No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.

I don't think that all girls seek the influence of older men, but I think girls whose fathers are absent or recessed from their lives often do. And honestly, when I was growing up, fathers were generally pretty absent from their children's lives. We didn't see a lot of them. That may be something that has genuinely changed for the better in our culture: men are more present for their children now that more women are working.

I grew up in the 70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth.

Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?

I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.