Light in the Dark (there's an app for that)

We grapevined through the pass, refreshed ourselves with date shakes at Hadley, gassed up at the Morongo Indian Casino gas station and then my phone beeped. An incoming text message wanted to know—did we really buy $500 worth of shoes at that gas station? USAA, who issued our credit card, was Johnny on the spot.

The Challenge

I’m taking the NaNoWriMo challenge. I’m going to write a novel in 30 days; 50,000 words in 175 pages; 1,666 words and 5.8 pages a day; I wasn’t going to do it until I read the rules and found out it doesn’t have to be a GOOD novel: quantity counts, not quality.


I try to do something scary every year as an antidote to fear. The scariest thing I ever did was land my husband’s plane at San Jose International Airport. I took landing lessons to distract myself from the fact that I was likely losing my job. Losing a job loses its alarm when losing your life is on the horizon.

The point of this exercise is to beat my internal editor into submission; banish her to some netherworld in my brain; tame her insatiability for my words which she likes to chew on like a cow on cud.

I will give my words to NaNoWriMo’s sightless word counter instead. Better isn’t better, more is better! I believe that as much as I believed I could bounce that Piper Warrior to the ground and live to tell about it.

I sent my husband to his shop and told him to come back in a month, when he has to dig his way through a pile of metal shaving he’s produced teaching himself how to lathe. He took the challenge, packed up his computer and moved to his man cave.

We will Skype.