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Summer’s over and fall is on the way, it’s time to let you all know what’s going on with this blog.

To be incredibly brief: nothing.

After the flurry of activity that saw me posting here twice a week, and then reliably once a week, and that helped me post all 3100+ lines of the poem, activity here will run down to nothing.

Why

There are a few reasons for this change to the plans that I’d made for the blog back at the beginning of 2018.

1. Work

One of these is my continual search for work.

I’m a freelancer, and perhaps was too proud of that fact to realize that I just haven’t been able to consistently earn enough to make a living from freelancing alone. As a result I’m starting to look into office and retail work, which will necessarily leave me with less time to tend to this blog and create content for it.

2. New Challenges

Another is that I want to move onto the next big challenge in my literary life: publishing. I’ve written a lot of stories over the years, and a handful of them have been published in various collections and journals, but I’ve never approached publishing as a business. This needs to change before 2019, since not only am I planning on launching the ebook (and eventually the hardcopy) of my translation of Beowulf in that year, but I’m also planning to publish my own original fiction then as well.

3. There’s Just So Little Time

Preparing my translation and those other works so that I can completely follow through with my self-publishing plans will take me some time over these next few months. And time spent with my fiancée and on whatever work I end up with will leave me with too little time to make the kind of content that I’d want to post on this site.

As a result, until my translation gets published in the new year, this site is going to function as more of an archive than an active blog. It’s my hope that people will still come across it (and be directed to it!) and find what’s posted here interesting and engaging.

The Podcast

As for the podcast, I’m sad to say that it’s not going to continue beyond the current three episodes.

I’d like to deeply thank author Paul Begadon and Illustrator Alexis Fajardo for their time and participation in that experiment. And I’d also like to apologize to them for not doing more with it. Someday down the road I’d love to do some sort of classical epic poetry podcast. For now, though, it just makes more sense for it to come to an end.

Wrap-Up

Thanks to everyone who’s followed along with this blog over the years. If you know people who are looking for what I’d call a casually loyal translation of Beowulf, I hope that you’ll point them over here.

In the meantime, I’ll be linking all of the clean poem pieces together for easy navigation on this site. Watch for the new intro post for this blog this Saturday (September 8).

And keep your eyes peeled in December 2018 for the launch announcement for the e-book of my translation!

Thanks again to all of you!
-Nicholas “NSCZach” Zacharewicz