Of all the seasons I've lost this year, this one hurts worst. 

Let summer be sucked into a hole. Let the hot days drip down the backs of someone else's thighs, let the mercury climb up the pole for someone who has dollar bills for him. I missed the summer, sitting inside and hoping things would get better. Summer is gone. 

Spring hurts a little more, but I can live without it. Missed out on beestings and pollen sneezes. I heard the squirells chasing each other anyway, mad with fuckjuice as they scrabbled across the rooftops. It was still early in the pandemic. We had sourdough and optimism. We believed Halloween could be salvaged. 

But here we are in the bleak, burning season. New books tumbling down the pike to pile against the locked doors of empty bokstores. Candy stocked for children who will never come to the door, to be eaten sullenly while drunk. A walk in the cemetery under red skies, the sun a tarnished copper coin in the bottom of a fountain where people wash their feet. No apples will be picked, no hay will be ridden. The patches will be pumpkinless and I am contemplating yet another set of yearly rituals to be scaled back, moved to Zoom, or cancelled altogether. 

Let's play wake the dead anyway. I'm still writing love letters to loves I cannot be fleshly with. I'm going broke in fragrant black candles trying to make my bedroom/office/tomb a more inviting space. I'm still reading excellent creepy books, like "The Only Good Indians" by Stephen Graham Jones. Still planning my yearly scary story party (write me back if you'd like an invite. It's on Zoom instead of my living room. All time zones welcome.)

Of all the seasons, this is the one I can't ignore. I want to count my harvest. I want to plan for winter. I want to believe in time's gentlemanly ways again, instead of knowing it to be a rude dance partner who has clearly slipped me something. 

Can you count a waltz? Let's dance the harvest. 

I'm teaching a class with Marianne Kirby this month on how to write fat characters without lazy tropes or harmful stereotypes. This is an easy thing to overlook in your work, and also an easy one to fix. It's through Writing the Other, an award-winning class series set up to give writers the tools to write about people who aren't like them... which is always a hot topic in this business. If my class is useful to you, consider signing up. If it's not, they probably have something else that will be. 

I sold two essays just recently. One will be in Uncanny magazine, and the other will be in the inagural issue of Fantasy magazine. 

And my next book is officially out on submission. This is one of those things so glorious, so terrifying that I can't look directly at it. I don't think about the process. I let it happen in some forbidden tabernacle and I hold the rope and wait for the priest (my agent) to yell back to me about what she sees. 

It's time to eat and be eaten. 

Hungry like the wolf, 

Meg