Fall's Back

The calendar has come back around to fall, with its various seasonal trappings. The parade of holidays is underway, the days are shortening, the weather is changing. Here in northern California, the past month has brought a shift to less chance of sudden heat waves and more of sudden rain.

November has several traditional associations, including US elections, so I'll remind you to vote if there's an election happening where you live. I'll also remind you that any writers you know might become especially weird next month, due to November's connection with extreme writing.

If you're reading my blog, you're probably aware of National Novel Writing Month, an annual event that encourages writing a 50,000-word novel during the 30 days of November, for the joy, challenge, and community of it. You may not have heard that the nonprofit organization which provided the infrastructure for NaNoWriMo shut down earlier this year. Despite this unfortunate development, the spirit of NaNo survives. Plenty of writers will still push themselves to meet big goals in November, either solo or as part of a group, whether or not they're specifically counting to 50k. (One place to find resources and an encouraging newsletter is NaNo 2.0, a more modest endeavor launched by NaNo founder Chris Baty and other longtime volunteers.)

The spirit of NaNo always calls to me in the fall, and while I'm not setting myself any word count goals, I will be using November as motivation for increased writing progress. In my last update, two months ago, I shared photographic evidence of the planning I was doing to sort out structural changes and make decisions before moving ahead. The planning stage dragged on for longer than I intended, and I'm ready to get back into serious writing mode.

While none of my recent work has warranted photographing, I can offer some pictures from a cool bookstore I visited in early October while on a great family trip. The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles is a huge store with a labyrinthine level of shelves, nooks, and book sculptures. I shared additional photos on Bluesky.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Celia Mattison at Literary Hub asks, What’s With All the Sheep on Book Covers?: "I clocked the new ovine ascendence because of a longtime friend and book industry colleague, Jordan Bascom. Once a week, she looks at the covers of dozens of forthcoming titles and we compare notes on what is in vogue, identifying covers with shared motifs, fonts, or images. Our shared affection for the animal kingdom means that we pay special attention to any cover vaguely zoological (outside of birds, which have remained ubiquitous cover fodder for decades). When she sent me the third sheep cover in a calendar year, I asked her what she thought these covers might be trying to say. 'This is not your grandmother’s pastoral fiction,' Jordan replied wryly." (I found this article particularly interesting because I hadn't noticed the trend, though I had spotted the previous wave of rabbit covers.)