Another One Bites The Dust

B'bye Labour Day Weekend. It ends as it should; cold, gloomy windy - without the 'bang' and definitely with a whimper. No last blast BBQ, no run to the LCBO - simply with a roast of port simmering, a husband snoozing and two cats clawing more holes in my sofa. It's not officially Fall by the calendar but the feeling hangs heavily in the air, like the smell of decomposing greenery in my recycle bin.

I Love Fall! It's my 'summer.' I love digging out the cable-knits, donning my long pants and not have to worry about keeping up my pedicure or feeling forced to shave something every time I hit the shower. Not to mention that the rivers of sweat-inducing humidity will soon clear out and late afternoons - or early mornings - will be perfect for walks.

I find I hit my creative stride in the Fall. Ideas seem to come easier, not beaten down (I suppose) by the oppresive heat of summer. Things seem to flow smoother, faster and with a more steady rhythm. Some people are Spring writers - preferring to wait until the last petrified pile of grey snow has melted before they buckle down to the keyboard. I know a few - very few - summer writers. These are mostly people who make the weekend run to the cottage and pound away at a keyboard on a dock, surrounded by water, beer and have rivulets of sunscreen dripping off their nose and splashing off the space bar. The majority of my writer friends leave it all for the winter months - closing up social shop at 00:01 on November 1, immediately after disposing of the wilted pumpkin and sweeping the evenings' accumulation of empty chip bags and Kit Kat wrappers off the porch. They are also the same people who wake up on the 23rd of December, throw a wreath on the door, grab some Wal-Mart gift cards, a pre-stuffed turkey and call it Christmas. I really admire those types of people. I collide with them in the dying days of Fall, usually in the middle of the Wal-Mart line.

If I'm a good writer and I carry the momentum through until Easter, that gives me enough lead time to hit the end-of-winter sales and shop for next Christmas without having to break a sweat. That's when I see the last of the winter writers, wincing at the sunlight and preparing their edits to send off material in advance of the pre-writer's season editorial rush. (For you non-writers out there, Spring and Summer mean a lot of writing conferences - RT, BEA, RWA - after which editors are deluged with new manuscripts.)

And so, here it is. For every writer there is Season. For every a season there is a new book. My season is heavily polluted with edits and the raking of new ideas, or in lieu of, leaves from my neighbour's encrouching Maple tree. And seeing that my neighbours have just left for a month in Newfoundland, I may spend my dwindling summer hours on a ladder with a very long pair of pruning shears.