There’s been some years where, here on the blog, come January, I’ve talked about some grand plan I had for the new year. I think the last one was the year I was going to finish all the books I’ve started and not gotten through. Do you know how many I read off my list? Not a one. And one year I gathered a posse of other creative types and was going to check in on them all year, to make sure they were accomplishing what they wanted to get accomplished and give them encouragement along the way. Which lasted til March.

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I don’t mean to be tagging along on Siri’s coattails, but perhaps it can’t be helped. This was the first year in a while for both of us to attempt Nano, so of course we’re going to want to talk about it.  Unlike Siri, my wrists haven’t been hating me any more than usual, so I threw myself into the idea full force–50K, on a brand new project (I did Nano in 2011, but did a story I’d already started–second draft, even). And I am pleased to say that, in the end, I pulled it out.

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So, if you guys follow our Twitter or Facebook feeds, you’ll know that a few weeks ago we had a table at a smallish scifi/fantasy literature convention called MileHiCon. We went into this madness with our previous experience on the subject being that we had attended a couple conventions ourselves at various times, and also knowing people who had had tables themselves, though not with any details about how they had run said tables.

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Friends, I love October. There are so many lovely and wonderful things about it. Summer’s heat finally breaks. The leaves turn beautiful, vibrant colors. It becomes okay to break out your boots and sweaters. There’s cocoa and roaring fires. There’s Halloween. And there’s the promise of magic in the air, in the crisp breeze, in the crunching leaves. Also, my birthday is in October.

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This past weekend was spent at our local Scottish-Irish festival. This is one of–or the–largest festival of this type in the country, and my husband and I went for the whole weekend, because we’re fairly active with our respective clans and like to go all out at this sort of thing. During some downtime on Sunday, I got out my current read–Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog (time travel, on the humorous side)–and had just settled in when someone wandered by and asked what I was reading.

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Man, I love putting together the anthologies. I love the challenge of writing to a specific prompt, and coming up with a story that not only works for the theme, but also (hopefully) that I like as well. For our latest, Under Her Protection, we were tasked with writing a fantasy story in which the hero was a woman tied in with a bit of romance.  Sky’s the limit, right?

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I have a secret, friends. I love learning. And more than that, I love school. Oh, sure, back in the day I loved my summers of freedom (though for several summers in high school my friends and I had a “Shakespearean Acting Troupe” which always started off as a real attempt to put on a Shakespearean play–roles assigned, scripts purchased, rehearsals mounted–but invariably ended as an excuse to make our parents let us hang out three times a week all summer), but there was also always something enticing about heading back in, with new classes and new subjects. College was a little different–more like the fun of learning had been drained out of it. When I look back at college, there were some classes that I remember, but more I remember what I did outside of class–crew, and more Shakespeare, and hijinks and camping trips and…

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So, we had a rather massive snowstorm over the weekend. (This goes back to winter and spring being very confused seasons, which we talked about a few months ago.) Now, it’s not necessarily unheard of to have a snowstorm in the middle of May. I’ve seen it snow into June before. (Invariably this happens when I am unprepared, such as when I’m wearing shorts and sandals and am nowhere close to home.) The June snowstorms tend to be ugly things, accompanied mostly by wind and not so much by actual precipitation. May snowstorms, on the other hand, are evil for other reasons.

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So, I was visiting my mother last week, and she’d put together a bag of stuff for me. Toys and clothes for the small, mobile one. A book she’d bought on clearance at Barnes and Noble, and another she’d borrowed from Grandma and that I could borrow from her. Some mail from people who haven’t figured out that I moved out ten years ago. A first draft copy of one of my novels. And something I’d completely forgotten about.

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Unlike Siri, winter doesn’t get me down after awhile, but that’s because here in Colorado, winter is a bizarre and very confused season, which tends to turn into a bizarre and very confused spring. Take yesterday, for example. 75 degrees (~24 degrees for you Celsius people) and sunny. It was brilliant. We went for a long walk in short sleeves and played in the yard. Today? Blizzard. (Although admittedly a fairly warm blizzard. It’s not sticking to the streets but it’s blowing around pretty impressively.)

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