Happy Monday, everybody! :P

Like a lot of people, I tend to approach the start of the week with a mix of eagerness (getting out of the lazy weekend funk that gets old after a while) and fear/annoyance (what's coming my way the next five days?). Given that work and PhD classes resume this week for me, the mix is even stronger than normal--making my dips back into the writing world all the more enjoyable, and easing the transition back to the grind. In this (slightly melodramatic) spirit, I present as this week's tune Johnny Cash's version of Sixteen Tons (Usual copyrights apply; I own nothing!)

Though I only became the mild Johnny Cash fan I am today after seeing the (probably wrong in several ways) movie Walk The Line, this song has stuck with me since a good long while before then. I've heard it said that anything hard or frustrating becomes tolerable if you find the funny or just meaningful side; whenever I hear this song (and especially Cash's version), I either laugh, or get a powerful sense of how it relates to my life or the job at hand--often both. The "job" could be a new or restarted writing project, a class paper, or cleaning the bathroom; whatever it is, a song like this takes the edge off, and gives a much-needed rhythm to the work to make it speed up.

Speaking of writing, it came down to the wire, but the beta-ready draft of All The Troubles of Home is finally finished as of last night! True to form, I immediately found some material to add or remove, so it will be a little later this week that I will start sending out requests for readers; drop me a line if you'd like to be one of them! After the FINAL final final edits are done, I'll be setting up the cover design, which will probably be finished around the end of February or start of March. Once that's in motion, it'll be nearly all classwork and Outside World demands for a time, though I'll still be posting here every week, and on my author pages as project news comes up. Keep your eyes peeled and inboxes open, and keep the shares, comments and reviews coming, like always!