This weekend is a huge weekend at our house. Of course, the Labor Day holiday on Monday is enjoyable, but the highlight of the weekend is the start of the 2025 Auburn University football season. (Long-suffering Auburn fans will understand when I say that the unofficial team motto is “We’re Auburn; we make the game exciting no matter who we play.”)
More than just Auburn, it is the “official” start of college football nationwide, except for a handful of games that were played as kickoff classics last weekend. Through January, a football game will be available on TV just about any night, which allows me to read and write and craft while my husband watches TV. Unless it is an Auburn game on TV, I can do a host of things while a football game is on and still follow the game.
I like this time of year — the few days before the college season starts. It is ripe with possibilities. Every team is undefeated, and every fan of every team deep in their heart has the hope that maybe this year will be THE year, the year that their team wins the whole shebang to walk away with the 2025-2026 NCAA Division I College Championship. At the end of this weekend, half of the teams will be a step closer to that dream, while the other half of the teams will have taken a step back from it.
That same sense of possibility exists the moment I open a new document to begin a new story. I don’t know where I will end up, who I will end up with, and what we will have done to get there, but I know at that moment, the moment of beginning, that anything is possible.
The stretch of time and effort between that moment of beginning and when I have a product I believe is worthy of publication is different. That effort and time are what makes writing “The End” on the last edit of the last draft before you send your baby out into the cold, cruel world to seek its fortune so fulfilling.
But the best thrill I ever had from writing was the time someone turned to me and, in talking about something I had published in a magazine, said, “I read your story, and it meant a lot to me.”
What is your favorite part of writing?
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