I have no idea why I’ve been getting hourly spammy email notifications of comments on a blog post I wrote nearly a year ago, but after my initial confusion and subsequent irritation, I am grateful. Truth is, I’ve been busy keeping up my personal blog and neglecting this one because I didn’t love the stock style and didn’t know how to navigate the site.

This year I’m taking things on even if they intimidate me, things like re-designing this site into a more authentic reflection of me and my work. This may not be the most professional looking writerly blog but it is 100 percent me. And those real-deal authors are the ones I prefer to meet anyway. Speaking of which … I was incredibly inspired at yesterday’s Northwest Author Series event featuring April Henry.

I do this thing, though, when I’m excited about meeting a real-life published author I admire and end up talking too much, too fast and use the word “ummmmm” to describe a writing project I can normally spend hours discussing.

When I finally got my chance to meet Anne Lamott, I mostly just tried not to vomit from excitement. True story.

So, today, while I didn’t puke on anyone, I did geek out on author April Henry. First of all I took 12 pages of notes in my journal full of her ideas, quotes and jumping off points for my own writing projects inspired by her talk.

I also for some reason felt compelled to show her the pages of notes I took. It’s not at all that I wanted some gold-star for being a good pupil, my notes are hardly legible so it’d be a B+ at best, but I wanted her to see how inspiring she was to me, how much I thought she had to say worthy of remembering. I also thought that if I were in her shoes, which I intend to someday be, it would be wonderful to see that what I said mattered so much to someone. I remember once another favorite author of mine, Christina Katz, posted a picture a reader sent in of her book marked up with sticky tabs. I thought it was so cool that it still mattered to her that her words encouraged someone else.

After all, nerdy or not, it’s kind of the point, right?

In addition to spending the afternoon surrounded by creative people with goals like mine, I loved that this lovely, smart, creative person in pursuit of her own passion looked me in the eye and said she believed I would be published. My heart soared. When I got home I saw she’d written this in my new copy of her book: Circles of Confusion -

“Nathalie – I hope next time I see you you sign a book for me!”

For anyone who lives their dream in real life, these words carry a lot of weight … it doesn’t hurt my feelings that she’s a New York Times best selling author either.