Before I get started, I wanted to introduce the newest members of my clan. Pictured above are Heinlein (orange and white) and Asimov (black). These two beautiful maniacs have been taking up the lion’s share of my time since I adopted them in mid-May. They are bonded brothers from the same litter and are about three and a half months old. If you follow any of my social media, you’ll probably have seen about a hundred pictures of the two of them and I think it’s safe to say that you should expect their to be hundreds more since I am obsessed with the two of them.

So first and foremost, you may be wondering about the long gap since my last post. Quite simply put, I had hit a wall due to the quarantine and just couldn’t muster the desire to keep keep posting regularly. If you’ve read my bio on the site and some of my other blog posts, you’ll know that I struggle with depression. The lack of interaction with my family and friends due to the social distancing and not being able to work really took a toll on me mentally. There was a few weeks where it was a challenge just to drag myself out of bed as I truly had no reason not to stay in bed. This sort of situation is very difficult to everyone, and even more so to those that have a shadow inside of us constantly trying to drag us down. Over the course of the pandemic, I saw how social distancing takes its toll on those with mental health disorders when one old friend died from an overdose and another very close friend went missing for a few days. The lack of mental health services in the United States was already an issue, and the pandemic exasperated that issue exponentially.

Luckily, adopting my boys did wonders for my depression and pulled me back towards the real world a bit. I’ve been coaching technical soccer sessions a few times a week via Zoom and I’ve been working a lot on my writing. I have a few projects that I’m working on right now that I’ll go into detail about below. As we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel in regards to the pandemic, the goal is to get back into the swing of things and hopefully keep the site updated more frequently.

Anyways, onto the plans for the site. First, I may switch from my current format of one or two longer blogs every week to a series of shorter ones more regularly. I’ve seen some sites that do well with that shorter format of release but it’s hard to say if it will work for me. I’m toying with the idea and may experiment with it a little bit over the next few weeks.

Second, there will be a new short story released this week. There will be a disclaimer before the story as some of the content is relevant to the current social climate in the United States. I don’t typically share my political views publicly due to my role as a youth coach and educator, but when it comes to police reform and equality, I firmly believe Black Lives Matter. That’s all I will say about it in this forum. If this topic is something you would like to discuss with me, I’d be happy to connect with you privately and discuss my thoughts on the matter.

Third: I’ve been doing some editing and proofreading work for an author friend of mine in Australia and truly enjoying it. Being able to work through someone’s script with a fine toothed comb and help them find the vision they are looking for is so incredibly gratifying. If any of the author’s out there that read this need an extra set of eyes on their work, please let me know. Also, if anyone knows of any opportunities in the editing industry please send me an email!

Last but certainly not least: I am looking at trying a new form of storytelling on my site. I am sure this has been done before but I was thinking of releasing starting an episodic series with weekly releases. I had the idea of running a ten episode season, with a new episode that is roughly twenty pages or so released every week or every other week. I have a topic that I am dying to revisit that would work perfectly in a serialized format, but I don’t know if it would be worth my time or not to try it. I would love to hear some feedback or some recommendations if you know an author that has done something similar!

That’s the game plan for the site. Hopefully the new ideas will draw some traffic and some interest and potentially some collaborations. Leave your thoughts on the episodic format in the comments below!