It’s that time of year again. My girls are out trick-or-treating (one as Effie Trinket and the other as a Monster High doll), and I’m distributing candy and eating way too many small chocolate bars. What’s disappointing is they don’t even taste as good as I remembered. I’m getting old. Or, I have developed a taste for higher-quality chocolate.

It’s also NaNoWriMo Eve. That magical month in which thousands (millions?) of writers attempt to write a 50K word novel. I’ve participated most years since 2006, but only finished the first year I entered. This year, I updated my profile and committed to writing.

In a great blog post, Rochelle Melander shares some excellent tips on how to make NaNo work for you, on how you can adapt the activity to fit your writing needs. For me, this means working on some short stories that exist only as images or titles in my mind. I have no characters, no plots. With classwork and revisions, I don’t know if I can write 50K words this month, but I would be happy to complete a couple first drafts and upload them to the NaNo site for the “official” word count. Anything to generate new writing!

Happy Halloween! Boo.