Time to Hit the Books

Happy September! Here in Toronto, Canada, we’ve just come off a sweltering Labour Day long weekend…but even still, whenever the wind blew, there was the faintest of chills in the air. Autumn is coming. The biggest sign of this: all across Canada, Labour Day means back to school.

Mind you, nobody in my household actually attends or works at a school. But I’ve never lost the sense that September marks a new year, a new beginning. (I celebrate January 1, too. Why not have an opportunity for two fresh starts a year?) Now is the time to step out of vacation mode (or “spend the glorious summer weekends pretending you’re on vacation” mode, as the case may be) and move into Getting Stuff Done.

I’ll admit that I’m much better at planning to Get Stuff Done than I am at doing it. But I am feeling like it’s time to work on projects related to (dare I say it?) writing. Over the last six weeks I’ve slowly been moving back to the page. I went on retreat for five days and banged out over 10K words on a co-written novel. Then I wrote three shorts, which may never see the light of day, but hey, that’s another 4K words written by me that exist in the world now and didn’t before. Then I edited the first third of those 10K and kept going.

Do I have a plan? Yep. My co-writer and I are setting regular deadlines…which, even if we don’t quite make them, still help keep us typing. I’m also thinking about blogging again, because from past experience, the more words one writes (whether fiction or non-), the harder it is for the Inner Critic to keep up.

I’ve been off my game for a long time. It’ll take a while to come back. But I’m starting to think it’s possible.

Here’s to September, and new beginnings!