Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

It has been more than eight months since I last posted anything at all on this blog. (Here’s the last post, a triumphal and epic look back on my struggles with plantar fasciitis.)

Since that time a number of pretty substantial changes have occurred. The biggest and best is that I got married on May 24, 2014. My wife and I went on a honeymoon to Croatia and to Budapest, Hungary. (The Adriatic outside a hotel balcony, the islands off the coasts of Dubrovnik and Split, seem very distant now, as snow continues to fall on Pittsburgh for the 10th consecutive hour.)

About two months after we returned, I left a job I didn’t like much to embark on a new career. In August I began teaching at a couple of colleges in the Pittsburgh area, and also started ramping up my marketing and networking efforts in the area of freelance writing and editing. Since then I’ve gotten to work on some fantastic and interesting writing projects with organizations and publications I truly admire. As far as teaching, I had a bit of a trial by fire in that first semester—there are some days, and classes, I’d do over if I could—but I came through it with a better sense of how to teach, how to be myself in front of a classroom, how to structure classes so you don’t lose your mind during the last week of the term. I’m in my second semester now and the experience of that first semester has made a big difference.

The biggest adjustment has been learning to manage my time and not to become overly isolated. I’m writing this on a Monday night, late, in part because each Tuesday of this semester is entirely free—at least, free in the sense that I have no classes on Tuesdays, and nowhere to be. In reality, there are five writing projects I am chipping away at (not including my own fiction), a Wednesday-morning class to prepare for, and a long Thursday-evening class I have to at least be thinking about. I will be plenty busy. Tonight I see on social media that much of the eastern seaboard is preparing for a blizzard, eagerly anticipating being snowed out of their jobs. I want to join in, to switch between reading and watching Netflix all day long, but I can’t. Working from home has been a perfect fit for me, but I’m also high-strung enough that it’s made it difficult to relax, and sometimes tough to call an end to the day’s work.

So that is what has been going on. It doesn’t really explain the complete silence out of this blog, but I suppose we could pretend it was a perfect and reasonable excuse.