I am writer, hear me squeak

[petronia]

It will be a Halloween fic, right enough; after all pumpkins and Akabane are all one really needs for the proper spirit. But in my head it's more like... an October fic. This being the way the tail-end of the year works in my mind: one long breathless dash from Indian summer to Christmas, Canadian Thanksgiving and Halloween and American Thanksgiving (and Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, soit-dit en passant) merely signposts flashing past a bullet-train window. October blurs into a singular sensation comprised of the slanting afternoon sunlight of Indian summer, filling the air with lazy suspended golden flecks: refracting off dull green-gold of maple and brown-gold of chestnut, true-gold of oak and blond-gold of poplar, vermilion-gold of sugar maple bright and faded at once, like the colours in an ancient tapestry. And morning fog that smells like woodsmoke, chill nights and the winter constellations rising, cranberries and turkey and pumpkin pie - pumpkins in general - birthdays of friends and the first scattered flakes of snow...

Eastern Canada October, of course, not Tokyo October, or October anywhere else in Asia. I plead only that seasonal fic is a specific type of fantasy, and Ur-Halloween's trappings are hardly Japanese. The Jfen themselves know this as well, going by their fanart. (Does anyone even grow pumpkins for jack-o'-lanterns in Japan? How about butter squash?)

After Christmas things settle down into a dull hibernation, and if I'm lucky I can get some reading done. But for the past several years January-March has been such a miserable proposition (what with winter term and the last trimester spent working in a barely-heated basement with cold drafts coming in the seams, during one of the bitterest winters Montreal's experienced in my lifetime) that - well.