I finished my thesis and defense at the end of May, and in the last few weeks I did some travel and talked to a lot of people. The question I got the most was, “What now?”. As it happens, I’ve been brimming with ideas, and I thought it would be well worth my time to put them down. My goal here is to write them down with enough detail that they can be explicit goals, and so that I can judge myself on their completeness after the fact.

So, here we go:

Moving: Ok, so, this is an easy one. I’m moving at the beginning of July, and there are a few things that need to happen to make this as seamless as possible. First, books and games need packed, and everything needs to be organized. I’ve got less than three weeks left to get everything done!

Writing Papers: The main research goal I have for the summer is to get some papers published. Now, this may not seem so exciting to most of you, but between distilling salient info from my thesis and adding new content, this is a major goal.

Writing Fiction: This is a much more lofty goal, both in time and effort, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while now. As a means to this end, I have two distinct writing projects that I would like to try, and my goal is to get at least three pieces of fiction up by the end of the summer.

The first project, and, in many ways, the less ambitious, is a writing exercise that I hope will help me get to writing more often. As some of you may know, I have saved every fortune I have received from a fortune cookie; my goal will be to write a short piece of fiction detailing both the circumstances I opened the cookie, and how the fortune came to be. As you can guess, the goal here really is to provide a short, maybe fable-like story that explores what getting a fortune is like.

The second project is much more ambitious. I mentioned to a number of you about a year ago that I wanted to start writing something in the Dark Necropolis universe. I started this, but never really got anything finished, so I my goal will be to finish at least the first part of this writing. This may wait until NaNoWriMo, but I’m going to work on it as I have time.

Warhammer/Warmachine: With all this writing, you may wonder what time I’m going to have for getting my Warhammer and Warmachine armies going. Well, I’ll be honest, I’m putting my Warmachine army on hold for a while as I gear up for the November Warhammer apocalypse game. However, I want to get all of my “red” Warhammer squads and Wolf Lords complete by then. Everything else will be icing on the cake, but I do want to spend some time getting these guys looking better than they did last year.

I have also been putting some work into my Warhammer database. I would like to have something presentable here soon, though I’m not completely sure what incarnation it may take. For a first blush, I’d like to put something out that uses the free Blood Angels codex that came out a while back. More details as this gets closer.

Blogging: This bullet really is cheating – I plan on blogging all of the above as I work on them. Between pictures, more work on my research blog, and stuff being posted here, this is really about blogging more often. I’ve got a few other things up my sleeve for more content, but I really want to focus back and do some more blogging so you all know a little bit better about what I’m up to.

Until next time…

Have Fun