Yesterday evening I spent reading the first half of Stross's Singularity Sky -- all the techie bits were boring and duly skipped over, but what I gleaned from what remained was great fun. I have severe doubts about the plausibility of all this Singularity stuff, but, like time travel, it's a delight to play with. Extreme sense-of-wonder-ness. This morning I woke up around 6 and finished it, which was a nice way to start the day, especially while munching a little bit of my mom's shrimp curry (which she sent home with me) on toast. Yum.
Since then, I've been working for about an hour, drinking Ceylon tea and adding new titles to the writing booklist -- I'm almost ready to give it to Shannan to make live at the SLF site -- just one more set of titles to add. Whew! It's getting pretty darn long...
Also churned through some e-mail, with more to go. I was severely backlogged, after WorldCon and other East Coast-ness. I have about an hour or more to spend on that, then I'm going to be deep into reviewing the Vermont College website, familiarizing myself as much as I can with their low-residency program. I did already spend some time there this weekend, but I'm going to review some more now, because at 12:30 Chicago time, I have a phone interview with them. One of my professors, Robin Hemley, kindly recommended me to their program, and I would love this job so much, I can't tell you.
It's an academic gig, where you teach remotely for the most part, sending manuscripts back and forth with your students, and then two weeks out of the year (one in January, one in July), you fly out to Montpelier, Vermont for a week of intensive teaching/reading/writing with the students. There's a team-teaching component during the residency periods, which is something I really enjoy -- it was terrific teaching in concert with Jed and Susan at Oregon, and with Gavin and Kelly at New Jersey for the SH workshops. Writer-teachers have different strengths, and I think it's really valuable for writer-students to get multiple perspectives on their work. I'm also particularly impressed with the low faculty-student ratio (5:1), which means that you get to really know your students' work (much harder to do in the sort of writing class I taught at Utah, with 25 students in my class).
The pay is about half what a regular starting academic job would be, but given that you get to work mostly from home (no committee responsibilities, or the like), I think it's a very fair pay for the work. Robin recommends the program and the department highly, which is very reassuring. And of course it would be a great academic credential for me, without needing to leave Kevin in Chicago. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much -- we'll be fine if I don't get it, I'll just keep writing this next book. But oh, it would be pretty close to perfect. Wish me luck!
I graduated from Vermont College. If you have any questions about the program, I’d be happy to answer them.