Halloween 2026

My biggest complaint about Halloween this year - October has zoomed by too fast. XD

Anyway, I threw a party last weekend, and I'll be attending a masquerade this weekend, so it's been fun, at least. Though pushing to finish Once Gorgon Bitten, Twice Shy (Magic Morsel, 2) edits sucked up most of my time. And crocheting my bag for the masquerade (as well as a few cute bats). Busy month!

Not a lot of new decorations this year, but I clicked a few good pics. Jack-o'lanterns, too. My obsession with jackalopes has officially crossed over into pumpkin carving. Read Gorgon Bitten, and you'll understand why. ;)

Pics below! Enjoy!

Here's that awesome crocheted bag I made for my costume.

A sneak peek at my masquerade costume (most of it, at least).

And because I love it... Once Gorgon Bitten, Twice Shy cover art!

Halloween 2025

October means Halloween! Totally the holiday I own the most decorations for.

Unfortunately, I decided on no party this year due to several factors. Right about now, I'm glad I made that decision because this week has been a nightmare between jury duty, a car that needed fixing, and the thermostat in the house failing. More fuel for future Fractured Fairies stories, right?

No party, but I still decorated! Acquired a couple new items this year, as well. I seriously need more room to store Halloween decorations.

So here come some pictures! Carved pumpkins aren't happening until Friday, so no pics of those this year.

This last pic is of one of my favorite new decorations. The bowl is super creepy and neat, plus it reminds me of the cover backgrounds of Do Not Go Gentle and Dead As Dreams. Yeah, so I put a copy of the latter in it for the pic. Shameless self-promotion? XD

I hope everyone has an awesome Halloween! Don't forget to grab a handful of good horror books to read during spooky season.

Halloween 2024

I hope everyone's been enjoying spooky season this year. I know I have!

We haven't thrown a party since 2019 (due to Covid, a trip to New Orleans, and then we had to cancel last year for other reasons), but we finally did this year. And for once, I wasn't terribly behind in prepping the house for the party, so I actually got to enjoy putting out my decorations.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take more pictures of some of my newer deco. Oops. I was having too much fun running a haunted house tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) that I wrote for us. Heh.

I did grab a couple pictures, at least. Enjoy the spookiness!

New Orleans Fun! (Mostly Pictures)

In between the December madness (and by madness, I mean my to do list that has scrambled my anxiety into a tangled ball of thread), I'm posting some New Orleans pictures! I didn't want to wait to do this until January, so here I am. To make this quicker, I will attempt to be a writer of few words (this is so, so hard - lol).

My family and I went down to New Orleans in October to enjoy all the Halloween fun. This was my fifth time in New Orleans, hubbie's second, and my kids' first. We all had a blast!

The main event we went down for was the Krewe of Boo Halloween parade. Here's some of the awesome floats. Quite frankly, I'm shocked both of my kids could move with all the beads around their neck once the parade finished up. Don't ask how we fit it all in our suitcases flying home!

That last picture up there is of the plastic coins they threw. What an awesome souvenir! We also went to Boo At the Zoo - the first picture below shows the pool died red. Oh, no, the elephants are bathing in blood! XD The other fountain you see is just outside the Botanical Gardens in City Park.

I loved some of the Halloween decorations in the French Quarter. So fun!

Finally, I leave you with tons of pictures of yummy food. We went to so many great restaurants. And yes, even my kids enjoyed the local cuisine!

Halloween 2019

Happy Halloween, 2019!

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been diligently making progress on several things, though. The first draft of Well of Solitude (Fortunes of Fate, 7) is complete, and I've already received some critiques on it. Revision and release likely won't happen until 2020 for that. And I'm also doing a final round of edits on Thorns Entwine the Blade (Trinity Torn, 2) for the November 13, 2019 release! And other little boring, writerly tasks...

Oh, and NaNoWriMo is coming up!

But this post isn't about writing all the words. It's that time of year again - the time of year I love. Unfortunately, this year I've been having a hard time enjoying Halloween, per usual. Worrying about other stuff tends to do that.

However, we've already had our Halloween party for the year (which reminds me, next year we won't be hosting one - maybe I'll be posting Halloween related pics from Disney World, though), which means I have a handful of pictures to post.

Not too many are below. None of me again. I stuck on my cat ears and tail and called it a year, so only got a family picture instead of an individual one. As I said, it's been a little rough getting into the Halloween spirit.

Pumpkins, pumpkins! Nope, jack o' lanterns! Mine is the starry-eyed emoji face one, and the 5-year-old attempted her first pumpkin carving on her own (which one do you think it is? - lol). My eldest was lazy with the cat head, whereas Hubbie was lazy per usual with a simple face.

New little bat fences this year. I figured it was time to add something new to the outside since I usually don't have too much set up there. I'm not a fan of the huge inflatable things, and every time I consider putting up some gravestones I decide against it, so I went lower key with the bat fence on each side of the walkway. Dollar Store purchases, but I don't need anything fancy!

This was my favorite addition to my decorations this year. There was a unicorn skull as well (I'm obsessed with unicorns, so it was hard to resist and choose between them), but I ultimately chose the dragon - look at the fire!

I hope everyone has a happy and safe Halloween. Don't forget to find a black cat to cross your path for good luck (yes - good luck - poor things get a bad rap, and I can attest that our Nightshade is just derpy, not unlucky)!

