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This is November. Brown and orange. Cool and brisk. Gray skies -- really gray skies that can produce no rain but are simply the norm -- are reintroduced in November. Yes, this month has its share of sunny days that are actually quite pleasant (despite being cool and brisk), but those days are just a tease for colder and bleaker days to come. November gets dark so early. You hit that time change, and too quickly, that sun is below the horizon too soon every late afternoon. And it only gets worse as winter approaches. Between the day after Halloween and Thanksgiving's aftermath, November is filling. And sugary. Yet, this is the worst time to work out. The weather isn't always agreeable to exercise outside, and there never seems to be enough time to work out inside. November is indecisive in so many ways. This month is personal for me because my birthday lands here. I get through it, and the remaining weeks are a blur through Thanksgiving. Maybe I'm not giving the rest...

Before my side goal in November , I had been blogging about some fall memories. I had written this and intended to post it around my birthday, but never got around to it. Before December, here's one more fall memory from way back when. I've been in the newspaper industry for almost 22 years (and that's not counting my first couple years working for my college's newspaper). Yet my first newspaper job wasn't writing or editing or clerking. Eight years before I set foot in a big-city newsroom, I was a paperboy for a neighborhood weekly. I had wanted to deliver newspapers, following the lead of some of my friends who did. My parents didn't want me (and them -- on cold days, who's driving?) to take on the commitment of waking up early every morning to deliver a daily newspaper. But in the fall of 1982, they did let me take a job delivering the Harlem-Foster Times. Published once a week, the Harlem-Foster Times was one of a string of neighborhood weekly papers...

It's been awhile, hasn't it? I haven't posted in more than month. I've been busy. For the fourth November, I attempted NaNoWriMo . Three years ago, I finished, achieving a 50,000 word novel. The last two years, I didn't make it so far. But I was optimistic this year. I had an idea that I had been thinking about for months, and in October, I even started writing things down -- characters, plot, logistics. I was looking forward to finishing Novel No. 2 in November. After midnight on Halloween, I started writing and knocked out 700 words before the month was even an hour old. Then, November happened. November happened in a big way. November really started in October -- the last two weeks of that month completely throttling my schedule. I wasn't able to manage any more prep work for the novel, and though I was still confident in my imminent creation, I should have recognized the signs that November would be nutty. On top of the extra meetings, the extra co...