With the onset of June comes the official beginning of summer. That means school is out (not just for me,) and the real fun begins. For me, though, summer is terrible. It’s too hot in Southern California, and once it starts to hit 90°, it doesn’t go back down until October. I, for one, can’t function well in the heat. It makes me lethargic and unmotivated, which means it’s the most difficult time of the year for me, but I’m still going to try to be productive. So, in typical monthly update order: blog, writing plans, video games, reading/listening, school, and other things.

I have a few minor changes to the blog planned for the future. The biggest of which is the new rule which I’ve already employed, and that is the “I can post fiction in lieu of a typical blog post any time I want”. It’s been getting more and more difficult for me to come up with real Learning! posts, and sometimes, writing fiction is just easier. The second change is simply a consequence of my other plans, which I’ll talk about more in a bit, and that is the fact that since I’m going to be writing a lot more, blog posts will be written further and further ahead of schedule, which might render the first change meaningless. Only time will tell.

So, writing plans. Phase Three begins officially on Tuesday. As you may recall from May’s update, I’ve been working on a few personal transformations to better prepare myself for more writing. Phase One was a revamped work space, Phase Two was a wardrobe change, and Phase Three is a daily schedule, in which I force myself to start writing full time. This plan will be set in place very soon, and if all goes well, I’ll be writing for about 24-30 hours a week. I’ve never written that much on a regular basis, but hopefully it will give me the time to not only write blog posts in more favorable hours of the day, but also allow me to give proper attention to all the things I’m currently working on. Right now my immediate project are the Spear Gate stories I’ve been writing over the past few weeks. I may or may not put a halt on that soon, but I so want to refocus my efforts on Rise of the Riftguard, as well as Lisa Stenton and the Spark universe. With dedicated hours to work for writing, perhaps I can actually work on all of them at once.

My free time lately has been entirely consumed by Heroes of the Storm. I’ve been playing it more and more since I got back into it (in January, I believe), and at this point I’ve been playing it exclusively. I’ve jumped back into more competitive play, as well, and right now I’m working on climbing the Platinum ranks with the (false) hopes of hitting Diamond before the season ends.

As I’ve been doing this, I’ve been listening to Critical Role again. One of my brothers got into it recently, so I’ve started from the beginning so I can follow along. At this point, there are over a hundred episodes, and with each episode being over three hours long (on average) that’s, well, three hundred hours to catch up. If I spent five hours every day listening, it would still take me a month to be brought up to speed (and I already know I can’t devote that much time to it, so there’s that). But it’s great to finally go back to listening to real things, as I’ve spent the last two months spending video game time with music, which isn’t as efficient as I could be.

My semester has been over for a while now, but I’ve still been going into a local high school each week to teach improv. Monday, however, will be my last day for the school year. It’s always awesome to watch the kids grow more comfortable on stage and with themselves. I learned a lot about improv and teaching in general through my year with them, and next year I plan on actually helping them on a more personal level as well. I didn’t even try to learn all of their names this year, but I only teach about a total of fifty kids, so it’s more doable than I had originally thought.

Lastly, in a few days, a few friends from improv are graduating high school. They were freshmen when I met them, so it feels like a piece of me is leaving the high school for the last time. It’s unreasonable, because the last class I shared school grounds with will really be next year’s senior class, but still. The original improv team is flying the nest, and some of us are going very far away for a long time. It’s bittersweet, but I’m happy for them all.