I came upon a pixie’s wash basin hidden on the forest floor. Her laundry was hanging out to dry nearby but I didn’t want to embarrass her by photographing her unmentionables.

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My pixie friend has inspired me to a do a little housekeeping of my own…

To begin with, I’d like to invite you to read my spooky story The Grave of Ursula Pendlethwaite, written for a local non-profit’s Halloween newsletter. It’s now up on their website where you can read it for free! Click here to head there now.

Secondly, October is almost over, and with it my Freewrite experiment. I’ve got a deadline coming up and outline work left to do before NaNoWriMo begins, so I’m tallying up my numbers and bringing the experiment to a close a few days early.

The proposed experiment was to test if using the Freewrite actually doubled my wordcount, as claimed by manufacturer Astrohaus.

Going into the experiment, I’d been writing an embarrassing 4 000 words per month since baby Nim was born. Before that, my monthly average of new words (editing doesn’t count for this experiment) was 13 645 words.

I kept track of my daily word count from September 16th until October 26th, broke it down to a daily average, and then worked out an average for a 30-day month.

Did the Freewrite double my wordcount?

At 28 942 words, it did indeed.

*hands a bouquet to Astrohaus*

How did your October go? Are you participating in NaNoWriMo 2017?