Where's Mike?

So where the heck has this blog been, lately?

Yes, I know, it's been completely and utterly absent. My sincere apologies - I've been swamped. I shouldn't even be writing this now - there's something much more important I ought to be working on. I'll tell you all about it on Monday, but for today just know that I have not forgotten about you, my loyal (if relatively few) readers!

I can tell you that I am currently NOT working on my novel, and yes, it's pissing me off. It's a conscious choice and one that I can live with, but my plan had always been to cut back on my writing for a while, not to stop altogether. I'm expecting that in a few more weeks I'll be able to scale back and then I can get back to work. My re-write of Chapter 9 didn't end up being all that successful, so I suppose I'll need to start there once again and try to get it right. Then on to chapters 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 for sure. I think Chapter 16 is in pretty good shape, and I think Chapter 15 is pretty close to done already (it's already been extensively re-written). At the moment, it's probably reasonable to hope that by July/August I'll actually be writing new material. My estimates are always too optimistic, however, so we'll see.

I will say that my karate training is proceeding nicely - we're well into our Blue Belt material, on the way to Green Belt. In addition, Sensei Mehter kindly invited me to train with him at Aikido of Central New York the last two Thursdays, which was fantastic! I really love Aikido, and I'm enjoying seeing how much I remember. There's vastly more that I've forgotten, of course, I just don't enjoy that quite as much. There's a seminar on Saturday with Irvin Faust Sensei of Albany which I'm definitely attending as well (I'm skipping my son's dojo birthday party, though, so I'm a good Aikidoka but a bad Dad. There was just no way to be good at both on this particular day).

There's more to come - I'm very much looking forward to sharing some of my work and accomplishments with you here. I very much hope I'll find time to do so next week.