Sneaky Little Seasonses

Fall is here

It’s been a minute since my last post. Aside from the Meme Monday posts, I mean. I hope you all have been enjoying those. Part of that is business, part of that is grief.

Those seasons tend to sneak up on you.

Fall is here, whether you want it to be or not. For me, I do want it. There’s something about the crispness in the air, the shadows at night, the presence of a fire in the fireplace that makes this time of year special for me. Magical, even. It’s a time of transitions. Anything can happen in the fall, and many things do.

There are days when you see the mask of summer drop away, exposing the old bones of the forest. If spring is a time of life, and summer is a time of blossoming, then fall is the end of days; but it is also a reminder that this is an ancient cycle, one that the world has endured over and over. One that it will endure, time and again.

Fall has always been one of my favorite seasons. Others… not so much.

This last month has been a hectic season for me. There’s been a lot of work to do with my brothers as we clear my dad’s house and deal with his estate. The job of dealing with his library has fallen to me. Partly because it needs to be done, and partly because I asked for it; but largely because it is a part of my life and my childhood.

That’s about 100 cubic feet of books right there, give or take. There’s a tremendous amount of history, of course. Dad was an amateur historian and loved anything related to the Civil War or Word War II, with side expeditions into the Revolutionary War, and the American West.

I never read that much history. My youngest brother and he connected over that. For me, it was his collection of science fiction and fantasy. We’re talking generations of novels and collections from the Science Fiction Book Club. Classics like Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, Fred Pohl, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Kuttner… you name the author, they were in there. His love for all things military led to him having a nice collections of military SF as well. I grew up reading of men and machines that inhabited strange worlds, distant shores, and far-flung dimensions.

Much of that has already been packed up and delivered to their new homes. Some have gone to Goodwill, others to libraries, some to a local Veteran’s center. I’ve snagged a few for my own library; but the truth is that I did that long ago, pilfering—er, engaging in long-term borrowing!—a few of Dad’s books that meant a lot to me. It’s good to know they are going where they will be appreciated, but that’s a small comfort in a season when their departure signals a change in my own life that I’d hoped to put off for a few more years.

The Business of Writing

A mid-week update on my three major commitments: to write, to edit, and to read.

I’ll be heading to the World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls this weekend. My schedule is very light, with only one panel and one reading. Which is actually pretty nice. That will give me the opportunity to check out other panels, hang out, and hopefully talk shop with other authors there.

In my last update, I mentioned that I was finishing September with a pretty good track record for writing, all things considered. I ended the month with 30,187 words written. 26,017 of those were on Blue as Sky, and took me 33h 54m to write. That project is currently sitting at just over 45k words, by the way, so it’s roughly halfway there.

What does that all mean?

For Blue as Sky, I’m writing at about 767 words/hour. Let’s say 750 to give me a little buffer, and… oh, would you look at that, that’s about what I’ve been seeing every time I’ve bothered to measure my productivity! Interesting. It seems I write about 750 words per hour, regardless of what I’m working on.

If I’m shooting for 90k words, that means I’ve got 45k left to write. That comes out to 60 hours of writing, which is honestly staggering to me. I write a little over an hour a day on average. That’s less than 60 days to wrap this up. I mean, then you go back and edit to file off the rough edges and all that, but… I could put this to bed before the end of the year. Crazy!

Other Stuff

The FamilyLife Fall Gala went very well this year! We’re still working on totaling up the giving, but it looks like it’s going to be on par with what we’ve seen from previous years. I came out of it energized as well, and I’m looking forward to working with our new Director and the staff to implement some ideas that we’ve been kicking around.