Friends,

It’s been a while, hasn’t it. Having not blogged in a year, I’m feeling the rust as I type this message to you. If you are new to my site, or perhaps you’ve been around but need a refresher as to why I was M.I.A., let me explain. I released my most recent book, Needless, on January 5 of last year and within a week I was a new father to a beautiful baby boy that my wife and I named Everett. He is now going on thirteen months old, which is a sign of the times flying by. A lot has happened in that year, which I’ll talk a little bit about now.

 

Heading into the week of my wife’s due date (and really, even before that time), I had already made up my mind that I was going to take a break from writing and blogging for a while to focus on my newborn son and the crazy transition that ensued. If you’re a parent, you know. With Needless being the last (for now) book in my WWII collection, I didn’t have pressing plans to write and publish anything in the immediate future. So I artificially bookended that chapter of my life as an author, knowing that I’d begin a new chapter eventually…and hopefully be in a better position to write and work on my projects. I would like to think that that time has arrived, or at least is nearly upon us.

Over the past handful of months, I’ve worked sparingly on a project about which I’m very excited – and for various reasons. I won’t go into much detail right now, as I want this post to be one that gets me back into the routine of blogging and sharing my writing life (and other stuff) with you. I will say, though, that this next project is not WWII-related, and it is something very different from what I’ve written before. And I think it is a ‘good’ different. I will have more on this in the future, as my focus is on many things. The publication goal for this project is very rough – a few years or so out from release – so I’m in no rush to divulge story details and the like.

To wrap things up here, I’d like to list a small number of things I’ve done or that have changed since I last blogged:

• I have taken and passed two more graduate courses for my MA in European History program (Graduate Seminar in European History and Modern European History)
• I have started my third year teaching high school social studies in 2017-2018; the highlight so far this year has been seeing the curriculum I wrote over the past year come to life and bear fruit – spiraled curriculum is seemingly helping my students better grasp the information they’re being taught
• I went to New York in July ’17 to watch a professional football (soccer) match between the Italian team Juventus and the Catalan giants Barcelona, the highlight of which was definitely seeing many big names play live – notably Lionel Messi
• I lost a net weight of 12 pounds since January ’17 when I made it a personal goal to start getting serious about my health; I’m one week into my next year’s cycle and I’ve already dropped two pounds and am feeling much better than I had been
• And of course, the last year has been amazingly wonderful as I got to watch my son grow into a budding one-year-old with such a great personality (minus the random screams)…all with my wife by my side!

I hope that things have been well for you, my readers, over the past year, and I pray that you can understand my desire to take a break after three years straight of writing and living life. My plan moving forward is this: I will start out slow so I can effectively get back into a blogging groove and not burn out after a month, and to do this I will post once a month as we get into the summer season. I’ll make each post about a certain topic or interest of mine (with education, writing, and traveling being key inclusions), so that way it’s not just about the status of my current project.

Thank you again for reading, and if you’re new – welcome and feel free to subscribe to my blog. I appreciate having people who take an interest in what I do, even if it’s just through a quick blog post once a month.

Until next time,

Eli