Boo!
Happy Halloween! As you read this (if you read it Tuesday the 31st), I’ll be frantically scurrying around finishing up the prep for our Halloween yard haunt. Or handing out glowing bags of toxic waste (okay, candy, but the bags will be glowing) in our bright yellow hazmat suits (thank goodness they don’t breathe – it’ll be chilly out there this year). We’re doing a Radioactive theme, so UV lights and glowing slime are the main attractions. Just the thing to make our zombie baby crew happy. I’m not sure the skeletons are all that impressed, but the campers and banjo players seem content enough.

Fingers crossed the slime turns out. As I write this, it’s still not made, and I only have internet recipes and a bunch of ingredients waiting for that sweet, sweet chemical reaction. We shall see. I really should have bought more blacklights. And tonic water. Hmm.

I’m planning to create a scrapbook layout in my journal to commemorate the event with photos, so I’ll post a pic of that online once I have it done. This coming weekend, probably.

Next Stop: The Land of Writing Madness
Wednesday is the first day of November, which is also the first day of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo or “NaNo” for short). If you’ve been reading here long, you’ve heard of it – I’ve participated on and off since 2004 – and I used to win (write 50,000 words in a month) regularly when I first started, though not so much the last few times I participated. Tempest and Desert Heat were both NaNo novels, as were several that were never published.

This year, I’m getting back to the keyboard with a fictional memoir/story prequel to the book I’m currently working on, in order to establish the backstory I need for my current novel draft already in progress (I know that might sound a bit convoluted, but it makes sense to me). If it turns out to be a decent draft, I’ll clean it up and publish it. If not, I’ll still end up with the backstory I need, and hopefully a much better daily writing habit than I currently have (and much faster than the 250 words a day I’m doing now).

Do I know what’s in the story yet? Um, no. That’s the whole point – Madeline Hunter needs to tell me her story, so I can tell her great, great granddaughter what she went through, so that Lauren and her daughter Maddie (named for Madeline) can make it through their own story. While I know some of the highlights (and low-lights) of Madeline’s story, I need all the juicy details that one can only get directly from the character as she’s moving through life while I watch and type.

I’ll be posting excerpts every Friday of my writing for that week throughout the month, so check back then (or watch your email/social media) for those posts if you’re interested in following along.

Will you be discovering someone’s story this month?

Recommendation(s)
Head over to the NaNoWriMo site at nanowrimo.org, and check it out! Even if you’re not normally a writer, you can be in November! My husband participates in NaNo whenever I do, and just deletes his drafts after…I don’t even get to see them. So, don’t be afraid, jump in and give it a try!

Already signed up for NaNo? My username is “outofwords” on the site (I don’t know if that profile link will work or not, but you can try it, if you’d like). Look me up – let’s connect!