September is here, and with it comes lots of new and exciting things. I don’t really have a preface for anything this time around, so let’s just jump right in! Monthly Update Topic Order: blog, writing plans, video games, reading/listening, school, and other things.

I’m actually pretty comfortable with the state of the blog right now. Despite having taken my first ever sick day and having a different post be almost eight hours late, I think I’m doing fine. The system has me publishing fiction on a regular basis, and the only thing I might have any concerns about is the fact that I don’t really have anything to review right now, and as far as D&D posts goes, I usually only play it once a week, and I don’t want the Wednesday posts to just be “what did we do last week”. At the same time, I’ve only been a real dungeon master for about a year, so I’m not all that experienced, so it feels a bit strange to do lesson posts on that front, but I’ll keep with it as long as I can keep content coming!

Spear Gate is still going strong. the current draft is over 12,000 words long, and that doesn’t include the short stories that don’t involve the main characters. I’ve been starting to think of the Spear Gate as something akin to a web comic that just updates weekly. I like the sound of that for a number of reasons, but of course looking at it that way brings pros and cons. If it is a “web series”, then there is no draft. When you post it, it’s done. But that also makes it easier to keep moving forward. Plus, if there’s a web series that posts a weekly, continuous story the way I’ve been doing it, I don’t know about it, so I can call myself original. (Side note: There’s no way it hasn’t been done, but still.)

I haven’t been playing a whole lot of games, as I still don’t have a proper desktop. I’ve been keeping myself busy with Titanfall 2, but I also recently reinstalled Hearthstone on my phone, in addition to the fact that I’m playing Pokemon: Go more and more. (It’s still not an amazing game, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of where it was when the fad died out.) If everything goes well, however, I should have my computer and everything set up by this time next week. And when Destiny 2 gets released on the PC, I plan on putting a lot of time into that, as well as returning to Heroes of the Storm!

Podcasts and audiobooks have taken a bit of a backseat lately, as the school year has just started. That said, I’m currently about halfway through The Martian, which is about as great as I expected it to be, and I’m also just over halfway through Critical Role. That means I still have well over 150 hours to go. Maybe I’ll be caught up by 2019, because they’re still adding 3 hours of content a week! One day I also plan on devoting myself to podcasts a bit more. In my Top 3 alone there is a D&D one, a voice acting one, and a story script writing one that I’ve barely started, if I’ve even gotten that far.

Fall semester, 2017. It’s the heaviest load I’ve taken since high school, though it’s still not as big as typical workaholics I’m sure. My schedule does require me to be in class all but nonstop from 8:30-2:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though. My biggest gap is half an hour, which is barely enough time for lunch! Overall, the classes seem fine. I’m taking two theatre classes, and the others are lecture heavy, so there isn’t a whole lot of homework, which is a concept I can get behind. So, despite being in a state of perpetual exhaustion because of the schedule, and also slowly melting because of the heat wave, I think this semester will be a good one.

What else is there to say? I’m back to teaching improv again, which is a great feeling! The more improv in my life, the better. I also hope to start doing actual performances again sometime soon, but that’s still a ways away.

Anyways, hopefully it starts cooling down soon!