Yes, I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year, and I’m also signed up for NaBloPoMo as well.

I’m going to do the Blog Writing on BeyondMirrors.net so that I get more content on that place, and start keeping up with it.

I’m still not sure which story I’m going to do for NaNoWriMo though. I have decided NOT to continue Dark London at the moment. The version of it I won NaNo with last year…I never went through and edited, tweaked, corrected or anything on it, so it’s in this horrendous state of disrepair and needs much work before being continued.

So, my choices are:

Can’t Cry For Yesterday
Science Fiction. A terrestrial world with two distinctly separated cultures, one polytheistic, one monotheistic live together in a delicate harmony on a planet several galaxies away, after a chance encounter with the ship Condor from the Alliance they begin to war against each other. Kerem struggles to look after her younger sisters and younger brother, while her older brothers and boyfriend are on the front lines, hoping to find news of her parents who were taken as political prisoners.

and Sanctity.
Fantasy. Hajime starts at St. Aurous College only to discover that her school literally is a portal to Hell. There are ghosts living in her closet, and a group of other students fighting a war over opening the gateway, are they really angels and demons? and who keeps talking to her and calling her “brother”?

Okay, so those are my choices. I need to sort this out before tomorrow otherwise I’m going to be way behind before I even start.

I finally remembered to sort out my Technorati Profile and switch out Ami Writes (which no longer exists) for this site which clearly does in fact exist. Or does it?

Here we are almost at my favorite celebration of the year. What’s everyone else doing today?

Our day consists of, getting some food in myself and the munchkin, doing a tarot trade with a friend, helping another friend flat-iron her hair before a party tonight, taking the munchkin up to a party (still not sure if it’s going to be the grocery store, the mall, or the apartment complex), doing a re-dedication and blessing ritual for the New Year.

Somewhere in there is hopefully time to get up to the store and actually get some candy for trick or treaters from the complex who may come by…but I’m not sure if I’ll get chance. I didn’t want to get candy too soon because I would have eaten it all myself, but then I forgot, and I was at the store yesterday getting soda for our friends who came by for a DOA tournament. Travesty, I tell you.

There are seven and a half hours left to enter the free tarot reading contest. Deadline has been extended until 5 p.m. EST to try and compensate for the site being down last week.

I was trying to take some pictures this morning so that I can change out my avatar picture to my current hair color scheme rather than the red and purple which graces it.

This is one of the shots that were taken this morning. If the camera is out the munchkin has to get in on things somehow.

My husband and I were out at the local mall yesterday and decided to pick up another game for the XBox 360. We have XBox Live so that we can take advantage of things like demos for various games before we buy them.

I’m not that up on first-person shooters, but when I was asked to vote on whether we should get Jericho or Conan I voted for Jericho. It was pointed out to me that Ron Perlman does the voice of Conan in that game, which is superior than the voice acting in Jericho, but the game itself seeing it played and playing it in demo. It was God of War with Conan. Seemed pretty pointless to me when we’ve already had God of War, and it’s sequel played to death in this house. Jericho is new, different, written by Clive Barker and has zombies. All pluses in my book.

I think the clerk at Game Stop was amused by our discussion.

But Jericho was what came home with us, and it’s very interesting. The graphics, of course, are stellar, and the acting is good especially compared to something like Two Worlds. The plot device is a threat of apocalypse, and involves a team of army specialists who all have paranormal powers who are trying to prevent the end of the world. This interests me doubly because of my own following of the occult. I’m fascinated to see how things are portrayed.

It’s crazy what the idea of getting a piece of real estate will make some people do.

There’s a woman who comes up to my father-in-law’s house every year asking if he’s selling the property yet. Why? She even had the gall to continue hounding him last year even after he told her how sick my mother-in-law was. I almost hope she comes by this year some time that my husband and I are over there, because that’s just plain RUDE.

There are other issues going on with the other side of my family and property and housing too. It’s just a big stressful mess. I hope that things get worked out soon for my mother’s sake.

I’m a little disappointed that there’s been no interest at all in the free tarot reading contest that I put up, but it’s lessons learned and so on.

I’m debating still on NaNo. I need to sort that out. I have a story outline that I first wrote when I was sixteen, and another story that I’ve had on the cards since college, which was the major inspiration behind it. But I’m just not sure…do I want to write about ghosts, demons and angels? or do I want to write about aliens trying to survive on a planet torn about by a war started inadvertently by other characters I have from another story series.

My son turned 18 months old three days ago. It’s a bit…strange to think that he’s halfway to being three already. While it doesn’t seem like yesterday that he was being pulled out into the world, it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago either.

Mum and I went out to eat with him on Friday while my husband was on duty. He was impressing the people at Applebee’s because of his cute laugh and inquisitive spirit. He kept having conversations with the people at the table behind us and offering them bits of his chicken sandwich.

I think by far his favorite part of the evening was when he got to have some of the lava cake that Mum and I were sharing. See?

He’s come a long way in the past month to actually holding conversation. He has so many words but hasn’t quite worked out how all of them are used. This morning when I put him in his umbrella stroller so we could go and take the rent check down he told me, “Blah-burble-blah, face, cat, wow, cool, plurpa, boo, wow.” Not quite sure what it all means. He’s definitely grasped the word, “No,” which is proving unfortunate. The other day when I took some letters away from him that he had knocked down off the counter to shred he ran after me yelling, “No! No! Ma, no!”

He’s fathoming out how things function too. He can do up and undo the restraints on his high chair and his umbrella stroller, but thankfully, only when he’s in them. He understands about putting shoes on but doesn’t quite know about the whole “tongue of the shoe” issue so keeps trying to put his foot between the shoe and the tongue instead of in the shoe under the tongue. Yesterday he was showing me that he knows how the wind up toys are supposed to work but he doesn’t have enough patience to wind them up properly. He also knows about buttons on things, which means he wants to push them all the time, so he’ll turn the TV on and off, or the camera, or open and close the CD tray on the computer. He knows CDs go in that too, and will open the CD cases and try to stack them in four at a time…I can see us installing a cabinet door on the desk rather than just disabling the start button.

I cheat. We don’t do pumpkin carving at our house once the munchkin gets a little older I might attempt to do something like that, but not yet, so we have an electric pumpkin that I got a few years ago. The munchkin is very excited about the pumpkin, but decided to sit down when I actually took the photo. It would have been cuter if I’d got him trying to grab the pumpkin but the batteries in the camera died and I had to trade them out so by the time the photo got taken he decided he would sit down instead.

We’ve started using figurines as markers when we play Dungeons and Dragons. It’s helpful to have a layout and see where spells and attacks really can affect and gets things less confusing. Although we don’t have a full compliment of the appropriate figurines so it can get interesting when we have Master Chief following around an undertaker who is traveling with an elfin druid and Spiderman.