Written by my newest main character

Aside from December, August is pretty much my favorite month. Like, it’s hot and boring and end-of-summer-but-not-quite-school-again, but good writing things always happen to me in August, big defining moments that affect my career as an author.

Fateful nights are phenomena that get talked about a lot in order to seem dramatic. They seem to favor December, because of the magic of Christmas and all that. As if the dead of winter is more prone to fateful things happening than the heat of summer, or the romantic rains of spring, or the mysterious aesthetic of crunchy-leaf-ridden fall. Fateful nights are always defining moments left to be explained by the supernatural, either because there is no other explanation, or because it sounds more dramatic that way.

Sometimes someone dies on a fateful night, but not all the time, otherwise they’d just be called fatal nights, but the word fateful is more versatile, and can encompass not only death but fate and destiny in their larger meanings.

Fate is a strange being who works in mostly unexpected, slightly unethical ways. Fate prefers to work at night, because fateful mornings belong in office romances and adventures with all the dark parts taken out, fateful afternoons are devoted entirely to bad weather, but fateful nights have so much potential for drama and mystery and tragedy.

Fate rarely chooses August, because nothing of significance is ever supposed to happen in August. So when people refer to “that fateful night in August,” it’s a fair bet they’re either mistaken, making up stories, or being over-dramatic about a perfectly normal event that wasn’t fateful in the least bit.

But when a story haunts you for three years and you make no noticeable progress of the half-finished draft you have, and then one ordinary day in August at 4:30 in the morning you realize you’ve actually just reached “The End” and now have a complete, fully-fleshed-out draft, you can’t help but wonder how drunk Fate was that night, because things like that just aren’t supposed to happen.

All this to say, one time I finished a story in August and it was really exciting and now I’m almost done with the sequel. So even if you’re struggling to finish a story and it feels like you’re not going anywhere, don’t give up on it, because the worlds needs it. The world always needs stories like yours.