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It’s our favorite month of the year: NaNoWriMo. That’s National Novel Writing Month, for those of you who haven’t yet sacrificed your entire November to hitting that 50,000-word goal. Here at Quirk, we know that NaNoWriMo is exciting and invigorating. But we also know that writing a novel is hard. And lonely. And easy to give up on. All month, we’ll be sharing advice on how to finish that novel – and still have friends come December 1. So, gather your writer friends, stock up on snacks, and pull out your fluffiest pillows. Because you’re about to have the most productive party of all time.

We’ve got E.T. on our mind today and it’s a wonderful feeling. Our favorite extraterrestrial graces our pages today in a brand new picture book from illustrator Kim Smith. It’s enough to get our 80s-loving hearts a flutter. To celebrate this book’s release and the beautiful friendship between Elliott and E.T., here are some of our favorite interspecies friendships in pop culture.

Have you been attending Frankenstein’s Support Group for Misunderstood Monsters? If not, there's no better time to join. The group meets right here every other Thursday…and here's a guide to some of the monstrous misfits who you'll see sitting next to you.

Katherine McGuire has overseen subsidiary rights at Quirk for a little more than five years. What are subsidiary rights? Well, Quirk is really good at publishing books, and we're good at publishing them in English. But if it's not a book or it's not in English, but it's still based on something we published here at Quirk, Kate's in charge of building the partnerships that make it happen. That means she's got dozens of deals in progress on any given day with foreign-language publishers, Hollywood studios, audiobook producers, even apparel companies. She just returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair to meet with translation rights agents and acquiring editors from over 30 different countries, her book Stuff Every Vegetarian Should Know is out now, and she once snuck a gift-wrapped durian into a company holiday party to sow chaos.

Halloween is that most American of holidays: a mish-mash of old pagan religion, medieval customs and cavalcades of sugar. While no figure has come to symbolize Halloween the same way Santa embodies Christmas, that doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. Here’s some of our favorite gods and monsters who put the “Hallowed” in Halloween!

It’s no secret that we’re obsessed with witches over here at Quirk Books. We’ve explored our favorite covens in pop culture, published a book about self-care through spellbinding (shout out to all the Basic Witches in our lives), and are known to describe a good hair day as “witchy.” But what if our favorite covens from classic literature were bona fide witches? Imagine if the women of Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Les Miserables, The Great Gatsby, and Romeo and Juliet were all masters of spells and potions. Just imagine how differently those plots would turn out.