It’s hitting me that we’re suddenly in October again! This year it padded softly up behind me, hiding behind the green cloaks of summer, and wham! — snarl! — it bowled me over like Hobbes meets Calvin at the door. My dear old friend October, with its yellow-orange eyes and claws of steel, its fur and bones, its leathern wings . . . it flew at me from the cave at summer’s end and has me pinned in the sere grass. It’s breathing in my face and demanding to be noticed.

And who could fail to notice October when it occupies the chair? I was driving north yesterday to a happy occasion, and I was in awe of the hills around me, these hills of western Pennsylvania — so vibrant and splashed with the russet and yellow, the red, purple, and green from God’s palette! [First chance I get, when the sun is shining, I’ll have to get you some pictures of Frick Park in fall.]

So, October is here, and to kick off the season, I am going to take an excellent suggestion from our friend Marquee Movies. I’m going to do this blog’s first-ever reprint. Don’t feel gypped. It’s been four years now since I wrote the following account, and seven years since the events it describes. If you want to revisit the original blog entry and its comments, you can find it easily by typing “A Writer’s Life in October” into the search window — it’s in the archives. I’ve spruced it up a little here, so the new version is not quite the same as the old.

Anyway, here it is: my most memorable Hallowe’en . . .

One Hallowe’en I’ll never forget was 2005. That was the year my mom unexpectedly passed away on October 18. I flew back to the States to be with Dad and for the funeral and all. On the day of the funeral, the town was breathtakingly gorgeous — trees a miraculous palette of brilliant reds and golds. The procession of cars to the cemetery was the grandest Hallowe’en parade one could hope for — couldn’t have ordered a better day for Mom’s last ride through the town she loved. I saw a whole lot of friends and relatives that I don’t normally see — all very loving and friendly, all gazing into Eternity and aware of the brevity of life, all with an awareness of how much my mom meant to them. A surreal time, when I’m normally teaching but wasn’t that year.

The town was decked out in Hallowe’en glory: fake tombstones like gray toadstools in yards; chokingly thick webs in trees, covering bushes; scarecrow figures, jack-o’-lanterns, ghoul dummies, witches, oddities, orange lights . . .

I bought Hallowe’en candy, which yanked an inlay out of my tooth, and I had to go to the dentist. I bought pumpkins — big, orange pumpkins, so abundant and cheap in Illinois, so rare and expensive in Japan. I carved them, and my dad smiled. He said they looked like a couple, this one male, that one female. I took pictures of them.

I took the jack-o’-lanterns to my aunt’s house, because she has the best location ever for trick-or-treaters — no kidding. She’s right on the main street, in the safest neighborhood in town, where parents trust and everyone is home in well-lighted houses, and kids flock thicker than clouds in August. We set the jack-o’-lanterns on the porch and lit them. We set out my aunt’s Indian mannequins: a man and a woman (though the woman is really a smaller man wearing a wig and a dress — a native American transvestite). They have feathers and moccasins and fringe, and older kids love them, and middle-kids gaze at them in uncertainty, and babies fear them and bawl, but still their moms carry them to the porch to receive their Hallowe’en treats. I am proud of how some kids whisper to each other about my jack-o’-lanterns — “Look at their pumpkins!”

My aunt lets me hand out the candy. We are both still somewhat numb in this world without my mom. My aunt makes popcorn, and we eat it in the brief intervals between visitors. The intervals are brief — we have something like 150 kids the first night and nearly 100 the next. We run out of candy and have to buy more for the second night. My aunt keeps a tally, making a mark on paper for every kid that comes to the door. We laugh in the quiet lulls and talk about how many of the girls seem to be dressed as hookers. There’s vampire hooker, witch hooker, and just plain hooker.

One of the most amazing things is how kids appear out of the night. They materialize from the darkness out by the street. Some cut straight across yards, through the drifts of dry leaves, crunch, crunch, crunch. But some — usually boys — RUN from the curb, a skeleton or a Scream-masked horror swooping toward our porch. Kids stand under the street lights, comparing loot, plotting their courses. Tall witch hats tip and bob as they speak. Many carry little sticks that glow in phosphorescent colors.

I comment on the kids’ costumes to them (though I avoid saying things like, “Oh! A hooker!”). Isn’t it odd how most kids seem oddly uninterested in their costumes? One girl has a knife through her head, with blood trickling down her temples. I say, “Wow. You might want to have that looked at.”

I’m wearing a flannel shirt. For some reason, that sticks in my mind — that shirt, in that surreal October of grief and the Otherworld. Candy, candles, trick-or-treaters. Dragonfly hits the mass market that year; it’s in stores, in Barnes & Noble, in Waldenbooks. I’m making it as a writer. I sit in a rocking chair opposite the door. I make the decisions about how much candy to put into each bag. My aunt sits off to the side,  making her tally marks, watching through the picture window as I watch through the door.

Toward the end of the evening, when the visitors trail off, and we’re eating the unpopped kernels that can break your teeth if you’re not careful, my aunt wants to call it quits. But I insist on staying open for business until the end of the time the city allows. You never know when a ghoul got caught on some barbed wire and was delayed; you never know when a descending witch got snagged in some tree branches. I’m so low on candy that I can only put two or three pieces of boring stuff into each bag, and I see a few frowns and curled lips. But I want to stay as long as I can in my flannel shirt, up and down from my rocking chair, watching the dark, listening for the whisper and giggle of stragglers. A few bigger kids come, kids too old to be trick-or-treating — but, like me, clinging to this night.

This night. Hallowe’en. This year, this 2005, I’m halfway through writing “The Bone Man.” Mom passed away during the restaurant scene, and I got a phone call in Japan from the coroner, because no one else in my family could make the international phone number work. “The Bone Man” will go on to receive honors — publication in Fantasy & Science Fiction [Dec. 2007], translation into Russian, mentions in Year’s Best anthologies, from Dozois as a science-fiction tale and from Datlow as a fantasy/horror story. It will be on the ballot for Locus and for the International Horror Guild in their last-ever round of awards. It’s on the ballot against a Steven Millhauser story. I will hear from a woman in France who is fascinated by the story’s look at rural life in the American Midwest. A couple people nominate it for a Nebula. Wonder and love and family, sadness, childhood, adulthood . . . Japan, the U.S. . . . life, death, loss, success, crisp air, the imagination . . . I’m halfway to orphanhood and will get there in another four months. I’m nobody’s kid anymore. The buck stops here.

Everything flows together. The world turns toward winter, but on these nights, we’re linked to the earliest times, the beginnings. “We are all storytellers,” said Paul Darcy Boles, “sitting around the cave of the world.”

“Why don’t you write a Hallowe’en story?” a friend of mine in Japan suggested at the beginning of that October, when I was feeling down and agonizing over what to write. So I started to write “The Bone Man” just to distract myself. Just to have fun.

Yeah . . . as wonderful as my childhood Hallowe’ens were, I think 2005 was my Hallowe’en, the one I’ll never forget.