ends with people melted and used as fuel, a plot to restrict the technological advancements of the strange Steampunk world for reasons unknown. The metropolis of Lanford, a gleaming city made of brass and steel pipes, powered by a single gigantic steam engine in the center of the city, is the world’s central hub; a good chunk of the short story takes place there.

Needless to say, it doesn’t have a happy - or even complete - ending. Government’s gotta be mean, no?

We’ll be seeing what unfolds this November. Even I don’t know what’ll happen next.