It has been a long time since I've posted, and that delay is due partially to a whole variety of professional and personal-life things that keep coming up. There is some good news: my book, How Tradition Works has been accepted for publication by Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Text and Studies (MRTS published Beowulf and the Critics). An essay collection for which I'd submitted an article has gotten a book contract from U. Kentucky Press (unfortunately I now have to write the article; that's the danger of submitting an abstract that sounds great but requires a ton of not-yet-accomplished research). The first issue of Tolkien Studies is coming along, albeit slowly, and I'm now at the arm-twisting stage of my essay collection Anglo-Saxon Poetry in its Tenth-Century Context.

But it's been a busy semester, teaching Old Norse for the first time and running a Beowulf seminar (both as unpaid overloads) as well as teaching SciFi and English 101 all eat up a lot of time. And now I've got a graduate student (and we don't even have graduate students at Wheaton) who has come all the way from Hungary to study with me. Bizarre, the thought that someone would travel that far just to study with me... (and actually, he's really here because he needs to work with the mammoth bibliographical collection... he doesn't need me, just my volumes of photocopies...).
The post-tenure bug hasn't really hit too badly, except that I now find it easier to decide to go to bed instead of staying up late to plow through more work. But if a proposal I'm working on comes through (and there's some good signs) I'll have cool Tolkien-related news soon and an exciting project to work on this summer (though my wife suggests that now that I have tenure I can spend the summer putting in a new floor in our upstairs and painting the outside of the house...)