(226 so far)

So last night while selling pull tabs at the bingo hall (I sold $1500 worth. Most of them were bright red, which is what I've been telling Stacy lately -- they like bright, pretty ones with delicious illustrations and lots of small payouts: I think it's because, deep down, they know they aren't going to get enough big prizes for that to be the reason to play, and they want to have a good time playing. I wish we weren't doing this: I wish we had regular public money to pay for our music program) I thought and thought about the stupid short story. I wrote a bunch in longhand in my Japanese notebook. I still hate what I wrote, but I'm getting closer. I'm dealing with more last-of-the-humans now: there's really not that much you can do with only one, even if you're getting all into their relationship with the alien exobehaviorists or whatever. It allows me too to tell the bulk of the story in first and third person simultaneously, which is a neat trick (the first-person pov is writing about another one, and speculating about their motivations). I also realize I need to know more about the aliens. I know now that their sexual reproduction is kind of like fungi, which I was reading about again the other day pursuant to another project (I'm trying to put together an informal mushroom calendar so I can figure out where to go in February-May: what comes up when, and where). Fungi have this clever thing. If I understand it right. They either can be thoguht of as having one sex or several-many sexes. What they do is they find another genetic strain with which they are compatible and swap a full set of genetic material. Then when they reproduce they mix that material with a full set of their own, and then split it twice so that they have four haploid egg things each with a random selection of the versions of each gene. And then I forget, a miracle happens or something. The haploids double to make the spores? Oh, also I know the name for the story: "Tasmanian Flower Basket," which is a reference to Truganini last of the Tasmanians, and also -- for that reason -- the name of a quilt pattern one of them makes up.

I added 226 words to Afterwar and that's annoying because it was going so smoothly before. There was this really neatly worked out sequence leading to the introduction of the man without a country that I can't reproduce or replace with something better as yet.

Foo. It's noon.