The Turning of the Year š
Radio-landās been abuzz with festival season, but otherwise a totally unplanned and very welcome summer hiatus in the garden, not-quite-as-busy-as the hardworking beesā¦
Thanks to the real gardeners, the punkin is chunkinā and the zukes areā¦ pukinā (sorry, canāt resist). š
Charlotte's pumpkin... can you spot her? š·ļø
As geese honk and the northern hemisphere tilts toward fall, those of us whose nerdly hearts fibrillate to the rhythm of the academic year get the usual little bursts of dork excitement as we wake up to crows cawing (happy scholastic New Year, Nerds! šš¦āā¬š).
This year, my fizzy feels were all about another pending Surrey International Writersā Conference (SiWC) - even though I wasnāt going to make it, imagining my friends and colleagues there in their āback-to-schoolā duds made me all thrilly-chilly October happy inside. But then I belatedly checked a thread and found out that this yearās conference has been cancelledā¦
The best advice for stories, brutal in all other contexts. (Image: SiWC)
ā¦taken out by a labour dispute: and I can only say, from conversations with the incredibly gracious hotel staff in previous years,* that they deal with some wild things (not from the writers - apparently weāre an unsurprisingly tame lot) and deserve the best work conditions possible!
*You can read more about last yearās unhot mess** in this highly professional Writersā Conference Guide.
**I recently learned that āhot messā doesnāt mean, as Iād thought, a mess whose temperature is elevated by its entropy - like something boiling over on the stove - but instead that you are still aesthetically pleasing in your messiness. Since I absolutely canāt cop to any such thing, Iāve corrected my own usage.
Luckily, as every kid knowsā¦ thereās always next year. Sparkle on, SiWC friends - see you at the next turn of the year! āØš šøļø