Oh my days, I can’t believe it’s October. For our family, it means we’ve just crested our 5 month anniversary. We’re practically marriage pros, right? We hope you enjoyed our last post about writing characters of the opposite gender, and the future posts we have in store for you. Please contact us via comments below or however you choose to let us know what you would like to learn from us—whether it be writing, editing, or something in between.
As some for fun updates, I’m completely hooked on cross stitching again, as you can see from the evidence below:

It’s been fun finding quotes online or just inside jokes that Travis and I have and making it into something to hopefully display in the future. I complete about one project a week, since they’re easy and I obviously don’t mind devoting my entire weekends to completing something.
For me, (Whitney), October will be a time of planning and preparing for the 2014 NaNoWriMo challenge. I’m preparing by going through the manuscript that I already have and I’m making a list of scenes in my work, Speechless, that need to be reworked or created so I can make a patchwork of scenes finally go together. As I said in a recent post, I just wrote whatever came to mind and just furiously wrote in the attempt to just spurt out the daily 1500 words and just separated each scene with some dingbats and moved on. Now I’ll be filling in the blanks with more character development.
I’m also preparing by taking part in the #OctWritingChallenge this month! Writing 500 words a day seems like a good warm up for November. I love this challenge and I think it was out of laziness that I didn’t take part in it during September. My mistake. You can follow me on Twitter to get the daily updates. Join in while the month is still young to get the warm up you need for NaNoWriMo!
Travis and I are still enjoying our writing group. It’s amazing the kind of insight you can get from other writers/readers.
Travis is also busier than other with school and work. What a hard worker! He’s taking a really fun archeology class, and he’s definitely adding some of the things he’s learning to his manuscript, The Ancients Stirred, and adding more life to the archeologist. It’s pretty fun to implement something you learn from a class or from research to your novel—it feels like you’re creating a world that is more real.
What are you doing in the month of October to keep the writing juices flowing? Let us know, or comment with your websites or social media links so we can follow you on your way to progress.
Watch out for fun Halloween costume photos in the near future. We McGruders dabble in dressing up every once and a while.