Humpday Links and a Small Announcement

Here are a few tidbits that ought to warm your soul on a blustery early March Wednesday:

There are two totally legal and 100% free e-book/PDF downloads of books to read: Jeff VanderMeer's upcoming novella from PS Publishing, The Situation (due to ship in the next couple of weeks), and a Night Shades Book, Butcher Bird, by Richard Kadrey. I plan on reading/reviewing these in the next few weeks or so.

Fantasy Book Critic reviews David Debord's The Silver Serpent.

Rob Bedford reviews Felix Gilman's Thunderer, a book that I seemed to have enjoyed a bit more and which I hope to review shortly.

British author Joe Abercrombie is waiting with bated breath to see how I shall conclude my "reviewing trilogy" of his works. Sorry Joe, but this reviewing grew in the writing. It now shall consist of another review here, a third one elsewhere, and then (unless I am talked out of this) here shall appear a condensed review of your third book that shall employ the Elizabethan (or Shakespearean, as some call it) sonnet scheme, which some might call a "heroic couplet," although that would be in error. If I am so inspired, I may actually do this in the next month or so.

But that revolves around one little bit of personal news (which I rarely report on this blog): After four months of part-time work, I am returning full-time to the classroom to teach what now will be my sixth separate subject in my six years as a teacher. I will be teaching special education students at a private school for teens placed in a residential treatment facility for emotional/behavioral disorders. I start on Friday. Now I am doing this on a waiver, so starting this summer, I will also be taking 2-3 classes a semester to earn my endorsement for special ed. What does this mean for reviewing/commentaries, some might ask? Only a little bit. I do have a backlog of reviews to polish off writing/posting over the course of the next few days (Gilman, Fukui, Abercrombie's second, Ó Guilín) before I go to a slightly-reduced schedule here of maybe 1-3 reviews a week on the good weeks and maybe 1-3 days between posts on the bad. I'm happy with this arrangement and I have every intention of reading and reviewing the books that I promised others that I would review in the coming weeks. But if you want more on my personal life, I might be blogging a bit more about that elsewhere.

Now back to figuring out which words rhyme with "Glokta"...