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At last, October.

With fall officially upon us at the end of September, I start to feel a little more human as the days get shorter and the temperatures start to come down. It’s no secret that summer and I do not get along. Allergies that reared their heads in spring keep right on trying to kill me throughout the dog days of July and August, and as someone who breaks into a sweat any time the temperature is above 75, summer means I perpetually look like I just ran a road race.

When October gets here, though, shirts with sleeves become an option again. I might even be sighted wearing trousers. (No promises, though.) I start going outside willingly, and not just to get in the car or go to the store.

Basically, I start to exhale.

October is also when I tend to take stock of time. Partly, that’s because it’s my birthday month, so I contemplate—okay, maybe that’s too fancy a word for it. I think about my most recent trip around the sun that’s just come to an end and what, if anything, has changed since the last time I passed this point on the circle.

Obviously, you don’t have to wait for an arbitrary date on the calendar to take stock, and it’s certainly true that I ask myself “what the hell are you doing, Ricker?” on more occasions than just this.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways that I use my time, and I’ve been realizing that I only have so much energy and can’t do as much or take on as many obligations as I used to. For that matter, maybe I wasn’t even able to do it back then and was instead borrowing energy from the future and leaving the tank empty later.

I can only do that for so long before life basically says, “Hey, slow down.” Case in point, I was sick a couple times this summer and had no choice other than to rest. And wouldn’t you know, that’s what I should have been doing all along, because I started to feel better.

So if I have a goal for the rest of the year—besides the obvious finish revising the novel goal that’s been the goal all year—it’s to not try and do all the things. I took this semester off from teaching so that I could focus on that goal, so as far as I’m concerned, until next year, I have one job: finish the damn novel. And I’m getting really close.

What I’ve been reading:

September was a great month for reading, mainly because we went out of town for a week and I had a lot of time to read. So, some recommendations:

Less Is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer, is his follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning Less, which I loved. Less Is Lost took a while to grow on me, but once we were on the road and I had nothing else to focus on, I really connected with the humor and the plight of the main character, a fifty-something gay novelist. (Gee, I wonder why it spoke to me….)

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, was a recommendation from someone in an online business community I participate in, Wandering Aimfully, and if you know me, you know that I’m not a big reader of self-help books (unless they’re books about writing). This one was less a book about productivity and more about making peace with our finite capacity and our finite time on this world.

Fall for Him, by Andie Burke. I love reading romance, and I picked this one up purely based on an ad I saw on Instagram (I have finally trained the algorithm to show me ads for queer books—and if I have to deliberately train an algorithm, don’t even tell me jack about artificial intelligence, because it doesn’t exist). Where was I? Oh, right: queer romance. This one was charming, about two disaster gays falling for each other, somewhat literally: one of them falls through the ceiling of the other one’s apartment. There’s also a dog involved, so of course I was hooked. There’s also a homeowners association Karen character that reminded me way too much of the neighborhood where my partner and I used to live, so I was also rooting for her to get what she deserved. (And she does.)

Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go, by Kelly S. Thompson. Saving the best for last here. True confession, Kelly is a dear friend, so I was predisposed to love this in the first place. But her account of her stormy relationship with her late sister blew me away with its unsparing candor and its beautiful writing. It’s been nominated for awards and it is so deserving. Read this, and then if you have a sibling, call them, because you still can.

That’s all for this month. November’s letter will be a couple weeks later than normal because we’re heading out of town for a couple weeks. When we come back, though, I should have exotic pictures to share!

Where are we going, you ask? That would be telling. :)