Novenas & Novellas

Politics

The Pope: No Nukes, Period

Folks, let’s make something clear here:

It is quite literally Pope Leo XIV’s job to articulate Catholic teaching. If you’re not Catholic, then you are free to simply answer “noted” and move on. If you are Catholic, you should already know our rules on the matter — and in the United States, compliance with them is legally voluntary.

Catholics emphatically do not believe that our religious beliefs are a private part of who we are and how we live. Our understanding of “separation of Church and State” is that there is no official religion in the United States — i.e., we’re supposedly free to practice ours. See the First Amendment.

NoMoWriMo

Politics Writing

I was a relatively early adopter of National Novel Writing Month (now known as NaNoWriMo). I made my first attempt at the challenge in 2001. Over the next several years, my participation waxed and waned, but I finally reached my first official 50,000-word success in 2017. (I had previously won with self-defined goals a couple of times.)

By that time I’d become a semi-active member of NaNoLanta, and I still have a small stuffed panda in my writing area with a collar that says “Writing is My Superpower.” I won again in 2018, but by then some other parts of my life were changing and I was becoming far less involved with NaNoLanta. I participated in 2019 and 2020, but I did not win.

And then came 2021.