October burned bright and has now faded away into only embers of the most magical time of the year. I am always morose in the days after Samhain. It is the night that I feel the most excited for life, when it seems like the border between me and the rest of the world crumbles away along with the veil betwixt worlds, and there is so much joy humming through every moment. The jaws of reality shut fast and tight at the end of this month and the frigid winter months loom ahead of us with sparkling lights, deathly reminders of cold, and yearning for our pasts and our families and our mythologized ideas of these things that so often never came for even an instant into being.

November is a slowing, a gentle call to prepare ourselves for the end of the year and the resilience needed to make it from here to there. It is a month of apples and cinnamon, rainy days that whisper of frost, and glancing over December as you may across an ominous and enchanting moor doused in mist.

This is also the month of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), when writers and other creatives get to work on large projects alongside others who share this passion and dream of creation. I have attempted to participate in NaNoWriMo every year since I first learned of it, but somehow always managed to become too overwhelmed, depressed, and/or busy to finish. I am by nature a slow thinking and moving person who requires a lot of reflection and research to bring my ideas to the surface. I will try again this year to use this month to dedicate time towards my novels and in an attempt to give them the life that I feel they deserve. To anyone reading this who is participating in NaNoWriMo, I wish you all the luck in the world!

As always, I’ll end this month’s blog post with some poetry bits:

When the blood came so much left with it./ The fragile sanctity of childhood withered away from me. 

The body is a beast begging for salvation./ Have you asked it how and why it holds on/ salivates for trauma, before it can even grasp onto memories? 

The magnitude of the lie shakes, wakes people a world away from fitful dreaming. 

Love, Ariel