 September 2023 Musings Schooltime Happy September, friends! If you have just found my website or you are a return visitor, I am thrilled to have you here. Thanks for stopping by and taking time out of your busy day to read! Summer is putting up a fight here in North Carolina and refusing to make room for fall. The high temperature will be hovering around 90 for the next few days. Even so, my children and I have already decorated the house for fall and bid summer farewell. Everywhere I look, there is a pumpkin or a scarecrow setting the stage for the new season. The ancient Tulip Poplar in my front yard that we call Big Joe can hardly wait and is scattering gorgeous yellow leaves all over the yard. Fall is my favorite time of the year, and I plan to enjoy every minute! At our house, September also means schooltime. Yesterday I cleaned out and organized our school baskets. We homeschool, and any homeschool moms reading this right now are probably smiling. It’s the best feeling to clean out all of the old papers and pencils and toys that were meant to be put away in a bedroom, but found an easy hiding place in a school basket instead. Today my baskets sit on a bookshelf by the kitchen table with only this year’s books stacked neatly inside them. The special new school year organization will only last until the end of the week, when the baskets will be full once again with trinkets and artwork and snippets of stories and poems, but it sure is nice while it lasts! I have exciting book news to share with you! I have just completed developmental edits for FREE SINGS THE SEA, my YA Contemporary sweet romance coming out next fall. Publication is exactly a year away now! The editing process itself was arduous, but also enlightening and rewarding. I had the privilege to work with a gifted editor, and I cherish the time spent with her and the lessons I learned. And now FSTS is polished and shining and almost ready to come out into the world, and I can hardly wait! I have also been working on edits and mood boards for my middle grade novel MONSTER MOUNTAIN, coming February of 2025. This fantasy adventure is a fun, short read that I hope children will love and teachers might enjoy incorporating into their unit studies and lesson plans. If you are a teacher, parent or librarian, I would love to recommend that you visit Monarch Educational Services and take a look at the books and their content ratings. There you will find clean reads from picture books through young adult that you can feel comfortable and confident using as a resource or recommending to k-12 readers. September is synonymous with schooltime, and it can also be a glorious transitional month. Summer is just ending, but we are not quite into Autumn and the holiday rush yet. It is a good month to pause and take stock, to check in on your own mental and physical health, and perhaps make some decisions about the months to come. Are there some holiday traditions that no longer work for you, but rather leave you feeling irritable or exhausted? Maybe you could let them go and free up some downtime, or replace them with something that is more meaningful to you. However you choose to approach the fall season, I hope it will be with a sense of excitement and joy. Life is an adventure, and may yours be a grand one! Love, Stac 
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