Fall Events and Awards

Leaves have turned an array of reds, browns, and yellows, the air is crisp with the promise of chilly weather, and the mornings are eerily quiet as the kids are all nestled in their classrooms. Don't you just love fall? Everything about it is conducive to a writing atmosphere. It makes me want to sit down with a cup of hot tea at my computer and get in touch with my characters. Which I'll be doing as soon as I'm done chatting with you fine peeps.

To add to the writing spirit of fall, NaNoWriMo is approaching! If you aren't sure what that is you've got to check this link out. It is a massive organization of writers who have come together to dedicate an entire month to writing without guilt. The acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month and they mean it. Many people who participate actually complete 50,000 words, which for many middle grade and young adult authors, can be an entire novel. You're allowed to outline but you can't start before November and you can't go back and edit until the end of the month. It is a fun exercise in writing freedom that I highly recommend if you've never done it.

Me, I don't like to rush so I won't be participating but I'll be cheering on all my friends who are. In other writing news I'd love to thank Tina Moss for passing this award on to the Critique Sisters. We are honored and of course wish to share the cake with others so I'd love to pass it along to three of our new sweet blogger followers:

Angela Orlowski-Peart

Brenda Sills

Tara

~Heather

Lovely Blogs

Last week the lovely Maria, at  Wub2Write  shared a wonderful award with the Critique Sisters.  It's called the One Lovely Blog Award, and its rules for recipients are:

post the award on your blog and link to the blogger who gifted you with it,

pass the award on to fifteen blogs you have newly discovered, and

contact your recipients to let them know they've received the award.

Done, done, and will be done asap!

Receiving the award was, well, lovely, and selecting new recipients to pass it to was a truly enjoyable exercise. I scanned through the blogs I've noticed over time, and those of the people who comment on them as well as on this one (I read all the comments all the time), to find names I've come to recognize and look forward to seeing. Some of them, I've known about for quite a while, I admit. Some of them really are new to me. All of them caused me to think, perfect! This person writes a Lovely Blog and deserves an Award!

I thought fifteen was a lot, but when I got busy looking, I realized there are so many more that deserve such an award!! So I hope each of the wonderful bloggers I found will enjoy their process, too, and will identify many more blogs we can all enjoy and learn from.

Without further ado . . . here are the newest recipients of the One Lovely Blog Award:

Mystery Writing Is Murder 

The Alliterative Allomorph   

Em-Musing  

Keys to YA  

One Significant Moment at a Time  

The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment  

Chocolate & Spice  

Doing the Write Thing 

Julie Musil  

Tiptoe Kisses 

Fiction & Film  

Portia Sisco  

Kittie Howard  

Carolina Valdez Miller 

From Sarah, With Joy

Thank you, Maria! If you haven't checked out Maria's blog, be sure to go to it and read the one about her going undercover as a Lunch Lady at a middle school to get the inside scoop. That's dedication.

Happy Blogging, everyone.

~ Linda