Hallelujah, October’s Here!

Hello, dear peeps! First, a huge thank-you to everyone who’s already ordered my new poetry chapbook, Of Stars & Smoke: poems for the dark wane of the year! I hope you’re enjoying the poems and I wish for you a Halloween full of delightful treats! I need to let you know that early bird specials are now over and normal pricing has taken effect, but the paperback is still a deal at $8.95, and the e-book is just $2.99. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness and support in this endeavor!

I don’t typically make resolutions, but with the reduction in temperatures (small and gradual, but I’ll take it), I’m starting to get more excited about cooking again. Even longing to make foods that I never think of until autumn. Baked apples, for instance. Nothing’s stopping me from having them in August, but they don’t sound nearly as appealing then. Piping hot, bubbling  with sweet and cinnamon-y juices and maybe a decadent swirl of heavy cream on top… Yeah, that’s a cold front dessert for me. Something to make when I look out the window and see the Blue Norther swelling in the sky way beyond the railroad tracks, tearing toward us, gathering itself to wallop us with a blast of bone-chilling air. It’s required that the north-facing windows be open to feel that shivery drop in the temperature. So, spending fun time in the kitchen making baked apples and other cold weather indulgences (like my grandmother's cinnamon icebox cookies, made with two whole tablespoons of that warming, seasonal spice, and alarmingly irresistible): That’s #1 on my list of autumnal goals.

And #2: This will be a pumpkin-carving Halloween. They’ve slacked off to an every-other-year pattern, even though I always sketch out a few possible designs in hope of using them. But half the time I look at them and think, “Too much effort.” Yes, they are, but dangit, I won’t be the person lying on her deathbed regretting all the jack-o’-lanterns she didn’t carve.

Goal #3 will require much more time to complete than these next few months of autumn. At the speed I write (glacial), it’s likely going to take the next year or more. But I’m excited to tell you that by the end of 2023 I’ll have a good start on my next book! I can’t risk talking all the air out of it, but it’s novel-length speculative fiction, and it involves no characters from the Space Between series. And that’s all I can reveal right now. Except that it seems to be turning out to be YA despite my best efforts to rein it in. And that the first draft has already been written. 🙂

I hope everyone is doing well, and if you have fun plans and aspirations for autumn, I’d love to hear about them! Thank you all again, so much!