We’re just two months away from the end of 2014, daylight hours are shortening (Eastern Daylight Time ends tomorrow morning), and I find myself turning toward revision and reflection.

Photo of research notes. — Write Every Day.

For the last few days I’ve been getting caught up in QuickBooks so I don’t have to futz with a million business receipts come January.

And the Maryland Performance Excellence Foundation’s 2014 review cycle has ended: all healthcare applicants received their awards at the Baltimore American Society for Quality banquet on October 16. The MPEF board also recognized me for my work with the examiner team this cycle.

But today’s the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I’ve logged in, launched my daily writing file, and am ready to go. I made it to 44,000 words as a Rebel last year.

Write every day. That’s the heart of NaNoWriMo. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a novel, a play, an essay series, or any other genre.

What matters is the discipline of daily action on a project you care about. Deliver that project from thoughts in your head to words in print. Be the midwife for your own work this month.

Are you writing with the NaNoWriMo community this year? What are you working on?

Writing Around the Web

If you want a break from your own work, catch up on some of my recent writing.

Patheos columnist Sarah Moon has invited her readers to reconsider the liturgy of their tradition specifically or the Christian faith overall. She began Liberating Liturgies with a reflection and update of the Apostles’ Creed. And she’s been a gracious host of the two-part series on baptismal vows and congregational covenants that I published on this site last year.

Part 1, From Vows to Action, is already up: feel free to share about the vows that bind you to your congregation there.

Some of my Adventist peers noted the passage of October 22 a little less than a fortnight ago. October 22 is the anniversary of the Millerites’ Great Disappointment of 1844. The early Adventists who expected Christ’s physical return that October day grieved their disappointment, revised their theology about the timeline, and, within twenty years had reorganized enough to form what is now the Seventh-day Adventist denomination.

A few friends and I wondered that week whether our community might benefit from observing October 22 intentionally each fall: we might take memories of that period as a symbol of community resilience rather than as a family embarrassment to be hidden, explained away, or used to induce perfectionist guilt today.

I don’t think that will happen, at least not at the behest of the General Conference calendar. Revisiting what that date can mean will be up to local members: meaning-making is something we can all do.

So that’s what inspired me to ask my Facebook friends about Halloween (October 31), even though it’s a holiday I’ve never celebrated. Spectrum Magazine’s Jared Wright asked me to write, and what resulted is an article on Jamaican parenting, monsters, and facing up to the parts of ourselves that we’ve rejected.

I’m glad at least some readers understand that the article is only tangentially about All Hallows’ Eve.

And In Case You Missed It: A New Project from Akers and Eyer

Daneen Akers and Stephen Eyer, co-producers of the documentary Seventh-Gay Adventists, have just launched a crowdfunding campaign to support a new project. SGA allowed thousands of people to open a different quality of conversation about Adventist faith and sexuality in their families and with friends.

But pastors and congregational lay leaders still have a lot of questions, and there just aren’t many quality resources available to them.

Check out Daneen and Stephen’s note on the dialogue film they’d like to produce, and support the film at any level you can. They need to raise $20,000 this month to get started, and they’re already 38% of the way there.

Fund good dialogue! And share this campaign with others.