So I just realized as I was posting on the NaNoWriMo forums…

The basic idea is that there are two girls who are twins separated at birth. One was adopted, the other lived with their parents until their death. The one that was adopted is on a search for her parents, and finds her sister. The other one knows everything that happened with the parents of course, so her conflict in the story is the she has a friend who just found out she has AIDS. I think part of my problem with writing it, which I just realized, is that the two girls met too early in my mind. I think I have to give them separate story lines til past the halfway point in the book…

So now is the perfect time to realize this. Now of course it makes complete sense, like “DUH! Of course the girls need to run separate storylines (alternating chapters?) for a large chunk of the book. Then the meeting will be A turning point but not the FIRST turning point. I was trying to cram so much into a short story that I didn’t think about how to plan it out as a novel yet. So luckily I’m going to work on the planning and I have a good early start so that next month I will have a pretty good idea of where it’s all going.