15 Ways to Celebrate National Be Kind to Writers and Editors Month

By Kelley Lindberg

You knew that September is Be Kind to Writers and Editors Month, right? Yes, that’s right. It’s that special time of year when we writers and editors break out our tiaras and get treated to free stuff all month long. You shouldn’t go to such trouble, of course, but it certainly is nice to know that you love us. You really love us!

That, and it makes up for the other eleven months of the year when we wear rejection like Marley’s chains.

If you’re like me, it’s exhausting trying to come up with new ways to celebrate Be Kind to Writers and Editors Month. I mean, how do you top last year’s nightly fireworks, swimming pools filled with champagne, and half-naked celebrity singing telegrams? That’s why I’ve put together a modest list of fresh ideas for celebrating this joyous month with the editors and authors who make your life richer every day of the year, whether you lose yourself in books, movies, podcasts, television commercials, fake online reviews, direct mail ads for life insurance, or all-natural recipes for bug repellant.

1. Send your favorite author or editor on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris and/or a tropical island so that they can research their next book.
2. Buy every book on an entire bookshelf at your local independent bookstore.
3. Use stacks of books to create all the furniture in your living room. (Imagine – a coffee table made entirely of coffee table books!)
4. Plan your costume for the world-famous, bigger-than-Macy’s Be Kind to Writers and Editors Parade and Masquerade. (I’ve got dibs on J. K. Rowling, so find your own bazillionaire author to emulate.)
5. Buy your favorite author or editor a Porsche. (I’d like a burgundy Boxter, please. Thanks.)
6. Create a fabulous new dessert, cocktail, or coffee drink, and name it after an author or editor. Then send me the recipe. Or better yet, make it and bring it on over. We’ll share it.
7. Stop posting anything funny, thought-provoking or entertaining – really, anything at all – on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter or anywhere else online for the entire month, so we stop getting distracted from our writing. If we miss our deadlines because of a cute cat dressed in a shark costume riding a Roomba, it’s your fault. You know who you are.
8. Don’t call, text, or email us either.
9. Unless you want to take us to lunch or dinner. Then go ahead and call.
10. At your local bookstore, turn your favorite author’s books so that the cover faces outwards, instead of just the spine.
11. Loan a book to a friend. Or two. Or fifty.
12. Dress up your kid as a literary figure and send them out trick-or-booking.
13. Give only books for birthday and anniversary presents this month.
14. Start every sentence with, “In this book I’m reading…”
15. Stage write-in campaigns in local elections to get your favorite authors and editors elected to public office. So what if they don’t have any political experience? At least they’re used to producing work that has to make sense, without obvious plot-holes or egregious lapses in logic.