It'd Take a Miracle

Every year around this time we hear about various religious groups trying to keep Halloween celebration out of schools and throwing kids' parties in church basements as an alternative to going Trick or Treat. Apparently the objections are based (at least in part) on the pagan associations of the holiday and all of the evil things that children dress up as: ghosts, witches, devils, and the like. I guess the forces of evil are so powerful that merely dressing up in a red vinyl cape and putting on plastic horns is enough to lead an innocent young soul into full-blown satanism.
While I obviously do not share these opinions, I feel it is important that we all respect each other's ludicrous beliefs. Therefore, this year I have a Halloween costume that I think everyone can consider holy appropriate:

Now, not only is there no pagan or wiccan influence when I'm out drink or treating, but my costume is also really scary to all my secular humanist friends. It also satisfies any Halloween traditionalists who prefer the classic movie monsters. Seriously, twelve guys drank his blood and then he rose from the grave after being dead three days. Bela Lugosi, eat your heart out!

The other thing I need to mention is that starting tomorrow I am going to be batshit insa- Er, I mean I'm going to be participating in National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write an entire 50,000-word novel in 30 days because... well, because you're some kind of idiot, I guess. This means that I probably won't be taking the time to update the website during November, but I do plan on using the Calendar of Progress and Shame to post my wordcount thus far. The goal changes a bit from my normal "1 page per day, 6 days a week" guidline, though. To reach the NaNoWriMo goal you have to average 1,667 words per day, so progress reports will be based on that. The story idea I'm using is honestly something that may work better as a short story than a novel, but nearly everything I've ever written (fiction, at least) has turned out longer once I started writing than what I thought. We'll see if I can stretch this one out, or pad it with enough overly verbose crap, to reach the finish line.

I'm in for it now.