No Tricks, Just Treats!

First and foremost—Happy Halloween to each and every one of you! Halloween is my all-time favorite holiday. The house is decorated, the pumpkins are ready (Frankenstein, courtesy of Ant, and Johnny Cash, courtesy of K—they make an oddly complimentary couple), the candy is bought and the costumes are laid out. There’s even a large crow outside my office who is cawing, loudly, to bring the full Halloween effect to my workday.

I will not be dressing as a ghost tonight, FYI. I will be sitting on my butt eating Reeses and watching the live Ghosthunters special. That’s about as close as it’s gonna get, Ant.

The one downside to Halloween is that November is on the horizon. There are certain months out of every year that I despise, and November has the distinction of being month number three on my most-hated list. It’s dreary, and dark, and rainy and cold. It’s not yet Christmas. It’s super-busy at work. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, about November which would alleviate a good case of the “blechs”.

So, this November, I’ve made the decision to make myself insanely busy (hopefully the time will fly right on by) and participate in the National Novel Writing Month challenge! For those of you who are not aware of such writing nerdiness, during the month of November (30 days), I have challenged myself (amongst thousands of other nerds, and one friend who you can read here) to write on the story idea I mentioned last week. The one I’m not quite willing to share with you yet. Perhaps, by the end of the month, I will be! The goal is to reach 50,000 words on the novel by November 30^th. I am going to be posting my word count updates and any humorous anecdotes so that you can follow along on this absolute insanity adventure.

This leads me to my next update! Later this week I will be posting the newest installment of Imperfect Mothering. I’ve been putting the final touches on how imperfect mothers can save our country’s government (and with government dissatisfaction at an all-time high, this may be something that we want to forward to our local congresspersons). I’m excited about it, and I want to share some of that excitement with you!

Since I will be writing away on this crazy story idea in the hopes of breaking the 50,000 word point (let’s just be clear here, I’ve never broken 10,000 words on a story, so this will be a CHALLENGE) I am going to need some guest posts! This is where you come in: If you have a great idea for a post that you would like to share here, and it concerns imperfect parenting, I want you to contact me. I am going to be setting up a schedule of posts, and I would love to include yours. The ultimate goal in imperfect parenting is to discuss something outside of the ‘cultural norm’ of parenting advice that, in fact, makes our children, our selves, or our society a better place to be. It also helps if it’s not offensive, and could be considered humorous. Do you have a blog? We’ll link to it here! Don’t have a blog? No matter- I still would like to review your guest post. I will review and post guest posts throughout the month of November.

This is what I would need from you:

Name

Blog name and link, if applicable

Picture of you

Title of post

Post—usually about 750-1000 words in length

Short bio—3-5 sentences

I cannot wait to see what ideas you all have in the world of imperfect parenting!

Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to my friend Jesse, who you may know from those posts on my blog that are tagged “Jesse needs a publicist”. Jesse has started her own blog (like, yesterday!) where she will discuss her newest adventure: raising children television free (amongst other things, to be sure). She is a much braver woman than I. or maybe a little bit crazy. Either way, she’s witty and talented, and we have mad dreams of large blog readerships and sponsors sending us to conferences and millions of spam PR pitches to read each day. So, go show her some love here! 

I hope each of you have a wonderfully magical Halloween! Eat some chocolate for me.