• Where do you hide your holiday presents?

    December 15, 2019 /
    Taking advice from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter (Hide it in plain sight)

    Where do you hide your holiday presents? We live in a New York City apartment, so hiding spaces are few (even for when you play hide-and-seek, as you do with kids).

    And we are using all almost our space. We have  even put in storage space abover our bathroom ceiling. That’s one of the main places I hide presents. You need a ladder to get up there, so it’s not easily accessible.

    However, even my main hiding spots are beginning to fill up. My usual spot in the basement is storing toys which haven’t been played with in awhile. But they are in the purgatory period – will my son notice that they have disappeared? If not, in six months, we can donate them. (Not that that always works.)

    But I’ve found a new spot. Can you spot the hidden presents?

    Where would you hide them in this closet?

    Feel free to post your guess below. (I can use that next year in case my daughter reads this article).

    The presents are in the laundry bags! (And yes, I have a lot of black clothes. And my closet looks nothing like The Container Store closets or any designed closets. :).  Although I do love the Container Store plastic boxes and highly recommmend those.

    My tip is to wrap the presents in case they are found.

    And then the key is to remember where you hid them.  I often forget where I’ve put the presents if I deviate from my usual spaces. When I am older, I  plan to spend December hiding presents for myself, so I can spend the rest of the year finding my presents 🙂

    Have a great weekend! Where do you hide your holiday presents? And how do you remember where you hid them?

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  • Join Me on My Writing Journey

    November 5, 2019 /

    I’m embarking on my writing journey and I hope you’ll join me! I first started writing a romantic comedy many years ago; I saw such a bad one that I thought, I can write a better one than this.

    Starting My Writing Journey

    I started taking online writing classes (I’m a mom and I was working as a lawyer), so online was my best option. I enrolled in The Writer’s Academy Constructing a Novel, and it was so much fun. I loved writing, and I enjoyed talking about writing with other writers in the course. My writing tutor in The Writer’s Academy wrote that my scene was “sparky” and I was on Cloud Nine. An acquaintance saw me that day and said I was glowing as if I was in love.

    Indeed I had found a new love: writing. Writing a really good scene makes me so happy. But I didn’t have the courage to leave my job (and source of income yet). So I tried writing part-time, but eventually I realized that I just couldn’t do it part-time. (Unfortunately, I’m someone who needs sleep too.) So I quit my job. And here I am.

    Learning Writing Craft

    I love attending writer’s conferences and taking writing craft courses. I can’t believe that I get to choose from course selections of “Sensual Love Scenes without Stuffing the Turkey” from Alison May and Liam Livings at the RNA Leeds Conference or “Character Torture” by Linnea Sinclair. (I highly recommend taking any courses offered by those authors.) Compare that to “Recent Developments in Securities Fraud Cases,” “GDPR Enforcement,” and “Cyber-Security and Privacy” (course selections at my lawyers’ conferences). You can see there’s a huge difference.

    Which pile would you prefer to read?

    Not that I don’t miss practicing law at times.

    Rejections and Encouragement

    Because similar to my dating life when I was single, there have been quite a few rejections. But I am still plugging away, trying to improve my craft and making friends with other writers. I eventually found a great guy to marry after many dating disasters, so there’s hope! And I placed Third in the Los Angeles Orange Rose Contest for Women’s Fiction with Romance as a Central Element! They wrote that “You will be published.” (By whom? It’s like a tarot card reader who just hints at good news: “You will meet the man of your dreams. You will come into a fortune.”)

    Woohoo!

    Join me!

    So, join me on my journey! Have you changed careers? (Are you a recovering lawyer?) What do you like to read? Do you write? How did you begin your writer’s journey?

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