November
No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon –
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! –
November!
~ Thomas Hood
Methinks Thomas Hood had a tiny bit of an attitude problem. Just a little one. Okay, so he was joking, but yeah, I get that many people HATE this time of year; once the pretties of autumn fade out, with all of the foliage turning, we’re left with the stabbing fingers of twigs poking into the bleak sky, and darkness. The time changes next week for the US, this past weekend for the UK, and then it’s Winter In Earnest.
But November is also the countdown to the day of grace, in which we stop whining for five seconds and go, “Okay, yeah, we’re not dead. We have a decent place to live, in this country. (Most of the time.) Things are not that bad.” This, coming directly after Día de los Muertos, or The Day of the Dead, is probably a healthy thought process.
In the spirit of John Scalzi’s wonderful post(s) counting down the days ’til Thanksgiving with an Advent calendar, I’m going to write, live, and breathe gratitude this month.
Today’s thought: Got a text this morning that my mother is in the hospital. No gratitude for this, obviously; I am … a bit beyond frantic that I am five thousand miles away. However, my older sisters seem to have things well in hand, texting me updates, and I am told that All Is Well, and it’s only overnight, and now that doctors know what is wrong (apparently a pulmonary embolism, exacerbated by a flight), they can easily Fix It. I am grateful that my mother has four other children who can hover around her and annoy her until she shoos them all away and gets up out in self-defense.
As always, I am grateful: it could have been worse.
And, on this second day of November, I will hold that thought close to me.
Writer-illustrator Ursula Vernon has declared this National Novel Finishing Month. Congratulations to those of you doing NaNoWriMo; I am deep within NaNoFiMo, and I mean it. Even with doing reading for the Cybils, I have a lot of unconstructed time in the evenings (as Tech Boy finishes the corrections on his dissertation and resubmits it in ONE MORE TIME) and I could really finish my mystery.
I LOVE my mystery.
I don’t often talk about work in progress, because it never stays the same from one day to the next, but I will give you some hints which won’t change: an obsession with The 69 Eyes, stalking Moths, extra relatives, a “house divided,” elderly neighbors, and annoying eldest sisters.
I hope this novel (working title “Favorite Son”) turns out to be as much fun to read as it is to write! (And I hope that fun lasts through the denouement. Writing mysteries is HARD. You have to almost keep the ending a secret from yourself!)
Okay. Back to work.