October 2022: How We Spent This Spooky Month

It’s Halloween!! We’re so pumped to watch some movies and eat candy tonight. While dressed up in our costumes, of course. October has been an eventful, fun and hectic month for the two of us. We’re ending the month with a relaxing night after many full weekends of activities. Even though it was tiring, we made some amazing memories.

How has your October been? We’d love to hear all about it in the comments.

Embracing Fall

October is the best part of fall because we’re preparing for Halloween, the weather is nice and the trees change color. Most of our favorite fall activities happen in October. While we didn’t get to do everything on our Ultimate Autumn Bucket List (but autumn isn’t over yet!), we’ve had an exciting few weeks.

Earlier this month, we got out of the city and drove to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where we went apple picking, wine tasting and hiking. It was a beautiful 60-degree sunny day that gave us impeccable views and beautiful photos. Spending time in nature turned out to be the relaxing trip we needed.

We also attended some fall-themed events. We did a Halloween fright event, which included a haunted trail, spooky corn maze and dark hayride. We also attended a fall festival, a beach-themed seaside festival and a petoberfest. These events got us into the spirit and allowed us to be frightened and have fun. We got back yesterday evening from the seaside event in Delaware, which proved to be so much fun. While the weather was chilly, there’s something special about visiting a beach town in the offseason. We definitely made sure to have a lot of fall fun.

To get ready for Halloween, we carved pumpkins, watched movies, let candles for ambience and baked cookies. But tonight, we need to watch Hocus Pocus, our absolute favorite, and read from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Dedicating Time to Writing

In between all the excitement, we’ve focused on our writing a lot. As most of you know, we co-write The Misadventures of Johan O’Malley. We also have our own writing projects: Ben is writing and editing his books for young readers and Christy is working on a YA trilogy.

Recently, we’ve been talking about our writing process and whether or not to participate in National Novel Writing Month. We also talk about the business side of the publishing industry so we can learn more about everything from querying to final publication.

We’d love our readers to support our writing journey. If you haven’t yet, please read our latest chapter: Halloween Gone Wrong. Johan O’Malley has an interesting Halloween experience.

Reflecting

Back in the spring, we posted Life Lessons Learned from Our Chren Weekend, where we talked about our lives and our futures with some friends. That was an eye-opening weekend for us, as we reflected on what we wanted and how we could accomplish our goals.

We’ve been reflecting recently about how to take our blogging and writing to the next level. We also talked about taking chances and making stuff happen for ourselves. In contrast, we’ve talked about people we know who haven’t been able to do this. Friends who don’t know what they want and have changed directions more times than we can county. Or people who “don’t have to figure anything out” because they think everything will be fine, even without putting in the effort.

We don’t want to be like those types of people. We don’t want to be the people who let life happen to them.