Oh man, so much going on the past couple of months that I haven’t had time to update the personal site. I read my first finished story for 2nd Story last month, an awful tale of getting lost in the woods and running into a redneck with dubious intentions while living, briefly, in the small mountain town of Crestline, CA. Once I get around to recording the story, I’ll be adding it to the too-long-dormant podcast. I’m working on a second and third story for 2nd Story currently, with more readings to come in the months ahead.

In addition, I spent much of November working on a couple of giant articles, one for Columbia College’s DEMO Magazine (not yet published,) as well as a decade-long retrospective of my hometown’s music scene for the Santa Cruz Weekly. There’s a piece I wrote for community-minded tech site Shareable.net that is in their hopper–not sure when it’s going to run, but I’ll post a link when it does. I also attempted, and failed, at NaNoWriMo, stalling out at 12,000 words.

In other big news, Is Greater Than is re-launching on December 30th. It went on an unannounced hiatus around the middle of the year, due to a sense that I needed to re-focus the site and find a way to re-engage with it. With the help of fellow editor Brigid J. Barry, I’ve figured out those issues, and I’m really excited to get it up and running once again. It’ll have an increased literary and cultural focus: one of my realizations of the past year has been that I just don’t have the stomach to run a politically-focused publication, and that if I wanted to continue working on the site, I needed to focus on topics that gave me a sense of personal satisfaction in addition to the ulcers. There’s a ton of great political work in the archives from many great contributors, and I’ll always be grateful to them. It’s not what the new incarnation will be, though: instead, we’ll be focusing more on cultural criticism, fiction and creative nonfiction. If you’d like to pitch or submit a piece, please take a look at the submissions page for details.