Talk Like a Pirate Day: Why the Joke Survived
August 31, 2026
A private joke between two friends in 1995 became an international observance in 2002. I drove to a pirate faire for it once, in the worst costume present.
Tag: September
Writing and book holidays observed in September, as autumn arrives. Every literary celebration, author day, and reading observance falling in September, each marked with an essay.
SeptemberVJ Day: The Record That Only Exists Because Somebody Wrote It Down
August 31, 2026
The surrender took about twenty minutes aboard the USS Missouri. My grandfather had been a prisoner for three years and four months, and the record of it survives only because he sat down afterward and rebuilt it from memory.
SeptemberNational Comic Book Day: Iron Man, FOOM, and the Seeds I Never Sold
June 14, 2026
National Comic Book Day celebrates the medium that taught a lot of us to love stories. I owned early Iron Man and Spider-Man issues, lost them all, and once trashed boxes of comics, and learned from all of it.
SeptemberAgatha Christie Day: The Queen of Crime and the Mysteries I’m About to Write
June 14, 2026
Agatha Christie became the best-selling novelist in history, behind only the Bible and Shakespeare. She created Poirot and Miss Marple, and her mastery of plot is on my mind as I'm about to write mysteries of my own.
SeptemberNational Punctuation Day: Learn the Rules Before AI Forgets Them For You
June 14, 2026
National Punctuation Day fights sloppy punctuation, and the marks are having a strange moment. A case for learning the rules cold before AI quietly forgets them for you, and why they still matter.
SeptemberH.G. Wells Day: The Other Father of Science Fiction
June 14, 2026
H.G. Wells founded the opposite half of science fiction from Verne. Where Verne loved the machine, Wells used the impossible to hold a mirror to humanity. A look at the divide that still runs through the genre.
SeptemberLabor Day
June 14, 2026
Labor Day is the first Monday in September. An honest take on the holiday and the writing angle in it: writing is real labor, most of it invisible.
Reading LifeHobbit Day
June 14, 2026
Hobbit Day is September 22. What Tolkien's hobbits teach about character and worldbuilding, an honest take from a writer who never read The Hobbit.
Reading LifeNational Library Card Signup Month: A Writer’s Best Free Resource
February 11, 2026
September is National Library Card Signup Month. Why every writer needs a library card and how libraries shaped one author's career.
SeptemberSeptember 11th: A Writer’s Tribute
February 11, 2026
A personal remembrance of September 11, 2001, the day that changed everything, and why the stories from that day must continue to be told.
DialogueNational Read a Book Day: A Writer Who Reads Everything
February 10, 2026
September 6 is National Read a Book Day. A 113-book author on why reading is the single most important thing a writer does besides writing.
Pop Culture & Storytelling LessonsStar Trek Day: What the Original Series Taught Me About Storytelling
February 9, 2026
A lifelong Star Trek fan with over 200 hardcover Trek novels on what the original series got right about storytelling that most of its successors missed.