According to Wikipedia (which still involves human editors, therefore I totally trust Wikipedia these days and not AI “summaries”),

An ofrenda (Spanish: “offering”) is the offering placed in a home altar during the annual and traditionally Mexican Día de los Muertos celebration. An ofrenda, which may be quite large and elaborate, is usually created by the family members of the person who has died and is intended to welcome the deceased to the altar setting.

This year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is dedicated to family members who always supported me during November and have died.

Ofrenda: Aunt Pat

She always sent me a letter wondering if I was writing again for November. Aunt Pat could never quite remember the name NaNoWriMo, but she understood the whole point of writing a draft of a novel in a month. She worked in a library and was an avid reader, so understood the toils and travails of an author.

Ofrenda: Dad

Dad super supported my writing by just sort of casually asking what I was writing. The decades of me and Dad were bumpy, but settled down in late adulthood. It was Dad who came up with the title Swing Follies, because of our shared love of Hollywood musicals.

Ofrenda: Mom

I cannot even express how devastated I was when my mother passed. She didn’t quite understand what it was I wrote, but she understood that I wanted to write. Mom used to ask me during our phone calls “how many books did you sell today?” For a while, this was an amusing exchange. As times — and economies — changed, this became not so fun a question. She honored my request to not ask that anymore. Mom was an avid reader of historical non-fiction, always eager to learn about things she never learned in her youth.

New Beginnings: NaNo 2.0

National Novel Writing Month has been revived with a new venture, NaNo 2.0, “a free, community-led endeavor that’s keeping the spirit of National Novel Writing Month alive.”

I’ve signed up and posted my goals. The site is in a very nascent stage, so descriptions of goals are limited. My actual November 2026 goals:

• finish writing Story 9 of the Ockham Steam-Works Laboratory Chronicles
• edit Stories 7, 8, 9 of the Ockham Steam-Works Laboratory Chronicles
• publish Story 7 of the Ockham Steam-Works Laboratory Chronicles
• put Stories 8 and 9 on pre-order

Cheer me on! Stay tuned for more 2026 releases! Sign up for my newsletter to get the latest news!

And may our departed loved ones’ memories be a blessing.