I wonder how it's possible to hold onto the freedom from overthinking that comes with nanowrimo. There comes a time when it's appropriate to agonize over every line your character says, but I don't think I'm there yet. It's just that when I hear characters talking to each other I have to think "Wait, he wouldn't say that. I would say that, maybe Debra would say that but Sal wouldn't."

November is over. The rush to as many words as possible is over. I'm revising the plot, rearranging the scenes. I called for readers as I wanted to get input before revisions get frozen into place. Having done that, having sent out 3 manuscripts, gave me the freedom to step back & rest a bit. Thanks for that. I began to think how to revise.

But it's still wide open!

I read through it myself. There's some redundancy, & I can think of some edits, but I feel like I'd like to take a rest & let someone else read it before I proceed. Who would like a copy?

I revised & printed. I'm the first reader. After that I'm looking for some more readers. Any volunteers?

So November is over. The next thing i need to do is get a ream of paper (which I've needed forever) to print the thing and read it.

So all i have left to do is describe a conversation about planning a wedding between somebody who has been married before and is familiar with the ways of the US on planet Earth and somebody unfamiliar with said ways. Plus inviting the guests, getting the license, and the ceremony at City Hall with more than the required number of witnesses. Plus a celebratory meal afterwards. Can I do it using at least 4751 words?

I wrote about shopping for Oscar night, what Segullah and Debra are wearing, both gowns and jewelry, Segullah's date Moshe, natural hairstyles for Segullah and Moshe, the big night itself, Debra's sudden decision to accept Sal's proposal, and her late night telling her roommate about it. Now they just have to iron out the details. My word count right now is 15,249. That includes a glossary. I think I'll include recipes too, for the dishes Segullah serves for her Shabbat dinner with Debra and breakfast the next morning.

The conflict over the marriage proposal and the tension between Debra and Sal will be forgotten when the news comes out that Segullah has been nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. She invites Debra & Sal to attend the Oscars, & offers to buy them gown, tux, jewelry. Segullah & Debra will go shopping, leading me into places my writing doesn't go very often. What female charaters look like and what they wear, & shopping for it. Debra's lifelong conviction that you can't make a living as an artist or writer takes a hit because Segullah's novel made money and now she made money from the movie.

The spirit of nanowrimo says i shouldn't go nuts finding out whether this is possible, how many guests are nominees allowed to have at the Oscars, i should just write it.

The time frame for my story has undergone some transformation as I've written it. When planning it i got away from my own life & decided Debra is younger than me, and should have her young adult experiences in the 90's instead of the 80's like I did. However as i write it this doesn't seem to be happening. Debra's job at the sculpture store is based on a job I had in the 80's, and there are no computers in the story. So far there are no real references to mark it in time. I'm finding it sort of refreshing to write about a time when shipping orders to customers meant writing them up in a 5x7 UPS book with carbons. My husband prepares UPS shipments every day and he says UPS doesn't even give you that book anymore, everything is done on the computer.

Still to come: I want to capture in this story the excitement of 2 big nominations in real life. The first was for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. I was once in a writer's group with the author of the novel the screenplay had been adapted from. The experience of watching that screenplay win the award on TV and seeing the author (who I haven't seen since the writer's group) in her seat at the awards show and cheering for the movie, although I was really cheering for the author, yelling my head off in my in-laws living room.

Seems like a few months later Eugie's novelette was nominated for a Nebula. This was a story I had actually read, and an author I was actively in touch with, and a genre I'm deeply involved with. This time the awards show wasn't on TV, I had to figure out how to watch it on the Internet, and watch what seemed like hours of a door with waiters going through it serving the dinner. This time I was yelling in my own living room, my husband & daughter watching me glued to the unreliable webcast. As a reward for this enthusiasm I got to see a shuttle launch because Eugie recorded it on her Droid and posted it on Facebook. When Sheila Williams wrote about Nebula weekend in her column in Asimov's I got to relive all this again.

