Changing Times, Changing Seasons

My egrets left their pond almost a month ago, and my grey heron left a bit more than a week ago. Now the warm temperatures are following them and fall/winter is arriving. Today is the first day when our high temperature will be in the mid-50's Fahrenheit (12.5 Celsius, approx). A cold front will be coming across the northern part of the state, and we will see our first snow today. Not here in the Twin Cities (thank goodness) but across the northern part of the state.

Yesterday was such a gorgeous day, warm and slightly breezy with our bold scarlet, bright gold, deep brown and brilliant green leaves all vying with one another for a "best dressed tree" award. I took a break from sitting at the computer while having a wonderful, long conversation with Aearwen, and sat outside on my patio nursing a glass of wine while talking. Thank goodness I have a chance to talk with her weekly. I can bounce things off her and even though we rarely speak specifically about stories or WIPs, we still manage to focus on problem areas and clarify them. The story I was stuck on which was on Version 2 got a serious revision again when I returned to my desk and Version 3 seems like it will do what I needed. I'll read it over one more time to be sure before finalizing it for submission.

I did the official thing yesterday and signed up for NaNoWriMo. For those who may be unfamiliar with this, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and takes place in November. I've known I was going to make the attempt to do this for most of this year and didn't need to officially sign up, but I also know that there are various events, writers boards and get-togethers, and different motivational things that occur during November to help keep all of the authors on track to succeed in their goal of producing 50,000 words by the end of the month. I have a feeling I will need that support, so I did the official sign-up thing :-) I can't start writing until November 1st, but I'm looking forward to letting the words out and I just hope it turns into a true novel, not just a longer story.

Have a fabulous day!