Recycling some old stories

I finished another edit of my novel. The title is A Teacher First. Final decision, as they say on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. I really like the title now, whereas I was never really comfortable with the original title, Bring Back Coach Zim! I'm pretty satisfied with how the novel is looking.

I've also been doing some other writing lately, sort of. It's more like recycling some old writing. I've taken a short story I wrote about twelve years ago and rewritten it. It was poorly written but a pretty good story, in my opinion. One thing I've learned since then is how to tighten a story up. Now it's still a good story (I hope) and less poorly written. It'll be ready to submit to a few magazines by this weekend. I haven't had a short story published in two or three years, mainly because I haven't really written any for two or three years.

And I've wanted to write a few articles to submit to magazines but have been too busy (lazy). So I've taken a couple of columns that I wrote but never submitted to the Sanford News, tweaked them a little, and sent them out. I don't have a lot of faith in them, but you never know. They aren't bad, just not the best I've ever written.

I'm reading a book called Bang Your Head, about the rise and fall of heavy metal. It's good, I'm really enjoying it. And I've been reading a series of mystery novels, the Bernie and Chet series by Spencer Quinn, which I believe is a pen name for the author Peter Abrahams. Bernie is a private detective and Chet is his dog, and the stories are told from Chet's point of view. It's a good idea and really well done. I've read three of the books so far, I think there are a total of five.