October Stuff and Cetera

I hope everyone had a great Halloween? This was our first Halloween in the new place, so we had no clue how many kids we'd get. There's a school right next to our little group of buildings, though, and an apartment complex on the other side, so we figured we'd probably get quite a few.

None. Nada. Zip. Not a single kid rang our doorbell, and we had good candy, which the husband and I will just have to eat ourselves. [heavy, theatrical sigh] Seriously, though, that's really sad. Trick-or-treating is one of the best rituals of childhood, and the idea that it might be dying out sucks massive quantities of swamp water. :(

Writing-wise, I actually did pretty well in October -- 9 points in McKoala's challenge, which is a great improvement over any of the last few months.

Writing 8250 -- 3 pts.
Editing 17,102 -- 3 pts
Synopsis -- 1 pt
Submissions -- 2 pts
TOTAL = 9 pts



One of the submissions was accepted, yay! And one of the stories accepted earlier was published on the 30th, also yay! :)

Most of the writing was in the last couple of days. I've been working on a fanfic novel that I started just over two years ago. I was originally thinking it'd be a long short story, or maybe a novelette, but it just kept growing. O_O Eventually, in early '09, I just had to set it aside to get back to work on my commercial writing. My readers have been saintly in their patience, but I've felt this hanging over my head, and sort of cringed inside whenever I thought about it. I finally broke through a difficult scene toward the end, though, and from there it just flowed. Gotta love when that happens. [beam] I don't usually mind half-done projects -- I have more partial stories than I want to think about on my hard drive -- but something I've started posting, that has readers waiting for the next chunk, is a different story. Finally getting it done feels like the classic huge weight fallen off my shoulders.

And... just in time for NaNo. :) I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, after having skipped last year. If anyone else who's NaNoing wants to buddy with me, I'm at AngiePen on the NaNo site. (Which is currently not responding -- I'm sure Chris Baty is howling in pain over the demolition of his bandwidth, as happens every year at this time. [grin])

Speaking of which, I have an awesome NaNo icon I got from someone on LiveJournal. The credit was "Lesley." I have no idea who Lesley is, but the person who gave it to me assured me it was okay to share, so feel free to grab it if you like it. :D



Enjoy! And best of luck to everyone else NaNoing this month!

Angie