NaNoWriMo and Halloween 2018

Combo post! For me, the start of NaNoWriMo and Halloween go hand-in-hand, anyhow. I mean, by the time I get to the end of October and the start of November, everything's just melded into one huge lump of mushy memory. October can be a little rough for me, some years, and this year especially since the flu screwed up a lot of my plans.

Anyway, NaNoWriMo!

Nope, I'm not aiming for a full 50k this year. Not even going to consider the idea. I probably won't really be posting over in the NaNo forums at all either. A low key and quiet half-assed half-goal NaNoWriMo sounds perfect to me.

I actually have several tiers of goals this year and then a bonus goal. And yes, I'm continuing revisions of Thorns Entwine the Blade (Trinity Torn, 2) for the most part. So...

❦ Low - 8,000 words of revision
❦ Mid - 15,500 words of revision
❦ High - 19,750 words of revision
❦ BONUS - 6,000 words of a rough draft (of what is still to be determined)

The low goal is pretty much my normal monthly goal. My normal goal last month was destroyed due to the flu and post-party prep exhaustion, so I would like to catch up a little to the backlog if possible.

So, we'll say the overall goal for this year's NaNoWriMo is 26,000 words. I'll still use the potato buddy counter, but I'll also use one of the official NaNo meters on the left side. Don't expect to see this climb until November 5, though, as I have a beta read job that needs to get completed, and it's top priority.

That's enough of NaNo. Simple this year -- and I won't report final progress until the first week of December! Let's hope the NaNo Crud stays far away.

Onto Halloween. It was a bit of a scramble this year, and I didn't take too many pictures during the Halloween party because of this. But I'll wrap up this post with a couple at least. None of me this time, since I decided I'd be lazy and just throw on a Pusheenicorn hoodie. =D I hope everyone had a Haunting Halloween!

Halloween 2017

Happy Halloween! OK, I know it's tomorrow, but our annual party and Trick or Treating with the kids has already come and gone (and I get a day off tomorrow -- 16th wedding anniversary). So, I shall regale you all with pictures. You like pictures, don't you?

This year, I cosplayed another one of my own creations! The idea grabbed hold of me when I was writing Hell On Wheels. Yup, I decided to dress up as Moira, stuck unhappily in her Welcomer garb. Well, my costume wasn't quite as skimpy as what she has to put up with (I couldn't bring myself to squeeze into a sequined bikini). What do you think? Did I do her justice? Maybe next year I should play Grinka from the Fractured Fairies series. Aqua hair? I'd have to pass on playing Tamara the fairy -- I'd be too cold, and I don't think my guests would appreciate me flitting around naked.

Per usual, I was rushing to get the house ready for the party, so I didn't get to spend a lot of time on my pumpkin (I always wish I had more time to do something fancy). This year, I decided to do a monster face, mainly because of my youngest's little googly-eyed monster headband we got her to play with (she was not a monster for Halloween, though, but Rainbow Dash). My eldest did the flying kitty (since that's what she also dressed up as), and I carved the ghost into my youngest's white pumpkin. Per usual, my husband did a simple face -- he's not much for pumpkin carving, but he still does it with us!

The kids also painted some of those pumpkin gourds and the teeny tiny pumpkin my youngest picked out at the pumpkin farm when she went with her preschool.

One picture of the decorations from the party! I didn't take many because of the major rushing this time. Once everyone started arriving, I pretty much collapsed into a chair, chattered, and ate.

And I thought this was a cute picture, so I'm going to post it, even though I am careful not to post many pictures of my kids publicly. Trick or Treating! I love it that the last couple of years we've all went together. (Don't worry, we still put a bowl of candy out for the other Trick or Treaters.)

Finally, look at all this candy that my kids got this year. Notice the pitchfork resting on top of it all? Yeah, Mama Tax. >:)

I hope everyone had a great Halloween this year!

Oh, and as a reminder, you can still get the Monster Maelstrom anthology with my Fractured Fairies flash story, "Monster in the Room", in it for FREE! Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Smashwords, iBooks, and GooglePlay!

1001 Reasons Not to Clean - #11 through #15

Welcome to 1001 Reasons Not to Clean! The main goal of this series is to see if I can actually reach 1001 reasons, 5 reasons at a time (the final post, if I get there, will be 6 reasons). I'm sure I can. It's not just my crazy brain being unrealistic, right? Links to previous posts are below. And feel free to share your excuses, and they might get added to my list (with credit, of course)!

#1 through #5 ~ #6 through #10

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11. Because you're throwing a Halloween party and right after you spend hours upon hours cleaning the house so your friends don't think you're a slob, you just have to clean it again after they leave.

12. The aforementioned friends at the Halloween party don't notice or care when you clean anyway. They just want food, booze, and conversation (and on occasion Drunken Mario Party -- though as we're getting older, this is happening less and less, unfortunately).

13. NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo trumps everything. (OK, OK, not everything. Don't want my toddler to starve or sit in her filth.)

14. Because you're throwing a birthday party for your toddler (and you know unlike your friends, your mother will criticize everything if it's not clean), and the toddler doesn't care one jot that you cleaned. She never does. And she shows it by the shredded pile of wrapping paper after she opens her presents like a maniac.

15. After all that party prep (and dealing with your overly critical mother), you want to nap with the toddler before she even asks you this time. In fact, you make her go down for a nap early just because you need to avoid more cleaning. Now.