October To Dos, and NaNoWriMo

October has a special feeling to it now that I'm committed to doing NaNoWriMo again**. I feel like I imagine a mother might feel in the last month of pregnancy, when she's scrambling to get a bunch of things done before she has to devote all her time to her baby. (More on the parallels between writing and motherhood another day.)

So here are the writing/creative things I want to get done in October, pre-NaNo:

+ Finish the two baby sweaters I'm making for my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's babies.

+ Get the short short "Marriages Mysteries" revised and send it out.

+ Get the longer short story "Trying" revised and send it out.

+ Send out my body image essay

+ Write a pitch for the Coupling column of the Boston Globe

+ Write a pitch for an article on simultaneous submissions and find some writing mags where it might find a home.

+ Write a pitch for Utube's first literary journal, Shape of a Box. (Love the concept!)

I'm slightly tired from just typing this all, but I think it can get done.

**I am not going to follow the NaNo rules 100%, as I did last year. I am in the process of completely rewriting my NaNo manuscript from last year. Basically I'm using the idea and the characters that came out of all that writing, but I'm not using the actual writing at all. I don't want to interrupt that process to start on another novel. So I'm going to continue working on my second draft of that first novel, with the goal of getting 50,000 words of it (re)written in November. In any case, November is going to be completed devoted to writing, and that's the point of NaNo, right?