I feel like we're all on the same team, and we share our victories.

i guess i know how the story is going to go from here on in. Sort of. Don't know when i'm going to have time to write it. Friday I'm supposed to work at home. The office is sort of a disaster, as everything has been dismantled for painting/carpeting. I'm sure I have plenty of time to get at least the outline of the story written this weekend. Maybe i'll get to 20,000 words.

The weird thing is the number of holy books I've had on my desk while writing it. First, the book of Judges, because the story within the story is Deborah, written by Debra's high school friend Segullah. I'm imagining a feature length musical epic based on about a page in Judges. I couldn't write it, but my fictional character Segullah could. Does. Did. She wrote the screenplay and the book of the musical based on her novel of the same name.

Then, while writing the scene where Debra goes with Segullah to a Friday Shabbat service some Hebrew words and a tune that has always haunted me, I don't know where I know it from, started running through my head, and I typed the words into Google and discovered it was the 133rd Psalm. So then I had the book of Psalms on my desk. (I'm getting away from my usual Ashkenazic/Yiddish spellings because Abayudaya Jews of Uganda say Shabbat and synagogue, not Shabbos and shul. I want to try harder to find out if there's a word for synagogue in their local language of Lugandan. But I think they want to use the words that other Jews use.)

So I think I'll be able to wrap the story up by the deadline of Nov. 30, if not the word count.

In this story, a marriage proposal is a source if great conflict.

So skipped everything else and wrote the marriage proposal scene.

I think I'm stuck in "i don't want to write THAT!" land. Feeling discouraged. Maybe I should proceed to the idea I got when reading "A Pep Talk from Chris":

Chris Baty says

incite change. If your story is losing momentum, juice it up by
inflicting some major changes on your characters. Crash the spaceship. End
the marriage. Buy the monkey. Change is scary because we have to figure out
what comes next. But feeling afraid is ten times better than feeling bored,
and your book will benefit from your risk-taking. Go big this week! You
won't regret it.

Chronologically it comes later, but i can always fill it in.

I'm not sure it's going to end up being a novel, but I'm having fun writing it. I never really aspired to the 50,000 words because my energy level is not always so great these days. My goal is more modest, more like 20,000 words. I never know how long anything is going to be until I've finished what Eugie calls the 0 draft. I get an idea and I write until it's complete, not thinking "it's a novel" or "it's a novella" or "it's a short story." I figure I'll know after it takes shape. They usually end up being 3-5000 words. Then I edit it to make it better, which usually means shorter. Then when I get to the marketing stage I think about the requirements of different publications. I have never marketed a novel.

I think The Object of My Affection by Stephen McCauley is something of a perfect novel. It takes exactly a year, and it ends the way it starts, with a trip to Coney Island. Maybe a year is the minimum time frame for a novel. I guess there's no real maximum time frame. Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson is a big novel, encompassing 6 years in the protagonist's life, but is told from several characters points of view, and goes back into the grandmother's childhood. So it incorporates three generations.

I think my time frame is about five years.

Day 3 of NANOWRIMO. I'm on Day 8 of my outline, but I've only written 2,628 words. Only 47,372 to go. In 27 days.

I've written the entire "past" background to my story, and have now arrived at the present. 3 of my supporting characters are very likeable. Now that my protagonist has been kicked out of school, I don't think these characters should disappear. I can't seem to bring myself to write about the roommate at all.

The Daily Grind was rejected by THE NEW YORKER. I have to decide where to submit it next.

ASIMOV'S seems like an obvious choice, but after it took them 104 days to reject "Being" with a pefunctory form letter, I decided never to submit to them again as an unpublished author. I really got my hopes up. Here I thought they were seriously considering it, while in reality it probably fell under the desk. But that's not really a reason.

How about STRANGE HORIZONS?

I still have not sent A SINGULAR BEING to THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION.

