You can taste the fresh apple cider in the air and hear the coming crunch of leaves underfoot even as they hold fast to the trees. The autumn equinox is 8:05 p.m. today, after sunset, so technically this will be the real last day of summer even though it is billed as the first day of fall. It’s a futile distinction; autumn is upon us.
As if to compound the tragedy, I woke up from a Monday afternoon nap to the cries of Canada geese passing overhead on their way to wherever they go after summering in Green Bay. It is a beautiful sound and a lovely sight, the majestic V’s forming across the sky, but you can feel the great birds carrying the summer warmth away with them.
The brightest colors of the year are in October. The views can be breathtaking on the days when sun shines on the reds and yellows and oranges. Still, I prefer the boring and dependable solid greens of spring and summer to the vivid variety of fall. I have nothing against autumn except for its inexorable march toward winter.
I have made my fondness for the summer solstice as clear as can be. Officially, summer begins in these parts at precisely 3:24 a.m. today.
I love when the sun rises at 5:05 a.m. If I had my way, we would not “spring ahead” and the sun would rise at 4:05 a.m. today. I don’t care when the sun sets; most days I’m tired by then anyway.
We are scheduled to have about 15 and a half hours of daylight today. I am very fond of daylight.
The reason I’m singin’ dem ol’ Summer Solstice Blues is that starting tomorrow, the day will be a few seconds shorter. This, this day right here, is the longest day of the year. Next thing you know — well, on Sept. 22 — we’ll have 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night — and on Dec. 21 we’ll have 15 and a half hours of nighttime. Fooey on that stuff.
The forecast says that the sun will be shining for much of the morning and it will get cloudier as the afternoon progresses, but I don’t care. It’s the summer solstice, and the distance between sunrise and sunset is the farthest it’s going to be in 2026, and that’s good enough for me.
On second thought, never mind the blues, they can wait until December. Let’s celebrate all this daylight.
It has now been one year and three days since I last published a book. See the World! has been out there since June 10, 2025. I browsed through the pages Friday afternoon and saw that a few of the prose poems I selected for the next book are already in STW! I will have to consider that as I approach the final edit.
I’ve been collecting blog posts into books since 2010, when I gathered a group into Refuse to be Afraid. See the World! is my 10th such collection. I also have seven books of fiction in print-on-demand and ebooks. I don’t exert a lot of energy on marketing, and so my 17 books each sell zero to a half-dozen copies in any given year. Who would have thought? If you build it, they will not come if you don’t point the way.
Like the nine books that preceded it, See the World! is a roughly organized group of these reflections I share every day. This particular grouping is 72 entries including the Introduction and post-concert Author’s Note, one entry for each year I had lived as of June 10, 2025, but that’s only interesting as a number, it wasn’t intentional.
Perhaps I am not a famous author because, as I admit in that introduction, “There is little rhyme or reason to what I share.” You never know, when my daily post drops at 3 a.m. Central, what sort of content you will find, so I don’t appeal to any specific target audience. Still, continuing my introduction from a year ago —
“… I do have a couple of themes.
“First, I want what I write to encourage, enlighten, and/or entertain.
“Second, I want to reflect what Jesus said were the two greatest laws on which all of his teaching was based: Love God and love our neighbors, and by the way everyone on Earth is a neighbor.”
I have found, especially with my books from the last six years, that you can open them to any page and find something that will expound on one or more of those themes.
For that matter, you can just scroll back through this blog and find the same thing for free, but spending a modest number of dollars will give you a “Best Of” collection or two, or 10. (One of the titles I considered for the next book was Please Buy This Book, I Could Use the Money, but I think readers might expect that to be a humorous book, and sometimes I’m not [intentionally] funny.)
My books are all less than 20 bucks in print (except for Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes, but hey, you would charge more for a 700-page book, too) or less than 5 bucks in ebook form (even Myke!), and so you could read my entire canon for less than 85 bucks, less than 375 bucks if you spring for the paperbacks.
This post, for now, is as much marketing as I ever do. Did it work? Go to your favorite online book store, search for “Warren Bluhm,” and find some light summer reading — either “Buy It Now” or, even better, take the information to your favorite real book store and have them order it. You should have the book(s) within a couple of weeks.
And if you’re not enticed, let me know why — really. I do want to improve my “pitch” to potential readers.
