Labor Day has always been a bittersweet holiday for me. On the one hand, I love autumn, and I’m always ready to say good bye to the dog days of summer and hello to a crisp snap in the air. But I love the tempo of life in the summer, especially with a kid. Summer means more time to hang out with my son, to spend time with him in the morning without struggling to get him ready for school and to play catch in the afternoon without having to bug him about doing his homework.

 

The impending school year also brings anxiety about what new things he will face. I was one of those kids, by the end of August, I was ready to go back to school. But not my son. He likes his school, but he dreads going back, dreads the newness of a new grade. I feel his anxiety, too, in a way I didn’t feel when I was a kid (not that I didn’t have plenty of other anxieties).

 

In my writing life, the change of season is important, too. All that extra downtime has to come from somewhere, and I guess a lot of it comes from my writing. I always expect to accomplish more in the summer than what I end up doing. This summer, I wrote a short story and a couple other small projects, I caught up on some reading and posted a few blogs (which take me way longer than they should). I also spent a lot of time working on an outline. Looking back, I had hoped to accomplish more.

 

Now that September is here, however, I am ready to go.

 

I don’t think it is purely coincidence that the outline I’ve been working on is just about finished, and just when it’s back-to-school time, I’m starting to write the first draft.

 

So tomorrow, we’ll chill out a bit, maybe cook out, maybe go to the pool. But then it’s back to late nights and extra coffee, bags under the eyes and a steadily growing stack of pages.

 

I’m so excited, I can hardly sleep. Maybe I’ll just stay up and write, instead.