Favorite Halloween Books

Happy Halloween! To celebrate, I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite books about the season--or, at least, about witches. It's The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes. It's about two little girls (almost seven) and their adventures with the Witch Family. There's Old Witch, who is head of all the witches yet still subject to banishment by human children; Little Witch Girl; Weeny Witch (a baby witch); Malachi the Spelling Bee, and several other characters who live on the barren glass hill with Old Witch. It's a charming story that I remember from my childhood and rediscovered in Kindle format many years later. Obviously, I'm too old to identify with the girls, and it's not the kind of story my son would have found interesting at seven. It was still fun to reread it.

Do you have any favorite books about Halloween, either from your childhood or more current ones? Feel free to share them in the comments. And if you're starting NaNoWriMo tomorrow, good luck! I'm over 44,000 words into Dryads to Discover, and at the rate I'm writing, I'll be lucky to finish the first draft by the end of the year. Whether you finish your story in November or not, the writing is still worth it.

More Crochet Photos

Although I keep coming up with more writing projects than I have time for, I keep on crocheting as well--and coming up with more projects that I want to do. As long as I do a little both of both every day, I make some progress. I don't like sharing my writing projects when they're still in the rough draft stage, but the smaller crochet projects work up quickly. Here are some of my recently completed ones:

I started this pterodactyl right before the comic con at the end of September. I think it took about a week or so to finish. He's actually a darker purple in person.

 These are Halloween-inspired porg. From left to right, they are a jack-o-lantern porg (though my family thinks he looks like Deadpool, so maybe the next one won't have black eye patches), a vampire porg, a black cat porg, and a ghost porg. If I can figure out how to make a turkey tail, I might make some turkey porg next month. And yes, I have some ideas for Christmas....




I hope you enjoyed the pictures. Now to decide which writing project to tackle next.

A Halloween Tale--Tea Leaves

A couple of weeks ago, I got an idea for a Halloween-themed short story. I finally finished it yesterday. I don't write short stories very often, particularly flash fiction, so this was a good way to stretch my writing muscles. Here's your treat for Halloween; I hope you enjoy it!

Tea Leaves

Matilda sighed as she turned off the porch light. Now that the trick-or-treaters were gone, the house seemed even quieter than it had three weeks ago, after the funeral when the remnants of their family and a couple of neighbors had left. John would have said good riddance to all of them. Toward the end, his dementia had made him suspicious of everyone and everything, including her. She’d plastered a smile over her hurt every time he’d lashed out at her. She was still struggling to adjust to his absence, but even in her grief she was beginning to realize she now had the freedom to pamper herself. That meant brewing a proper cup of tea, settling her aching bones into the comfortable chair, and reading something that made her feel forty years younger.

She puttered around the kitchen, filling the kettle, polishing her mug, and carefully scooping level teaspoons of tea leaves into the strainer. The scent of jasmine wafted into the air. John had sneered at her “fancy tea leaves,” saying they were too expensive and complicated to use when bagged tea, dipped in water heated in a microwave, worked just as well. Even when their daughter, Susan, gave her loose-leaf tea at Christmas, Matilda hid it in the back of the cupboard so John wouldn’t find it.

When the kettle whistled, she let the water cool. In the meantime, she hunted for the sugar. Where had she left it? John had always accused her of losing things or mixing them up. She knew she’d gotten his last dose of medicine right. Why had everyone questioned her so much about it? All their doubts had made her wonder about it herself. What if it had been the right dose but the wrong medicine, or she’d given it to him at the wrong time? Matilda shook her head. She would never have her rest if she let questions worry her to death.

She poured the tea, brought it to the chair, and read for a while, sipping her tea every few pages. When the words began to blur, she picked up her cup to rinse it out. But a glance inside it made her shriek and drop the cup. Seconds later, she fell too.

* * *

“Mother?” Susan called a few days later as she entered the living room. “Where are you? Why aren’t you answering your phone….Oh no!” She hurried to Matilda, but it was obviously too late to do anything.

At the instructions of the emergency responders, Susan left the room exactly as she found it, even the pottery shards on the floor. But the autopsy never found the true cause of Matilda’s death. No one else would ever see “Your fault” written in the scattered tea leaves.

Halloween Weekend

I suppose I should state this up front: I am one of the few blogging writers who is not doing NaNoWriMo this year. (That's National Novel Writing Month to those of you unfamiliar with the term; the challenge is to write 50,000 words on a new project in one month.) My main focus right now is finishing Across Two Universes; once that's ready (hopefully next year will be the year!), I'd like to go back to another project I started back in 2007.