So who's doing NanoWriMo this year? Wanna be my writing buddy?

I joined nanowrimo!

I think i'll be able to achieve close enough. Close enough to 50K words, close enough to the 2 hours a night i was originally imagining.

Well, now it's 24 hours later, and I'm again (still?) tired. Also, I still haven't sent "A Singular Being" to S&SF.

I'm wondering if my plan of doing nanowrimo this year is at all realistic. I had pretty much figured I'd be unlikely to make the 50k words, but I don't think that's the most important thing. But now I'm wondering if I'll have the energy to write every night.

Maybe I'm just saying this because i'm tired tonight.

I'm thinking about going inactive on Critters again. I've fallen behind in my critiques. Of the stories I had imagined submitting I did "The Enemy", the mold one. That leaves "A Night Out", the dust one, "Always Birds", the one about the cold. "The Daily Grind", the job one has been Crittered, revised, and submitted to the NEW YORKER. But now I'm focused on THAT AND A TOKEN, which as whatever that genre is called that is not SF, Fantasy, or Horror is not critterable. For feedback, after I ask the members of Writer's Playground, I plan to see what I can arrange through the International Women's Writing Guild, the source of the f-2-f group where I met Sapphire.

Today I finished naming all my characters who still needed names. My protagonist has a surname.

Realizing a lot of my real life experiences in the 80's would not work in the 90's. In real life in 1986 I worked at Pearl Paint & lived in my rent stabilized apt. w/o a roommate. Couldn't happen in the 90's. In real life I changed jobs a lot. I found them through the Village Voice. I had my character finding a certain job in 1999, but I couldn't imagine how. I couldn't find a job in 1999, and neither could anyone else I knew. Realized she has to have a roommate, and she has to keep the job she gets after getting kicked out of grad school.

Real life is so complicated. The trick is to streamline it to make a good story, but still keep it real, keep it believable. Of course, there's no reason why the complications of being me have to be in it. It's not me. It's Debra.

i'm getting excited about the characters and settings in THAT AND A TOKEN. I'm having the character born in 1970 instead of 1961. From time to time I realize, hey, it's fiction, I can make it up however I want. And I don't even have to create a planet or invent a society! Setting fiction in the reality we all think we live in. What a concept!

I just outlined my new novel. It's "regular" fiction. I've been thinking about it a long time, am happy with the outline.

I think "Being" is ready for submission. This will be my first snail mail submission in a long time, it seems daunting. Having to produce a manuscript as a physical object, and send it using envelopes and stamps. Oh no!

I'm very happy with how the revision is going. I think it's almost ready.

As it is the story is divided by headings with Roman numerals I-XII. At least one Critter thought this was uneccessary for a story this length. I think the divisions are necessary, but they could be just blank lines, asterisks, or any other style of division. I'd like some feedback on this.

On 2nd thought I don't think an omniscient narrator is necessary. I just got rid of the words readers didn't get.

About the title. What I meant by it was that humans are singular beings, having only one self, and also that Newmia is a singular being since the Imray, at least the ones she knows about, place a high value on conformity, and she is different.

So why was I thinking of changing it?

Octopus pictures

Paul pix & video

They keyword is UNDERWATER INVERTEBRATE. Has no bones, doesn't hold its shape.

Next up: "A Singular Being" to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, though I'm still considering changing the title.

2 things are helping me think about this story:

1. I'm reading Unbelievable by Stacy Horn, which is about the parapsychology lab at Duke University, and the attempt to scientifically prove or disprove the existence of ESP. My sci-fi story is about alien beings among whom 2 abilities considered "paranormal" here on Earth are universal: ESP & the ability to appear without one's body, both during life and after death.

