Fall

Today is all about Marked copyedits. Publishing is always festino lente, and even though the kids have today off, there is no rest for the wicked or the writer. Even though my major focus is the CEs today, I’m going to alternate between them and Harmony. I started the latter as a gift to my agent and a way to keep myself occupied while waiting for a publisher or two to evacuate or get off the pot, so to speak, but it’s…growing.

It helps that gray skies have moved in. I’m more productive in the autumn, most productive in the rainy Pacific Northwest winter, middling in spring, and the summer is generally a sweat-soaked interval of beating myself over the head for diminishing returns. When the leaves start to turn and the rains sweep in, something inside me unfolds. Snowy winters, I think, wouldn’t do me much good. But the rain…it taps, it soothes, it whispers. It makes me glad to have a roof, of course. It is an immense luxury to come home from a run, sweat-soaked and miserably streaming with cold water, take a hot shower, put on dry clothes, and settle down to write.

Socks, especially. There’s just something about a good pair of socks on a rainy day. Of course, as my writing partner always gently ribs me, I’m overly concerned with my feet anyway. Dancing made me hypersensitive about my feet, my knees, and a few other things.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to more gray days, to the leaves falling, to comfortable temperatures, to thick sweaters and hot tea in the afternoons. Odd Trundles, of course, is surprised each year when the water starts to fall from the sky, and requires an adjustment period. He somehow forgets, during the summer, that such a thing as damp air exists. It’s both hilarious and a little saddening to see him high-stepping to shake his paws off, especially when he gives me a look of such mild, baffled dejection, as if suspecting I’m somehow responsible for the weather and have turned it upside-down just to mess with him.

I keep glancing out the window and seeing the clouds, the green of the cedars washed clean of summer’s dust. I know there will be at least one more torrid week or so, false summer ripening the last tomatoes, but there’s relief in sight.