When Am I?

It's about a million degrees outside (in Fahrenheit, that's 93), and I'm grateful that last year I finally gave in and accepted that I live in a place where sometimes it's an excellent idea to have air conditioning. Here in northern California's Santa Clara Valley, we have nearly perfect weather, except when we don't.

The kind of heat wave we're having this week occurs more often in July than late September, but the weather has been unusual all year, here and everywhere else, so what are you gonna do? (Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.)

It's not as though I ever know what month it is anyway. I think it's likely that many people who grow up and leave behind the school calendar sometimes lose track of their place in the year. But this is especially a problem for me because I spend so much time inhabiting a fictional world. In there, I'm quite clear on the date. Out here, is it my birthday yet? And did you say 2011?

Inside my novel right now, it's chilly and the sky is gray and it's been raining. It's November, mainly because this novel started as a project for National Novel Writing Month, which occurs during that month. (I'd love to do a study to find out how many NaNoWriMo novels are set in November.)

Soon I'll move on to the next storyline, and I'll be in a different season and a different decade. And in the real world, I'll be wandering around confused, wearing shorts and wondering when it got so cold.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Dwight Garner writes in the New York Times about authors who release books only once a decade: "Distressingly, this kind of long gestation period is pretty typical for America's corps of young, elite celebrity novelists." (Thanks, Guardian Books Blog!)