There are excellent books in which the reader never knows what time of year it is and that doesn’t matter. I did the other kind, the kind where the reader always knows what time of year it is and it does matter.
I didn’t plan it this way, but I ended up releasing the second edition into the world at exactly the time of year when the story takes place. It’s a secondary-world fantasy, and I didn’t set up its year to track to any real-world calendars, but it’s set during last month of summer, when the harvest is about to begin and some of the trees have a few leaves turning yellow. In the Gregorian calendar in a real-world northern hemisphere temperate zone, that would, of course, be August. The first day of Niselt’s twelve tasks takes place approximately yesterday.
The end of summer and the beginning of fall is a strange transition! The turning of the other temperate-zone seasons have obvious cultural resonance. Spring into summer is a gradual, continuous thing. The beginning of the cold months, fall into winter, likewise. Winter into spring can be weird–a famous guy wrote a poem about that one!–but we don’t lack for straightforward interpretations of how good it is to see plants growing and baby animals appearing as the cold months come to an end. Summer into fall is…what? An end, a beginning? The light is weird this time of year.
A bit weirdly–I don’t know what inspired this–we read an excerpt on Northrop Frye’s Cycle of Mythoi in my high school English class, photocopied and stapled. Therein Frye assigns one of the temperate-climate four seasons to four of the things he would call mythoi or stories–what we genre-writers today would probably think of in terms of genres. To Frye, spring is comedy, in the Shakespearian sense: a happy story that ends with a marriage. Summer is romance, of the medieval definition: not “people in love,” but a dramatic tale of adventure. Fall is tragedy. Winter is satire.
It stuck in my head. I didn’t use my book to do anything particularly Frye-ian with its time of year, since the story isn’t really a Romance or a tragedy, probably. (Uh, see afterward for thousands of words on romantic fantasy)! But it’s on my mind.
Another work set at this specific time of year, which is phenomenal, and relevant to my biased interests (i.e. I nabbed it for the first track on my book playlist in progress): “I Fell Into The Night” by Mean Mary. I recommend this story-song with all my heart/fingers! There’s (literally) no better time (of year) than the present:
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