She was so lovely - elegant - like a stream-lined motif for regal life.  Her voice had a blues singer crack in it and she giggled young though she had certainly left girlhood behind dusty decades ago.  I bought her book because I loved her face and the way she typed all the important things in Evernote like an eager college student while we sat in the lecture hall together - me (like I was that side of 50) writing long-hand with a cheap pen and notebook.

"I wrote it for NaNoWriMo," she told me.  And I was in awe.  Because I thought it was all hype and the big build up to failure but I held her book in my hands and I felt it's pages and I thought that might be the bravest thing ever - what she did - putting it down in a torrent of flying fingers and scrambled ideas.

I asked her to sign the book and her fingers were old and graceful and nails painted burgundy and she acted like it was the kindest thing in the world - that I would want her mark inside the cover that spilled her name in crisp white font.

I'm not brave enough yet.  I wish I was.  Maybe next November...

Instead, I'm propelling ahead with the NaBloPoMo challenge - a blog post a day - which lowers the daunting expectation of writing 1600 daily words but gives me a whole new kind of anxiety: What if I'm boring?  What if I have nothing to say?  What if my subscribers are annoyed when their in-boxes are dinging with daily hits of yours truly?

And what if I didn't do it and never realized that I could do it and totally missed out on a opportunity to push and better and dare myself? 

So here we go.  November first.  And I'm already worried about what I'll write about tomorrow...