I guess I'm doing nano

I think of nano as an organizing method for the writer who needs something to get over the early phases of a project--I know its origins are as an inspirational event for those people who "always wanted to write," but it's clearly gone beyond that in several directions.

Well, now that I'm more or less recovered from chemo-brain/palbociclib-brain, I'm still a little more unfocused than normal, a little more unconfident than normal, a little more diffident. Which means something for a person like me, who is already plagued by distractibility, lack of focus, lack of confidence, lack of ambition, low energy, etc. So I'm thinking--let's get the ball rolling any way we can.

I mean I've been writing slowly all a,long and even submitting (as usual without any result). But see above. Anyway, I've been thinking about a project I started last year, originally called Crow Girls but now I think called Crow Girl, Pigeon Girl to more accurately reflect the story, and which was backburnered because it lacked an actual plot (beyond "two little girls are recruited by urban birds to save the world from fascism").Yesterday  I was brooding about how mad I am at everybody in politics now, especially the liberals and center-left who seem to think that the most dangerous thing in the world is antifa, but also the ultraleft who seem uninterested in mass organizing and coalition building, and I came up with the answer to the central question "but how can two little girls and all the birds in the city air save the world from fascism?" and of course the answer is that they compel the liberals and the center-left to work with the left and ultraleft, and I have almost figured out the mechanics of that. The climax is the birds drop fliers all over the city, gathering all these disparate groups to meet separately at the same time, and once they're meeting, the human allies of the birds and girls are giving speeches about unity and principled coalition building, and then more fliers and they're all marching to the central government plaza and meeting there where they simply take the parliament and...

well, the book doesn't have to go all the way. Honestly I think the war that's brewing still happens, but I think it ends faster and the outcome of the war is better, and I think that there's less damage during the war than there would have been. That's my hopeful message: unite, everybody, fight fascism, and history will still be terrible but it will be better.

This is set in the same world as The Drummer Boy and the little girls are Yanek's niece (Liby, the crow girl) )and the little sister of his godson(Mily, the pigeon girl). The girls are recruited by the birds, and they begin to understand what is going on because uncle Yanni and uncle Maxi are not speaking to each other because Max is brawling with the fascists and Yanek is a government employee (an arborist, but still) and is reluctant to support confrontation, despite having called up ghost soldiers to defend the striking miners in the earlier book. The world is not a roman a klee for Central Europe in the 1920s-30s, though it is informed by the culture and landscape of that time and place. Unlike The Drummer Boy this book is entirely urban and most of the human characters are girls and women, with a few boys and men involved. The fantasy element might be fairly limited, though I've been urged to have the girls and their allies actually become birds during the climax or the events leading up to the climax.

I'm not trying for 50,000 words. I'm trying for 30,000 and I hope the whole book comes out to 45-50K. I want to practice writing more sparely, at a more sprightly pace, with stuff happening more intensively and less subtly.