After months of anticipation, New Moon opened at 12:01 last night to sold-out theaters across the nation, and is projected to bring in $85 to $100 million this weekend. Are you one of the fans who've already seen the movie? How did it measure up to the book, and to the Twilight film? Let us know.

Photo: Stephenie Meyer at the New Moon premiere earlier this week.

We're over halfway done with NaNoWriMo and I'm curious about what's been happening in other parts of the country this month. What events have you hosted or attended? And how's your month going, generally? (I'm woefully behind, but hope to catch up over Thanksgiving.) Tell us about your write-in.

Want to host a write-in, but not sure how? Find write-in advice from wrimos around the country.

Over the weekend, I attended a seminar at Poets House by Naomi Shihab Nye on elegiac poetry. She's in the process of working on a collection about her late father -- perhaps for publication, perhaps not -- and she shared some of the things she's been reading and writing since he died. Like many people there, I had come because I'm also tentatively working on an elegiac work of some kind, in my case, for my mother. Shihab Nye started by opening up the floor to us, asking if we were working on similar projects and what our process has been. It was so comforting to be in a room with people who were also working with loss, and to hear that they, too, struggled to find the right form for their grief.

She also offered a number of book recommendations that I want to pass on, for readers here who might be engaged in a similar project or who recently lost someone: Beloved on the Earth, an anthology edited by Jim Perlman; Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr; The True Calm Keeps Biding Its Story by Rusty Morrison; and Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, to name a few. I haven't had a chance to read these yet, but they're on my list.

She also gave us an exercise: 1) Write down three questions you'd like to ask someone who's lost to you, either through death or estrangement. 2) List three to five physical items that come to mind when you think of this person. 3) Write down three to five quotes that you associate with the person. Then take bits and pieces of what you've written and work them into a poem of a few lines. You might find that those few lines are enough on their own, or you might expand them into a longer poem or even (for the purposes of this site) a prose piece.

With Black Friday ahead, I started thinking about our gift guide, which could use some freshening up, especially in light of the recent economy. What's the best gift anyone's ever given you with your writing life in mind? For me, it was a subscription to Glimmer Train from my best friend from high school and college. More than the journal itself, it was the recognition of my literary goals that mattered to me. (For that reason, I suppose, a journal subscription is at the top of the gift guide.) What gifts have made a difference in your writing life, and why? What would you give to a writer who in need of encouragement?