Anyway, Alex got to celebrate Halloween for three days this weekend. His daycare center had a parade Friday afternoon; I left work early to see it. As soon as Alex saw me, he clung to me so much I wound up having to carry him in the parade. He was a dinosaur:

(We wound up leaving the hat off most of the time since it flopped over into his face.)

After the parade, we stayed a bit longer and played some games at the daycare center.

Saturday was the big day. I got dressed in my own costume -- a queen -- during Alex's nap. When Eugene came home, we got Alex dressed and took him around. It was cold and windy, but we went around for about an hour. Alex wanted to be carried again; he doesn't believe in using his legs if he can make me carry him. So I had to walk around our neighborhood holding up my long dress with one hand and balancing a toddler and his bag of goodies in the other. A piece of costume jewelry broke during our trek, and we lost a little toy we got from one of our neighbors. At least I didn't fall. Alex did pretty well, saying "Trick or Treat" and "Thank you" when prompted. He did get spooked at some of the decorations people had up; the worst one was a talking Darth Vader. When we came home, he turned over his bag and kept looking at all of his candy. I think he likes looking at the wrappers almost more than he does eating the candy. Unfortunately, he does like eating it too; I thought he was going to become a strict saccharidevore when he didn't want dinner last night. Today he ate other types of food.

Today we had a party with some other local parents. It was held at a place called Little Monkey Business, which is a combination indoor playground/coffee shop. Alex brought his bag of candy with him into the playground area; he was lucky enough not to lose any, though he did wind up giving a sucker to one of the little girls. His favorite toy was a little house; we joked he was going to take out a mortgage on it. While he did fuss here and there, overall he did very well. Now it's back to the regular routine tomorrow.

Whirlwind Weekend

It's feast or famine around here when it comes to my blog. After going through a dry spell when I didn't have anything interesting going on, I now have more blog fodder than I can manage. In fact, I missed my 20th high school reunion and a Halloween party for Alex this weekend. Why does everything have to happen at once?

It all started Friday, on Halloween. This year, Alex had two costumes: a dinosaur and a little devil. He wore the dinosaur outfit to daycare, where they had a little parade and a party for the kids. I don't have the pictures from that yet, but here's Alex earlier this month:




























And here's his devil costume:




Notice he doesn't like wearing the caps that come with his costumes.



I left work early on Friday to get ready for a trip up to Madison. After I had most of the packing done (I admit I overpacked, but with a toddler, you need to be prepared for anything), I picked up Alex and took him trick-or-treating to a few houses. Most of the kids came later--and there were lots. I bought five bags of candy; we would have run out if we had stayed for the entire trick-or-treat time. Although Alex wanted to go outside when he saw all of the kids, he was excited enough to hold the candy and wait at the door. At one point, a little girl in an angel outfit came. Eugene said, "Devil, meet angel," and the girl's father replied, "Devil, stay away from my angel." Too bad I didn't get a picture of them together.




We drove up to Madison Friday night and checked into our hotel, a Holiday Inn. This one featured a whirlpool bath in our room (which only got used for Alex's baths, alas) and a water park that we didn't use either. Unfortunately, we didn't have a suite, so when Alex woke up in the night, he could see us, and that made it harder to calm him. We wound up having to bring him into our bed--something we don't plan to do in the future!

On Saturday, we went to the Farmer's Market. I don't have any pictures from there, but Eugene took some. Instead of getting food, we bought a personalized piggy bank for Alex and a toy parrot for a friend's son. I browsed through Wintersilks but didn't find anything, and with Alex needing a nap, we skipped a trip to the Soap Opera. We let Alex sleep in the car while we took turns visiting Borders (one of us stayed in the car with him). We picked up lunch at Whole Foods; Alex woke up and ate a fair portion of a Honeycrisp. Later, we visited our friends for our annual Faux Thanksgiving reunion with our college friends. The food was good, and we enjoyed talking with everyone; unfortunately, I don't have any pictures. All of the kids are growing up, though.

We didn't have a chance to have brunch with our friends this year, since we were supposed to meet my family for lunch at a Polish restaurant. We did stop at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens briefly. Although we lost track of time, it was neat seeing the Thai Pavilion:



















































Finally, we left Madison to celebrate my grandmother's 94th birthday with my mother's side of the family:






















Luckily, at this point, it was a relatively short drive back home. It was great to go, but it's good to be back. Even with an extra hour today, I still have a lot to catch up on.