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.)

September didn’t slow down, now did it?

As soon as the month turned, I got back out of town—despite all the travel I’d done since May and a strong desire to stay in one place for a while—to meet my mother and her husband in Iceland at the end of their Arctic cruise. I’d found us a rental apartment in Reykjavik and rented a car and we radiated via road trip into the surrounding areas for a few days before they got on a flight back to the United States and my husband and I returned home to Lausanne.

For a little while, anyway.

Because two years ago I’d made plans to attend a literary festival in the Paris area, the Festival America, and no amount of travel fatigue could have kept me away. I gorged on four days of panels with amazing authors and even got the chance to chat one-on-one with several of my favorite novelists. Few things could make for a better weekend, in my opinion.

In between, I smothered myself in work to catch up and try to make progress as well, where possible.

I had a bit of an a-ha breakthrough on some roadblocks in the novel I’m planning while in Iceland after getting some fantastically helpful feedback from critique partners. If I’m lucky, I may even manage to push the plan over the finish line to completion earlier than expected, which would allow me to start in on the drafting work before the end of the year.

In the same vein, interrogating my revision work for the novel I wrote last year after the beta reader feedback I received in June finally revealed where I need to make some major revisions to better get across my intended message and make the story more propulsive. I’ll have to dig deep to make the needed changes, but I’ll learn a lot in the process—and I will, I hope, have a much better book as a result.

On other goal-related fronts, I even managed to make a little more progress on some of the very unexciting financial and accounting work that I’ve needed to undertake in 2024—though almost nothing else that I have on this year’s goal list made headway. My best hope is that I can catch up now that the autumn has well-and-good arrived and with winter on the way. The darker and colder months compose my season of hibernation, after all, and one I welcome even more eagerly this year.