I swear I thought it was only a month or two ago since I made my last non-Batman-related update. Oops. So, here’s why you haven’t heard from me save when I’ve been writing about men wearing rubber bat costumes:

Life.

I know, that’s broad. I’ve been writing as much as possible since school started back up again in late-August. I finished the second draft of the novel on October 18th. I’m not sure how it is. I’m waiting on a couple of people I trust to read it and give me the lowdown before I start the third (and, I hope, final) draft. When I wasn’t working on the book, I was writing the Gotham to Gautham Batman essays. I even wrote a 5,000 word short story last week.

When I’m not writing, I’m either reading (should finish Stephen King’s superb Revival tonight) or vegging out because teaching is hard motherfuckin’ work.

Before I go, I want to recommend two things to you:

Thing the First. If you haven’t checked out Mason James Cole, you really need to. His Pray To Stay Dead is a great zombie/horror novel. I’m not a huge fan of zombie books, but I loved this. Even better is his much shorter novel Buster Voodoo. I consider him a friend from afar, meaning he connected to me via Facebook at some point in the last five years or so, and we found that we had a huge admiration (obsession?) for the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Stephen King, and basically nerd stuff. All that means nothing to me when it comes to the writing. Cole is the real deal, I promise. His writing reminds me of King’s, but definitely is his own. I can’t wait to see what else he has up his sleeve.

Thing the Second. Richard Chizmar, owner, publisher, and editor of Cemetery Dance magazine and Cemetery Dance Publications, recently launched a new endeavor called Stephen King Revisited. With associate (and a really good writer himself) Brian James Freeman, Chizmar is re-reading Stephen King’s books in the order they were published and then writing essays about them. They remind me quite a bit of what I’ve been doing with my movie essays. Funny enough, I’d thought about branching off into the King books, too, but am now thinking that maybe I shouldn’t. Either way, you should definitely check this site out. It’s entertaining, insightful, and will bring you back to the first time you cracked open one of King’s novels.

That’s it for me. My essay on The Dark Knight Rises should be up within the next few days.