It’s the first day of October, and you know what that means!

It means September just ended! And pumpkin spice drinks have already been out for a couple of weeks! The Halloween stuff in stores have been out just long enough to start collecting dust!

And, I’m about to write a blog post every day for 31 days, just to prepare myself for a hopefully successful National Novel Writing Month in November.

I’ve only succeeded at Nanowrimo 3 times but each of those 3 times happened after a successful Blogtober. The effort involved in Blogtober opens me up, getting me in the habit of making hard choices and making time to put words on the page. There is no real narrative in these blog posts. There is no main character. There is just the topic, and whatever my thoughts are on the subject in 300 to1000 word chunks.

Mmm. Delicious chunks.

To have a successful Blogtober, it helps to come into October with a plan, or a list of topics. The topics this month (not necessarily in order):

1. Welcome to Blogtober 2023
2. The Continuing Struggle of Being a Creative Person Working in a Technical Field
3. Romanticizing the Author Life
4. The Realities of the Author Life
5. Measuring Success as an Author
6. Publishing Routes Unpacked
7. A Day in the Life of Brian C. E. Buhl
8. Mel Walker Short Story: The Psychic on the Jury
9. Mel Walker Sequel: Untitled So Far
10. How to Write a Villain
11. How to Write a Hero
12. The Current State of Social Media
13. Dragon Gems
14. When Do You Stop Learning to Write?
15. The Attractiveness of Drama
16. The Future of Writing
17. Are People Still Reading?
18. Roleplaying Games and the Writing Itch
19. Zombies!
20. Dehumanization in Stories
21. People Love People that are Driven
22. October 22, 2023 Update
23. Relationships in Stories
24. Sanderson’s Laws Simplified
25. The Good and Bad of Audiobooks
26. How Much Detail is Too Much Detail
27. The Flashlight Approach to Story Writing
28. Psychics Versus Mages
29. Running Away From a Story
30. The “Buy My Book” Post
31. Happy Halloween 2023

I have a couple of spare topics to slot in if it I decide any of these are too much alike, or if I don’t think I have enough to say on the subject. For example, the post on Zombies and the post on Dehumanization both have a lot of overlap. I think I have enough unique things to say about both subjects, and I think one leads into the other. I may call an audible in the middle of the month, though, and do something completely different.

I have Mike Baltar to thank for helping me come up with this list. I spent most of the day with him yesterday. We had lunch, then wrote at his place for a little bit, and talked about various writing topics. Thank you so much, Mike!

One Last Thing…

I do not believe that emails have been going out like they’re supposed to. I think the last OS update I did to the server housing my blog may have broken my mail services. The update originally broke this blog entirely, but I was able to put it back together, mostly.

To be fair, my mail server has been complete garbage for about a year already. In the next day or two, I’m going to try and rebuild it. I’m hopeful that the updates won’t mess up the blog again, but there is a chance of interruptions. It can’t be helped.

In other words, I know a handful of you have relied on the blog posts getting email to you, which is currently not working. I’m going to try and get that functionality back, maybe even tonight.

Thank you for your patience while I rebuild some of things behind the scenes!