John’s nearly through with all the physical slush, and has a few stories left to look over that I’ve forwarded on to him. With the New Year will come an end to the great slush pile.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, once we re-open, we’re going to use reading periods.

Meanwhile, work has begun on the non-fiction portions of Black Gate 12 and copies of various things we’ll be reviewing are going out to our, well, our reviewers.

I hope all of you are remembering that Black Gate website editor Leo Grin publishes articles on our web site every single Sunday… although there may be a hiatus for a week or two for the holidays. In any case, we’ve readied some good stuff for your reading pleasure in the last few weeks over at www.blackgate.com and hope you’ve been visiting.

Here I’ve just finished my first semester of teaching English composition at one of the local universities. Ironically,  I’d put off getting my masters for years with many excuses, one of them being that I never wanted to teach English comp. That’s ironic because I ended up enjoying myself — by semester’s end I felt like I’d really made a difference and helped the students to grow into better writers. With what I’ve learned this semester, next semester should be even better.

Howard