A Letter from the Editor

I’ve been reading for the weather. Not metaphorically; literally reading, line after line, through novels, short stories, poems, and plays, in search of language that captures what’s happening outside.

This work began early in 2025, when we started building Author Forecast, a device that displays your local weather through literary quotes. But my role at Author & Co. goes back further. In 2022, we launched our first product, Author Clock, and I took on the task of curating a library that would grow to over 13,000 time-specific quotes.

Author Clock tells time through literature, and every minute of the day is paired with a line from fiction that references that exact moment (12:00, 4:17, five o’clock in the afternoon). I spent over a year reading, cataloging, and cross-referencing thousands of excerpts, learning how time behaves on the page. I realized that time, when written, becomes something other than a simple measurement. It’s registered in shadows, in lateness, the way a mood shifts at a certain hour. “2:30 a.m.,” “two thirty,” “0230 hours”—these are functional. Literature tells time differently.

“It was half‑past two o’clock  when the knock came. I took my courage à deux mains and waited.”
— Bram Stoker, Dracula

Here, time becomes a shift in the air, the feeling of something about to happen. Half-past two isn’t just late at night, it’s the hour when everything changes!

Both projects, Author Clock and Author Forecast, ask the same question: What happens when we let literature mediate the way we move through the day?