That’s short hand for National Novel Writing Month, and it starts tomorrow, November 1st. If you’ve thought about writing a novel, but for whatever reason never have, National Novel Writing Month is for you. The details:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.

Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

Want more? Get additional details at the How NaNoWriMo Works page! I’m seriously concerning participating this way as a way to get the creative juices flowing.

This morning Google Book Search Partners announced the company and authors and publishers who were plaintiffs in the U.S. Google Book Search lawsuits have reached a tentative settlement.

The proposed settlement covers the issue of copyright infringement for those authors and publishers whose books were digitalized as part of the Google Book Search Library project. Google is looking at the settlement as a very positive thing. If you are an author holding an affected copyright check the copyright settlement site at: Books Google Booksrightsholders. Authors are also encouraged to contact either the Settlement Administrator or Class Counsel, both listed on the site. Authors and publishers can also check out Google’s Official blog dedicated to the lawsuit.

Although different than the issue of Amazon facing an anti-trust suit by threatening to remove print-on-demand books from their site unless said books are printed through the Amazon-owned BookSurge, what is similar is authors, publishers, and others taking on industry giants in an effort to protect their works. From the looks of things, it appears to be working.

HOW QUICKLY WE FORGET…..IF WE EVER KNEW…?
by Deloris Wright

This is the story of our Grandmothers, and Great-grandmothers, as they lived only 90 years ago.  It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote. The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.  Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’  

They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold.  Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote.

For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail.  Their food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.      

So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because–why, exactly?  We have carpool duties?  We have to get to work?  Our vote doesn’t matter?  It’s raining?

Read Deloris Wright’s complete essay on the difficulties and brutality our foremothers faced in fighting for the right to vote, by clicking here.

This election day, remember how lucky we are and how far we have come. More so than any other election year history is being made and you can be a part of it by exercising your right to vote for the candidate of your choosing.

October is Clergy or Ministry Appreciation Month. In Shades of Darkness, Shades of Grace, Tim Scott is a Lutheran pastor. I can tell you from personal experience that ministry is a tough business. The hours are long (many pastors work six days a week with only one day off), the pay is not great, and you’re often dealing with the entire human emotional spectrum.

In the novel, as in real life, Tim presides over Paul and Pamela’s lavish wedding, baptizes their child, and offers a pastor’s perspective when things get difficult. Between all that are regular parish meetings, weekly sermons, and counseling sessions for those who ask.

Being a pastor is a very busy life, and one hopes, a fulfilling one. But it is also a great deal of work. This October, if you know a pastor, let them know how much you appreciate them.

There’s another new review for Shades of Darkness, Shades of Grace. It’s predominantly positive, which is always nice. Once of the things you learn about reviews as an author besides which reviewers genuinely relate to your work, is what annoys a reviewer about the story.

In this case, the reviewer apparently didn’t care for the alcoholism sub-plot which, which just as it did in real life, affects the lives of the Pierson family. The reviewer writes that family’s history of abuse is graphically illustrated and used these words to describe it: dysfunction, denial, codependence, and enabling.

I won’t deny the description. Dependency is never pretty, yet the strong reaction still surprised me. Even in these more “enlightened times” alcohol abuse or any kind of chemical abuse still makes us uncomfortable. We talk about it more than we used to, but the topic still makes us squirm because we’re all too aware of the dysfunction, denial, codependence, and enabling behaviors it forces us and our families to admit to. And, quite frankly, we’d rather not admit to any of it.

The cold, hard truth is that alcohol dependency and abuse taints the lives of millions of Americans. Nearly 14 million Americans - 1 in every 13 adults - abuse alcohol or are alcoholic. Drunk driving causes approximately 16,000 deaths per year, which accounts for only 25% of alcohol-related deaths. And each year, alcohol is implicated in the deaths of some 85,000 Americans, making it the nation’s third leading cause of death after smoking and obesity.

Such statistics and the dysfunction that goes along with it were some of the reasons for the novel. In having survived the ravages of alcoholism, I believed it was my obligation to detail what happened to generations of my family so that others might recognize themselves or someone they know, and change course before it truly is too late. After absorbing the review, I realized the sub-plot had made this reviewer very uncomfortable. Perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing.