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.