Monday AWESOME! Halloween Light Show and an Award

Oh my gosh. This is my favorite family ever. I’m going to find out who these people are and move in next to them! It must have taken them all freaking year to choreograph this! Halloween is my very favorite holiday (I do love Christmas, but thanks to the shopping stress and stores putting up decorations in September, by December I’m all Christmas-ed out). And–Danny Elfman for the win! Love his music, so much that I have a lot of his work in my writing playlist.

Speaking of cool Halloween people, there’s this awesome family near our neighborhood who goes ALL OUT every year with decorations and costumes that could probably finance a down payment on another house. I’ll try to get some pictures and video this Halloween, except that’s hard to do because 1. my camera’s flash ruins the spooky effect by making it look like daylight and 2. the zombies and horror movie slashers always chase me down the street.

Here’s a question: Do you consider The Nightmare Before Christmas to be a Halloween or Christmas movie? (My vote’s for Halloween.) I’d put up a poll like my very cool friend Abby does, but I’m late in posting already and I’d still have to read her tutorial on it.

Now for my blog award! Cherie gave me the 7 X 7 award, a fun one I haven’t received before. I’m going to follow all the people she named in her recent award, but I have yet to name the people I want to pass it on to. I will soon, to try to get these people more followers! I admit I’m pretty awful at passing awards on. I’ve also been really bad lately at keeping up with the blogs I follow and spreading comment love. I do read all your posts, but I’m still trying to come up with a good schedule that lets me keep up with blogging, personal time-draining hobbies, and the all-important writing. (For more on that, see my dorky post on ANWA’s blog about those guilty pleasures that suck your time away.)

Okay, and now it’s down to the fun part of this award! I love this because I get to look through my old blog posts, and some of them were before I had any followers. So this might be the first time other eyes have seen them! I might get comments! WHEE…

1. Most Beautiful Post: The one where I was freaking out about which cover artist I wanted if I self-published. I’d still want her!

2. Most Popular Post: This one here, suckas! A whopping 19 comments, because my blog isn’t yet like some of you who get 30+ comments on all your posts!

3. Most Controversial Post: I’m not really a controversial or confrontational person, so I didn’t think I had anything to fit this category, until I remembered this post. There’s a member in our family who thinks getting published is a stupid, unattainable dream, and puts me down to my kids. It’s been very hurtful. I try to let such things roll off my back, but I had to rant about it first to get it out of my system.

4. Most Helpful Post: This one on my list of agencies who accept YA queries. I have the link in my sidebar too. It took a LONG time to compile and keep this list updated, and I’m more than happy to share it with other YA authors.

5. Most Surprisingly Successful: I didn’t really know where I was going with this post, so I was surprised when it got a lot of responses, and even a few RT’s on Twitter! I think I’m going to make a similar one soon with more pictures of faerie stuff that inspired me.

6. Post That Didn’t Get the Attention It Deserved or Most Underrated: I kinda loved this one but it got no comments! *sadface* Or this one, because it was fun!

7. The Post I Am Most Proud Of: Another tie! I still like to re-read my post on how bad I am at writing romance. And I really am quite proud of my Depeche Mode song parody. 🙂

Okay, whew! It was pretty exhausting going through all my old blog posts! Good thing I’m not a really prolific blogger or this would’ve been a killer.

More coming up this week about NaNoWriMo, maybe a writing snippet, and there’s also a really cool reason I haven’t done music posts lately but I’m going to start them up again!