Books and pumpkins: together again

Happy Halloween yesterday! And...I'm a dork. Last year I posted about holding a costume contest and forgot. Next year? Remind me in August someone? Argh. If you dressed as one of my characters this year, keep the photos! They'll work for next year too. I really am so much more useless than you can imagine. My life is feeding babies 5x a day, cleaning up after them 5x a day, playing with them in between, besides the older kids and writing and...you get it. I won't bore you.

Auction is up and kicking! I may never do this again, especially since most of my books don't have a contemporary setting and so don't allow me to name characters after people. Think what an awesome Christmas gift for someone that a character in one of my books (or one of the other authors') is named after them! I'll mention the person in the acknowledgements as well. All to support a great charity that gets books into disadvantaged libraries.

And now a little pumpkin goodness, from our perennial squash goddess, Laura. As always, I'm in awe of the talented people I get to claim as friends. These are real, carved pumpkins. They are spectacular in person.

And for those of you also following Survivor this year and my kickbutt friend Dawn, who is KICKING BUTT:

Here are a couple more literary jack-o-lanterns, featuring my sweet friend Ally Condie's books (Crossed out now!). Didn't they turn out gorgeous?: