So, it’s been October for four days now. Like last year, I’m participating in the Countdown to Halloween, and I had originally planned to post a book suggestion a day for the entire month. Obviously, that’s not going to happen. I’ve been busier than anticipated, and it doesn’t really look like that’s going to change in the immediate future. So, while I won’t be doing that, I will be trying to do something.

October is my favorite month, after all, and autumn is my favorite season. And Halloween is, of course, my favorite holiday. Not just because my birthday is the day before. In fact, the other way around. I love my birthday because of its proximity to Halloween.

Even as a kid, it wasn’t the usual stuff that made me love Halloween, not the dressing up and certainly not the candy, although those both play their part. It was the feeling of the season, the atmosphere of pleasant spookiness. I’ve said before that the month of October is the one month of the year when the world actually becomes closest to the way it is in my head all year round. In a comment to a post on his Google+, artist Eric Orchard summed up my position decently well when he said, “I could always use bats and jack-o-lanterns in my world.” Yeah, pretty much that exactly.