Me in the cafe area at the Beaulieu Lausanne, a conference center where an art expo took place in early October. Can’t say I liked any of the art, but I enjoyed seeing the current art-world and gallery trends on display. October 1, 2023.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends. Previously, I used these posts to hold myself accountable on progress toward my annual goals. Starting in January 2023, I broadened these posts to address more generally my observations and experiences for the month. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

October kicked off in a rush, with an art-fair event followed by two hikes to enjoy the last of the sun and the warmth before the autumn kicked in (which always triggers my hibernation instinct), followed by a theater event, and all mixed up with a bunch of errands that had kept getting put off over the busy-to-hectic spring and summer months.

All this to say that I more than welcomed the downshift at midmonth into a quieter couple of weeks to round out October.

Perfect timing, too, as around midmonth is when days leading into weeks of rain and wind and cold set in—plus the time change that happened for us here in Europe late in the month that brings sunset shortly after 5 p.m. (Ouch.)

Yep, hibernation has now set in.

However, the turning inward and settling down didn’t extend to my fiction efforts. I managed by the end of October to achieve one of my biggest goals for the year: I finished what I can definitively say is the first draft of the novel I had on my plate for 2023, which now has the working title Get Your Needs Met.

A first draft is far from a finished, marketable novel, but it’s a huge milestone toward getting there. I’ll now let the draft rest so that I can come back to it for draft two in January.

Meantime, I’m revisiting Invisible Gorilla, the novel that I’d been sending to agents for representation consideration, and I’m working on hashing out the theme for the novel I’ll map out in 2024 as I work on the later drafts of this year’s novel and adjust 2022’s novel.

Otherwise, in addition to those two aforementioned hikes, I decided to adopt as a habit one of the yoga classes I tried out at a then-new studio on the last day of September. My home yoga efforts continue, but this more intensive class on a regular schedule with a live teacher is helping me progress my practice. It requires getting up at an absurd hour three days a week, but I’ve so far found the trade-off worthwhile.

With the hibernation instinct fully installed, I expect a calm and quiet and introspective wind-down to the year.

I still have a few more goals to achieve—that I believe I can achieve—and I have other goals on my 2023 program that, at this stage of the year and in this season, I can see will not get checked off the list. In some cases, the reasons I couldn’t control. In other cases, I wonder whether I really wanted to achieve these objectives in the first place—as perhaps my inaction around them indicates that they really didn’t matter to me all that much.

And these are the considerations I take each year into the following year’s goal setting, which I typically start in late November. What’s amazing is that we only have a few more weeks until that time arrives.

Month-in-Review Highlights: October 2023