It's dream-chasing time again.

October is waning and on the horizon a more significant month looms:I do not call it November. I call it NaNoWriMo. For those too lazy to follow the link (or those with dial-up internet and little patience), I'll tender an explanation: NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It's been around for nine years now, and I discovered it last October in the library. A flier tucked at the top of the winding ramp caught my eye as I doubled over my bulbous pregnant belly and attempted to resume breathing after exerting myself so in the one-story climb to the second floor. Anyway, according to the NaNoWriMo website, the month is simply "a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing" in which participants begin writing November 1 and work towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by midnight, November 30.

My life dream has long been to be a writer (I'm talking since at least the first grade), but fear has always held me back. The notorious Inner Editor often keeps me from even attempting to write, telling me before I even sit down at the keyboard that whatever words and ideas and characters and situations are inside of me are unoriginal, dumb, insipid, embarrassing, and/or poorly put together. So the idea of just sitting down and crapping out a whole bunch of unfiltered and loosely tied together thoughts and ideas with a press-forward-and-don't-look-back attitude appealed to me. So I signed up. And wrote, oh, about 30 double-spaced 1-inch-margin pages before collapsing into a heap of shame and giving up on the whole endeavor.

But a year has passed, and the sweet scent of rotting foliage is making me want to try my hand again at writing a novel in a month. And, for extra motivation, I've decided to go public with the goal. Would you all be my cheerleaders? I'll even buy you dollar-store pom-poms. Please? Pretty please?

To meet my goal I would need to write at least 5 pages a day. This I could do after Soren retires for the evening, though it would mean neglecting other aspects of my life, such as my marriage, housework, reading, documentary night, relationships, and church callings. I'm so scared. I think that there is nothing scarier in this world that pursuing the dreams that mean the most to you, especially when you feel so completely inadequate. My worst fear of all time is not remaining unpublished, but of producing the sort of mindless drivel that abuses adverbs, speaks of "honey-blond" hair, and tops the bestseller list at Deseret Book. I don't fear not writing; I fear bad writing. But fear only restricts and never frees, and so, by way of working to overcome my fear of myself, I have decided to post the first paragraph from my last year's attempt at novel-writing.

Here it is:

"The enormous hostility Sara felt toward the two ladies standing in the check-out line was mostly inexplicable. There was nothing wrong with the women, per se-- they weren’t saying anything even slightly offensive-- but there was something about the way they pursued their lips and lilted of their voices and leaned on their hips that just…irritated her. To the point of raising her blood pressure, even. She examined them, studied their faces and mannerisms for clues that might unlock the mystery of her great distaste. They both wore their hair in the way expected of middle-aged women: short curling-iron sculpted layers, hair-sprayed into place. And they both wore their jeans in the way expected of middle-aged women: pulled up high over slightly pooching bellies made round by years of having babies and eating hot white rolls on Sunday evenings. Their make-up was tastefully applied, obviously there, but not classless in quantity. They wore dressy blouses and matching jewelry and the one with the graying blond hair had to pull out her gold-rimmed reading glasses while she signed the receipt for her credit card purchase. They were cute. Chatty. Personable. But every word that came out of their mouths made her stomach churn and her jaw tighten."