Happy New Year!

or how I think about September

Anyone else?

There’s just something about the arrival of September. Crystal blue skies and huge puffy clouds, crisp nights and warm late afternoons, and back in the day, kicking all of the children out of my house. Ahhhh!

Kids are grown now, but I still have that refreshed attitude every September, the autumn wind blows away the heat and sweat of the summer and brings new possibilities and opportunities. It feels like the new year so much more than the changing of the actual date in January. For me there’s definitely a leftover “back to school” excitement even though I’m long past my school days and even my kids are years past theirs. (Except for my youngest who is still in college) I always loved returning to school myself, even in the rough years of junior high when I was self-tortured because I didn’t know how to curl my bangs just right into that gravity-defying poof, or my mom couldn’t afford to buy me Guess jeans so I’d buy a wrong-sized pair at the thrift store, remove the patch, and sew it on my “less than” jeans back pocket. (Actually I don’t think she would have bought them for me even if she could afford them, something to which I am very grateful.)

Autumn itself is a bittersweet time for me because I dread winter, and most of fall reminds me winter is coming. But September is special. And once I entered the world of publishing, even though school days were gone, submission days took place. Publishing is a strange world of occasionally opening doors. During the summer, and the long winter holiday season—Thanksgiving until mid-January—publishing is all but a ghost industry. I don’t know many jobs where people seem to be on vacation so much, but publishing is one of them. That’s not to say all the employees are actually on vacation, but things like “summer fridays” seem to somehow be happening all year round and unless you are a fixture in a publishing house, you have to follow the schedule.

There are two main windows when agents (and authors) take advantage of sending new projects to publishers—one is after the New Year, and one is my new year, September. Of course manuscripts can be sent whenever you want if the editor is accepting, but these two periods of (most of) fall and the first quarter or two of the actual new year are the biggest submission periods. As I went from writer to agented writer to author, I learned these patterns as my agent navigated best times to send things out.

This is called “going on submission” or being “on sub”, which I will delve into more next week, along with some exciting news….

For now, I’m wishing everyone a happy fall with hopes of renewed energy, spirit, and creativity. And if pumpkin spice is your thing, your time has arrived.