Fall and falling up.
I still am not convinced that autumn is here, but the leaves are finally falling, and the nights are cold enough that I can leave my window open at night for the pleasure of burying my face under the covers. I don’t have a favorite season, but I love feeling the seasons turn. Right now I would say, with Sei Shōnagon: For me, the autumn. But when I am wrapping myself in woollen coats and going out for walks in northern Wisconsin, I will praise winter; and in Kansas summer, when I feel the heat warming my bones, I will say I love that, too. At least for a month or two.
Last month, I was thinking about how to find my way to a productive and satisfying life when there isn’t a job, however disliked, to give it a form. Mind you, I wanted to write, but I couldn’t seem to get going. And everything else was like that, as well. When the week has nothing in it but some meals with friends, it doesn’t matter when you start any project. You can always start it later today, after this nap, or tomorrow, even. Or the day after. This is pernicious with big projects—if you delay starting a book-length project every single day for six months, you are screwed—but even the smaller stuff.
We forget how much of our satisfaction in life comes from achieving little things. Enough little checks in the done boxes of our lives can do a lot to making us feel engaged with the hours of our days in positive ways. Our dayjobs are designed to make us forget that. The real work of living is work, right? So it takes over. We run out of hours in the day, what with work and commuting and the big-ticket, nonwork elements like family. Usually there is time available in there somewhere, but it’s exhausting to know what is the best use of it. (Too little time and too much time share this problem.)
For most of my life, I’ve kept to-do lists. I’m efficient and don’t waste time, and yet, every time something comes off the list, something new pops up, like the hot plates at a buffet restaurant. So I have been living my life reactively, as we all mostly do. I teach to the rubric. I am never not considering what’s going into my cv or my annual self-review at work. I am aware of the books and stories I’ve planned, that I’ve told people about, that I want to get to. I take the car in, not every six thousand miles (or whatever it’s supposed to be), but when it starts to make a funny noise. I call friends because they called me first and remind me, yeah, that’s right, I really wanted to chat with so-and-so.
It's a privilege—oh my god, what a privilege—not to live reactively. I don’t know if any worker can do it when they have so much on their plates, personally, professionally, and globally. I certainly was never able to do so. And now here I am.
So, what does it mean for me, as I learn to build my own patterns? Well, I am writing more (which was always the hope). I’m involved in retrieving my health after it was eroded over those years of KU. I’m just...trying to get on happily in life. I only have this one, and I am so very, very lucky that I have this bit of time for myself.
Publishing
My story, “Country Birds” is in this year’s Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, out this month. The anthology looks fantastic! Pick it up locally or at bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-best-american-science-fiction-and-fantasy-2025-john-joseph-adams/67ceefc6f661436c?ean=9780063441477&next=t. If you can’t do that, it was published originally in Sunday Morning Transport, here: https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/country-birds
The RiverBank tabletop RPG comes out this month! If you preordered it, expect to see it in November. I’m told it will eventually also be available through conventional bookshop channels. https://riverbankrpg.com/
I started work on a new roleplaying game, based on the mechanic I designed last year for RiverBank. Working title is Bugwick, and I expect it will be at Kobold Press again. At the moment, I am marching through character creation, about seven or eight thousand words in.
I still haven’t heard from the three flash stories I sent out in later summer. If I have heard nothing by November, I’ll send them out again.
I’ve been posting haiku almost daily at BlueSky—to my mind, the best use for social media. Check it out, if you wish: https://bsky.app/profile/kijjohnson.bsky.social
Teaching
Details as I get them on the spring class, and the summer workshops.
Appearances
I’m at Collin College’s Frisco Campus in mid-November: https://www.collin.edu/news/2025/10/collinwrites25
And I’m a special guest at the Philadelphia Area Game Expo (PAGE) in January: https://tabletop.events/conventions/philadelphia-area-gaming-expo-page-3
And for the first time in years, I’ll be at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) in March next year! If I can get a room, anyway. https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/ICFA
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Stay kind, be cool, support artists.
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