Happy Halloween/Samhain, y’all!!!
October is my favorite month, and part of me is sad to see it go, but another part of me is super excited for Christmas and the winter solstice.
I feel like I did my best to savor the spooky season this year — I hosted an autumn bonfire for my friends, dressed up as Linus from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!, consumed soooooo many pumpkin spice lattes, worked a delightfully witchy event at one of my jobs, went back roads driving on curvy, wooded, leaf-littered roads, attended my hometown’s fall festival, went to a pumpkin patch with my sister and nieces and then decorated our grandparents’ grave for fall (my sister and I decorate their resting place for autumn every year), walked the Old Greenville Trail at the peak of leaf-peeping time (at least southeast Missouri’s peak), learned a ton about monster myths from PBS Monstrum, and watched A LOT of horror movies, including: The Barbarian, Hush, Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, and As Above So Below.
I’m pretty sure all that savoring is why I’m not too terribly sad to see the spooky season fade into the yuletide. That said, y’all know autumn is my all-time favorite season, so I'm not quite ready to trade my autumn decor for decked halls. I’ll probably be missing fall by January.
I am sad I had to miss out on some of my family's Halloween traditions over the holiday weekend, thanks to a wicked, days-long migraine that led to much vomiting, (yuck!) but I’m thankful I'm feeling better now.
Anyhow, I’m particularly excited for this Halloween because, after many rejections, a creative nonfiction piece I completed exactly two years ago has finally been published!!! I’m so thankful to the folks over at Indecent for giving my story a home. I hope y’all will read it and enjoy it, but heads up: it’s kind of sexy, and it features swearing and cannabis consumption.
In related news, two of my poems were recently published by Scrawl Place. You can read them here and here. Yay! Thank you, Scrawl Place! It feels really good to have some publications to celebrate after a summer of rejections.
Also: guess who’s actually female? Charlie!!! I’m keeping the name, though. I’ve always loved Charlie for a girl. And when she misbehaves, or acts particularly fancy, I’ll just call her Charlotte rather than Charles. (Although, for the record, I think it’s fine to name a girl Charles — I’ve just always liked the name Charlotte for girls.)
Oh, I still don’t miss social media. I feel like it’s been really good for my brain and my body to go without it. Also, in the best way, being without social media makes me feel a little bit like I’m living in the 1990s again.
Well, I guess that’s it for now.
Thank you all so much for reading!
Liz