Halloween has come and gone. Now we can look forward to Thanksgiving (or, as many of us call it, “turkeyday”), a day on which we give thanks for many things, including turkey, but no turkey in its right mind has anything to be thankful for unless it escaped the axe.

“Busy as a bee” or “Busy as a beaver”—which simile do you prefer? I’ve been as busy as both put together. And work continues to pile up.

“It never rains but it pours.” Isn’t that how the proverb goes? As I’ve written in this space before, I’ve been struggling under the weight of a massive editing/rewriting project with a must-finish deadline of the first week in December…which isn’t that far off. I’ve avoided, for the most part, seeking out other large gigs (basically writing or editing books), confining myself to this massive project and only short-form tasks.

Just as I had feared, neither of my two new books was ready and in my hands in time for what was supposed to be my birthday party combined with a book launch celebration this past weekend. So we celebrated my birthday, but nothing was done about promoting my books to a captive audience.

I’m biting my nails. Not literally—after all, I wear acrylics—but figuratively, and if not for the acrylics, it would be literally, too. Here’s the situation:

This coming Sunday marks the beginning of this year’s Banned Books Week, an annual recognition of the efforts, down through the years, to keep certain books out of our hands—and specifically to keep them off the shelves of our libraries, out of our school classrooms, off our school reading lists, and even off the shelves of our local book stores.

We almost got hit by a hurricane last week. We caught the fringes—tropical storm-force winds, feeder bands, squalls—but not the full fury of the storm, which at one point had taken aim at Beach County, my home, as its bullseye. Those poor folks in the Bahamas. They got what we were at one point supposed to get. Thank God (and please take that literally), we were spared.

No, this isn’t to be a blogpost about selling mega-copies of your latest book, nor about personal-life stuff like marriage proposals or lottery winnings. Rather, today I am on about finishing projects successfully.

The great debate rages on: Should schools teach their students to write in script (a/k/a cursive)? I’m going to weigh in this week with my opinion: They should teach their students how to READ script but not how to write it.

In many areas, students are getting ready to go back to school. Here in Palm Beach County, school starts up again on August 12. In my own childhood, up north, school never started till after Labor Day.