2. Paul the psychic octopus. Not because of his ability to pick World Cup soccer winners, but because he is an octopus. My aliens are sentient octopuses. The ubiquitous pictures and videos of Paul over the last few days have given me an image of what they actually look like & how they move that all my research never did. I can't remember why I chose octopuses, but my research into the life, death, & habits of octopuses has driven the plot in some odd directions. I wanted to tell a story in which a young alien from a species that doesn't know the sort of permanent loss humans experience at every turn observes a bereaved human & is upset by the sadness.

What's funny is that to tell a story about beings who don't know loss I chose a creature that doesn't live very long. But that's kind of the point, they experience death a lot but not permanent loss because on their world the dead & the living have no trouble communicating. That brings me right back to #1, because what the Duke scientists were really trying to prove or disprove was that something of us survives death.

3. My experience with Critters Writers Workshop, both from the "reviewer" and the "reviewee" side has taught me that the reader's ability to read your mind depends solely on your ability to put it into words. Should I explicity say they're octopuses? Should I introduce an omniscient narrator?

After submitting "The Daily Grind" to THE NEW YORKER, I also submitted 3 poems to MOONDANCE: CELEBRATING CREATIVE WOMEN. I really only wanted to submit the one about Nina, now titled "What Is It About Nina?" but they want 3-5. I picked the 2 in my poetry folder I thought were the best, titled "The Pre-Med" (which I wrote while at Pomona College) and one I just retitled "At the Library" because I know I initially wrote it at the library at UCSB, and I think that title will add to the reader's appreciation of the poem. I don't really understand the poetry market, don't read it, only write it once in awhile. When I was very young, high school and college, it's mostly what I wrote, and if I'd pursued that path my whole life might have been different.

I don't think MOONDANCE is very organized about submissions, or rejections, anyway. I had one acceptance from them, and no reply ever to my next submission.

My submission might stand a better chance if I had submitted 3 poems about special women in my life instead of 1 about a special woman, 1 about some guy, and one about some weird moment freshman year. But the poem about my cousin Hillary that I wrote for her 50th birthday struck me as incomplete, and the one about a woman that was special to me in my teens made me cringe. So i picked the 2 that i thought were best.

There's also a poem I wrote about my husband years ago that I couldn't find to evaluate whether I thought it was any good or not. That drives me crazy. I suppose it will turn up. It's not on the computer.

I did it! I submitted "The Daily Grind" to THE NEW YORKER!

Not being in the mood to write, or crit, I turned to the easiest choice: reading. I just read the most wonderful short story. "Dance of the Kawkaroons" by Mercurio D. Rivera in INTERZONE #227 March-April.

I don't feel in the mood to write a critique. I think my inner critic is out of control. I don't want to turn it loose on someone else's work, or my own.

Realized I miss this blog. "Writer's Playground" isn't complete without it.

Here's my list of projects:

1. "The Daily Grind" was rejected by APEX MAGAZINE. I am planning next to submit it to THE NEW YORKER.

2. I think I really overreacted when after "A Singular Being" was rejected by CLARKESWORLD MAGAZINE, I reread their guidelines & saw "alien observes humans" on their list of "stories we don't want to see." Of course, "visitor to alien world is told rules & ignores them and is punished" is on that list too, & that describes "Babysitting" by Christine Murphy to a tee, & that is one of my favorite stories ever. Anyway, I went nuts & did radical surgery on the ms, called the results "version 5b" & submitted it to Critters under the title "Was A Singular Being, Probably needs New Title" as Fantasy instead of SF. I realized reading the resulting critiques that my butchery didn't make much sense. I am now going back to version 4e & going from there, destination THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION.

3. The memoir was rejected by agent Betsy Lerner & I didn't feel like that book length project was still on the agenda.

4. I submitted "Return to Darkness: My Sojourn in the Realm of the Cavedwellers" to MEMOIR (AND)

5. The novel i started in my 20's is now officially shelved.

6. I've been considering 2 ideas for NANOWRIMO, one sci-fi, one that other thing.

7. I also have another idea for a novel, not too developed yet.