Monday, November 1, 2010

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

Koala Challenge 9

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

Animated NaNo

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

Angie

5 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Luck with Nano!

Angie said...

Charles -- thanks! :D

Angie

Suzan Harden said...

'Tis always good to see the Koala happy. And break a leg on the NaNo-ing.

Karalynn said...

Good luck with Nano! And happy to hear about all the good news, from the release to the breakthrough in the novel!

As for the surfeit of candy, one of my friends assures me that kids these days practically get bused over to the "good" neighborhoods. I don't know if that means "safer" or "high-grade candy" or what, but he apparently lives in one of these areas, because his doorbell was ringing non-stop and he swears there aren't that many children around.

Angie said...

Suzan -- thanks! Yeah, I haven't managed to please the Koala many times this year, so October was a pretty good month. :)

Kara -- thank you, I'll take all the good NaNo wishes I can get. [grin]

Maybe someone in your friend's neighborhood was giving out full-size candybars, and someone Twittered it...? :D

Angie