It must have been Bad Larry's Pumpkin Blood Punch. Or maybe all of the chocolate... Or maybe I'm just tired and my inner joiner has taken over.

Whatever.

My friend Sally had a link to NaNoWriMo on her blog and I thought, "What the hell?" It's like, 6 pages a day (ack) starting at midnight tonight and ending November 30th. It's all about quantity and not so much about the quality. Cool, right?

And Bad Larry's Pumpkin Punch? Awesome. Seriously.
(Orange juice, pineapple juice, gin and triple sec. Uh huh. Yeah).

So what will my novel be about? I don't know. A large-ish woman with a sick husband who works too hard and eats too much crap? Now that's a compelling novel right there! Oh! And she sleeps a lot and complains about her life to anyone who doesn't run away! Now that's a likable character right there!

While we're on the subject of writing, the guy who wrote Little Children (Tom Perrotta) has a new novel out (The Abstinence Teacher). He was on some NPR program that I was listening to - probably Day to Day. Anyway, the interviewer brought up the fact that all of his books tend to focus on sex in the suburbs and asked if he believed in a happy marriage. He basically answered, sure but what's the story in that? The wedding is usually the end of the story and he said that his novel Little Children was sort of the "what comes next." Interesting. I liked the book and was surprised at how much I liked the movie... though the voice-over omniscient narrator was a little odd.

And while we're on the subject of good books... I'm reading The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold. Wow. It's uncomfortable but really good. The first line of this novel is, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." I'm only half-way through this book, but frankly, the main character killing her mother is not the most uncomfortable part. And the writing is so freaking good. (For those of you hooked up with Zooba, that's where I got this book).

Well, the husband is feeling a little bit better, thanks to his new medication. I hope to be at Twist tomorrow night for Stitch and Bitch and then Friday is my book club. Saturday is my cousin's wedding and then Sunday I'm going to a movie with Lara. According to her blog I'm one of her favorite people.

So there.

And also, like Lara I might have accidentally ordered a few things on Etsy today. I'm planning ahead for my Winter Wonderland Coffee/Yarn Swap. I got some more coffee bean stitch markers and some coffee soap and also some coffee-dyed yarn from Shelly Kang - also known as Shelly The Heathen Housewife Shelly - AKA, my second favorite Shelly.

So all over blogland there were adorable pictures of children in homemade costumes, beaming with pride at the accomplishments of their mothers, just waiting to quietly make their way to a lovely Halloween party and/or Trick-or-Treating. My kid? She took an orange t-shirt and wrote on it with permanent marker. It reads, "What? This IS my costume. I'm the scariest thing you've ever seen!" Then tonight she wore a black stretchy dress and black footless tights and black fairy wings. She was my "Scary Fairy." I wore my PJ's and went as a 2-year-old because right now that's the scariest thing I can imagine. And I'm good "in character." Whining for chocolate comes naturally to me.

OK, kids. It's almost midnight... I have six pages to write in the next 24 hours. And also? I have to sleep, work, knit, read and deal with my family. No wonder I haven't written anything longer than a blog entry in fifteen years!