It’s the first day of November! You know what that means!

It means No Shave November! The month when you’re encouraged to grow out your winter coat. Toss the razors ladies! Embrace your inner bear, sloth, and/or Cousin It! Cultivate a luxurious and silky mane, one that shimmers in the light, that waves in the snappy autumn winds. Aim for leg locks long enough to braid as you digest your Thanksgiving feast. It’s insulation for the impending winter, an extra layer to trap warmth. Go big or go home, just like our hair in the 80s.

It means the holiday season is upon us. With the supply chain problems around the globe, if you’re sharing gifts with loved ones this year you need to be ordering them before there were supply chain problems around the globe. Might be a good year for your homemade jalapeño eye cream and sandpaper freshening wipes. I gave us all a pass on early holiday music in The Year of Our Misery 2020, but no such grace will be extended this year. Holiday music returns to its regularly scheduled and appropriate time of noon Thanksgiving Day, after Santa and confetti have faded from the television screen.

It means many of my writerly friends are now talking to their imaginary friends, frantically clickety-clacking towards 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. I am not participating in NaNo this year, though I do have some short stories I’d like to dive back into from NaNo 2019. You know, check in with my own imaginary friends, see how they’re doing, if they’ll even deign to speak to me after such a long time away. I found one of them over the summer, loved the writing and the story, and got mad that it ended abruptly. I mean, why the hell did the author stop? I was enjoying it! Yeah…I’d forgotten I was the aforementioned author and got pissed off that there wasn’t more. Of my own writing. That I’d forgotten I’d written. Everything is a delightful surprise when chronic stress and anxiety team up with perimenopause brain to screw with your memory. I could make my own Christmas gifts; I should tell myself that habanero eye cream is much more effective on deep wrinkles.

But it also means it’s National Blog Posting Month! The NaBloPoMo of years past is long dead and buried, which breaks my heart because it was hella fun. Longtime bloggers know what I’m talking about. Also, my god I’ve been blogging a long time. So I’ve decided to do my very own NaBloPoMo of one. The writing habit I had was trussed up by my return to the classroom in 2019 and then set on fire by the pandemic. SoloNaBloPoMo is my attempt to prime the mental pump and get the words a’flowin’. They’re all stopped up in there and a mental word clog is a nasty thing indeed. They get impacted and that leads to bad ideas.

It’s a month of exciting opportunities! Time to loosen up the typing knuckles, talk to our imaginary friends, and let the razors pout in the corner.