100 (edit: 99) days to go!

It’s September 24, and a chilly, rainy, grisaille day in Paris, feeling very autumnal, especially where I run in the Bois de Boulogne, dodging glossy conkers so big you could turn an ankle on them. Less than a week until October, the month that most of my friends, much like Anne of Green Gables (and the makers of twee printable quote-graphics) love unreservedly, and to whose charms I am grumpily coming around. "Halloween grinch" is a pose to strike with a five year old in the mix, who wants this year to be a double decker bus. Or the Gruffalo, or a New York City taxi, or a unicorn. (Stay tuned.)

But more to the point, there are 100 days (as of yesterday) left in 2025, and so still time to try for the draft of a book, or whatever big project feels exciting, daunting, and just-about-doable in that time.(1) I have a new publisher and therefore a new deadline for my book, in mid-January, so I’m signing on with the London Writers’ Salon’s 100 days project, which costs a nice round 100 English pounds. I don’t need the plan, exactly: I have the deadline, and believe me I know all the ways one can slice-and-dice a word count goal into theoretically digestible daily chunks — but I do need the accountability, the community, honestly the shame that this is my fourth book and I still don’t really know how to get words on a page consistently. So, here we are. I have no connection to the LWS beyond appreciating what they do, which is primarily to host multiple hour-long writing sessions every day over Zoom, across a whole bunch of time zones, so you can usually find a convenient one—I’ll be showing up on non-teaching days for the 8am BST one, which is 9am here, and sometimes for the 8am EST/2pm hour. You can turn off your camera, but if you’re someone who finds body-doubling helpful for focus, it’s quite something to see hundreds, thousands of people silent in their little Zoom boxes, heads down. See you there?

I’m announcing this because perhaps you’re reading this and also find it surprising, perhaps energizing, perhaps terrifying, to realize that there’s a round 100 days left until New Year’s Day. Then we’ll be into 2026, a sci-fi-sounding year if ever there was one, and hey, wouldn’t it be great to start the year with your novel/thesis/poetry collection/book proposal/memoir/manifesto ready to launch? Or at least, edit. And for myself, it helps me soften the roar of ~ everything ~ going on in the world if I have a daily task, building to a plan. A focus for the moment, a bead to polish for the string (h/t Oliver Burkeman.)

And if you need another way to mark the fall, the food writer Marian Burros died a few days ago at the ripe age of 92, fittingly right around the time that we are all obligated (in the northern hemisphere at least) to make her famous Plum Torte:

Here's proof it can be done in a tiny kitchen, with a tiny sous-chef if you have one:

Happy baking, happy writing, happy fall (you freaks).

(1) By the way, if you are a nonfiction writer with a book project in mind, or a proposal that needs polishing, I’ll be offering some consultation and editing services in the new year.