Congratulations to everyone who attempted National Novel Writing Month—it isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. If you made it? Awesome! If you didn’t? You’re still awesome for at least trying it!

Anyway, I barely made it this year—I started in 2004 and won every year, but in 2009, I fell 8,000 words short. I just couldn’t do it. Which actually made me nervous, and heading into Thanksgiving week I was sure I was going to fail again. Then, in the last three days, I was luckily struck by inspiration and railroaded the remaining 15,000 or so that I needed.

My project this year was called “Bloom and Other Tales.” Yes, a collection, so to speak, of ghost stories. I didn’t get a collection—I rather got a few toward a non-Disney collection and a couple toward the next Disney collection. They’re all a mess and will require months of clean-up and hard work, but they’re out. The titles of the stories are: “Bloom,” “Below the Birch Trees,” “Can You Hear Me Now?”, “Under the Kudzu,” “Frosting Cookies,” and “Right Now Nothing” (because it doesn’t have a title yet). Not bad. They’re all way longer than they need to be, which means they’ll probably have several thousand words cut out of them. In any case, watch for them sometime in the next couple of years!