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.