Feast of All Souls

Today is the Feast of All Souls, the Catholic version of ally-ally-in, when our prayers for those on the wrong side of the celestial velvet rope are supposed to get extra mileage. It seems like a good day to gather in some loose ends that have been left hanging.

First, in case you didn't notice in my update to the Devil's Due post, my concerns about a mystery site linking to this page have been answered & alleviated. The administrator tells me they are a group of moms who maintain that level of privacy out of legitimate security concerns. So I think they will understand about my freaking out due to my own.

It's been an interesting test of my comfort level with increasing exposure. Before I heard from the admin, I ran a report of search terms people have used recently to access this page. Oh boy. Imagine being in a crowded, public place, and suddenly you can read minds. Some of it is not pretty. It makes me a little nostalgic for the days I had five readers who were all named Jen.

But not too much. I wouldn't trade 99.9 per cent of you, with your wonderful comments & emails, just to get rid of the ones who come here looking for pictures of "streaking boys."( I am a little worried about being the foremost google authority on rottweiler-daschund mixes, though. I've tried to warn you people not to attempt this, but some of you will just have to learn the hard way.)

Helpful hint: if you have a super-secret-but-innocent club, & you plan to link to me, it would probably be wise to send me a heads-up. Because the Mama Bear, once stirred, is not easily coaxed back into her cave.

Live & learn, for us all.

Moving along, NaBloPoMo is on! For the uninitiated, this is the blog version of National Novel Writing Month, where participants blog daily for the entire month of November. I ran this marathon last year, and it was a wonderful, if exhausting, experience. I wrote tens of thousands of words, I got my first big print publication credit, and my readership skyrocketed from the single digits to the doubles. :-) It was very, very good for me, & I thank the mad genius behind it.

This year, however, I will be passing out paper cups from the sidelines. I've decided to focus on getting a hundred page sample of my memoir together instead. I'll let you know how that goes.

Finally, I will be a regular contributor at a brand, spankin' new site, Flawed But Authentic. A year ago, I couldn't have imagined Leah, whose blogger interviews have been the basis for much of my daily reads list, would be inviting me to collaborate with her. Sometimes I lose sight of what a big year it's been around here, but it's things like this that more than offset the streaking boy fetishist.

Look for my first Flawed But Authentic post on Sunday.