The Shift

There is a particular kind of relief that comes with September.

Not the relief of things ending…though summer has been full enough that a breath feels earned. Something more specific than that. The relief of return. Of routine. Of knowing what the day is going to ask of you before it begins.

I believe in change. I have built my life around the willingness to pivot, to rebuild, to follow a thread even when it leads somewhere unexpected. But there is something I have come to understand about myself over the years - I do my best work in intentional motion. Not the reactive kind, where each day arrives with a new crisis to manage. The steady kind. The kind that fall tends to offer.

Cool air. Blankets. The colors arriving in the trees. Even the bugs yielding. Fall is my season in a way no other is. There is something phoenix-like about it; the world releasing what it no longer needs, making room for what comes next. As a Scorpio, I feel it in a way I’ve stopped trying to explain to people who don’t.

This fall has a particular charge to it.

The sign on Main Street

There is a street in Western New York that I drove for years on my way to and from a job (or several) that paid the bills and built the skills…and was never quite the whole story.

I drove that street in the particular way you drive a route you’ve driven a hundred times; not really seeing it, just moving through it, toward wherever you were going next.

This summer, I was at a signing at a shop on that street. I saw my name on the sign outside.

Not as an employee en route to elsewhere. Not as a client. As an author.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Long enough that it registered as something worth remembering. Long enough that I understood, in the way you understand things that have been building for a long time, that the woman who used to drive that street on the way to someone else’s vision, had finally arrived at her own.

That was the moment that culminated the summer for me. Not the sales numbers, or the follower count, or any of the metrics that tell you whether something is working. Just a name on a sign on a street I used to drive without really seeing.

What found me in the research

I have been circling Book 3 for months.

The present day story has always been clear; the series builds on itself and Sophia’s journey continues in ways I can feel even when I can’t fully articulate them yet. But the past timeline, the historical thread that will run through the third book, has been elusive in a way the first two were not.

With The Harbinger and The Enigma, I had context. Information from sessions that gave me a felt sense of the time and place before I ever started research (combined with my own affinity and past learning on the timeframes). I knew where I was going before I started driving.

Book 3 has been different. I had glimpses. A vague sense of a world that was ancient, but not clearly which one. I started writing in one direction and the further I went, the less right it felt. The more I forced it, the more it resisted.

So last Friday I stopped forcing it. I approached the research from a completely different angle; not looking for confirmation of what I already suspected, but genuinely open to being led somewhere new.

The rabbit hole that opened was not what I expected.

By the end of the day I had found it. Not chosen it. Found it. In the way this series always works; the story knowing before I do, leading me somewhere I couldn’t have planned for, revealing itself when I finally stopped insisting on my own version of it.

I’m not ready to say where it is yet. But…I can tell you that when I found it, something clicked into place with an almost uncanny precision. The kind that makes you sit back and think, “of course”. Of course it was always going to be there.

What September is asking

The fall events are approaching. Kister Water Mill in three weeks. More to come after that. The series keeps insisting on more and I keep following it there.

But underneath the calendar, something quieter is being asked of me this season.

To write. To go back to the thing that started all of this; the actual making of the story, the sitting down and following the thread wherever it leads. The events and the signings and the outreach have all been necessary and meaningful. But the book is the thing. It is always the thing.

September is asking me to remember that.

I’m listening.