The Corpse Brigadier

I caught Covid last week (but a few days before my second booster was scheduled too :P), but also have complete--albeit still very rough in some cases--drafts of all of my dissertation chapters and my introduction now.

I'm actually going to become a book doctor.

So I finally made it to yet another school year, having parted ways with my terrible job and gotten back to being underpaid and exploited for doing something I genuinely like. I am, granted, teaching mandatory technical communication for STEM students, which is a lot less likeable for everyone involved than some of the prior courses I've taught (Creative writing with an IF unit! Intro to Comp but vampire-themed!), but we're all getting along fairly well at this point. I also just finished a cohesive draft of a second chapter, and I might (fingers crossed) get it to my committee soon. My director at this point is very upfront about being fine with a short dissertation (three chapters + intro + conclusion). I expect this is a result of me having had to write this entire thing during a pandemic and deciding that I do not want to pursue one of the non-existent academic jobs in my field and instead try to leverage my scant digital humanities knowledge to get a non-academic job where I can play around with tech/code.

I finally got it together enough to pull off an exchange, which makes me incredibly happy, and I'm hoping to gear up for Yuletide in the next week. I'm also going to give Whumptober a shot this year, as if there are two things I dearly love, they're the month of October and terrible things happening to fictional characters. On the fannish cake related front, I made poor Algus Sadalfus a tiny cake in honor of his birthday, which featured him bleeding to death in a pile of coconut snow.

( Picture of the aforementioned confection )

Other than that, I'm in ridiculously high spirits compared to the rest of the year. I'm writing a lot of snail mail letters these days, which has been a nice counteractant to some of the cynicism I feel engaging with people via social media. I've also been able to make a sizeable increase in the amount of miles I run each week, given how pleasant autumn weather is for jogging, and I'm entertaining thoughts of training up to doing a very slow half marathon on my own again. I'm hoping this keeps up for a while, as I would really love it if I could keep up my present energy and finally have a bit of an easy time with things this year.