My Muse – Nike by Vivienne Ylang

Hello Scribe-verse, Vivienne Ylang posting today.  Long time, no write!  I’ve been writing my current WIP for quite some time – nearly a year.  I had some early missteps along the way, but these last few months, the problem has been focus.  I’ve  looked at my To-Do lists for the last several weeks and realized that the thing that gets crossed off the least often is actually one of the things that is most important to me – writing time. 

I’m a mom, like many of you, and most days I spend my time doing things for others – the kids, the hubby, the household.  And day after day, week after week, the thing that doesn’t make it to the top of the priority heap is the thing that matters to nobody but me. 

I can’t even blame anyone else for this – I’m the person who chooses what I’ll accomplish in a day.  So, starting this week, I’ve take a hint from the athletic shoe people, Nike, and I’m gonna Just Do It.  I managed to dedicate four hours to writing this week and I feel really good about that.  In fact, I feel like I’m on a roll and I’m gonna cut this blog post short and go work on my novel.  And you should, too!

Today’s Secret: Drop what you are doing (reading this) and go work on your WIP for 30 minutes.

No time for questions today – seriously – stop reading this and go write!

Big Fat Faddy’s

Hiddey Ho, Scribblers!  J Monkeys here.  Is there a special food in your life?  One that’s hard to come by? One that on those occasions when it is available, you find that you suspend normal food rules and just gorge yourself?  I do.

Now, I’m an ice cream and pastry girl.  You can keep your salty snacks and rich foods, I love me the ice cream.  Ben & Jerry and I are unusually close.  It’s nice that they sell their frozen gold in those pint sized single serving containers.  Has anyone ever gotten four helpings out of a pint of Chubby Hubby?  That’s just laughable!  In fact, I’ll be taking a tour of the B&J factory on my birthday – how cool is that?!

I also love pie.  Fruit pies, in particular, but pumpkin (I guess it’s technically a fruit – got seeds inside and all), chocolate cream, pecan, coconut cream…mmm, mm, mmmmm!  My favorite uncle used to say that his favorite kind of pie was whatever one sat in front of him.

And I’m often moved to consume all kinds of pastry.  Surprisingly, I don’t love cake.  I like frosting…but the cake’s gotta be something special for me to bother with it.

But my most treasured treat is one where the supply is spotty and inconveniently located: Faddy’s donuts.  Faddy’s has an apple cider donut that is piping hot, covered in cinnamon-sugar, crispy on the outside and cakey on the inside.  OMG – I gotta tell ya, it’s even better than a Krispy Kreme (also very hard to come by in my neck of the woods.)

But, Faddy’s has an outdoor donut-makin’ truck in front of Cabela’s in East Hartford, CT.  That’s a 30 minute drive for me, completely out of the way of my normal haunts.  My family likes to browse at Cabela’s but not more than a couple of times a year.  And the truck isn’t always there, or always open.  For example, my hubby (not chubby!) and I were at Cabela’s a couple of weeks ago but Faddy’s wasn’t open.  It was cold, rainy and a Tuesday morning which is probably why the outdoor truck wasn’t operating at full donut speed.  We somehow managed to live with our disappointment. 

But today (Oh Happy Day!) my hubby went back to Cabela’s after work (somewhat more convenient than going from home) because they had failed to remove the anti-theft tag from his new coat.  Joy of Joy’s – he brought home a dozen Faddy’s (still warm!) and a now tag-free coat. 

We waited until the kids were safely in bed and then devoured a half a dozen each.  Delicious – although now I feel a little bit…full.  Don’t think too badly of us for not sharing – one of my sons is allergic to wheat.  He can’t eat one and it wouldn’t be fair to give one to his twin. 

Now – I just learned (when Googling for this post) that Faddy’s is opening some kind of donut and ice cream shoppe in Bloomfield Ct.   Here’s the link – if you are in the area, it definitely worth a stop. 

What does this have to do with writing, you ask.  Not much – although now that I think about it, you might want to know what kinds of foods your characters like, things like that. 

Today’s Secret: Faddy’s – not a secret any more!  Donut delight!

Today’s Question: do you have a food like this?  One that you can only get sometimes?  Suz told me about some kind of fresh Upstate NY cheese curd that has to be tried while still on the farm for the full effect…

Don’t besmirch my scrumdiddlyumptious nerd redoux…

Hiddey-ho Scribblers!  J Monkeys here.  Before all else, let me take a moment to apologize for missing you last Saturday.  I experienced severe technical difficulty.  In fact, I wrote this butter-lovin post three times because it disappeared into the ether the first couple of times I wrote it.  I thought it posted correctly the third time, but alas, no.  So, in the immortal words of Whitesnake: here I go again.

Other than my undying love of Mr. Alexander Skarsgard, I’m not terribly likely to post pictures of hotties these days, but check out this scrumdiddlyumptious nerd:

Now, before you besmirch my scrumdiddlyumptious nerd by wondering what he has to do with writing, did you know that authors make up new words all the time?  It’s a perk we enjoy.

In fact, Mr. Will.I.am Shakespeare invented the word ‘besmirch’ along with 1700 other words we still use today.  (J’s favorite Will.I.am song) Check out this cool list.  If you click on the word in that list you will go to a notation of where he first used it – what play.  God I love the internet!

Scrumdiddlyumptious comes to us care of Roald Dahl – he coined that term to describe one of Mr. Wonka’s chocolate bars back in 1964.

And of course, nerd is an Anglo-Saxon word coming to us from William the Conqueror’s Doomsday book.  Okay, okay – I’m kidding.  Dr. Seuss invented “nerd” in If I ran the Zoo, published in 1950.   I was trolling YouTube for a Dr. Seussish link here and found this HYSTERICAL Epic Rap Battle Shakespeare vs. Dr. Seuss – watch if you dare.  It’s PG-13 esque.

JK Rowling brought us Voldemort, Muggle and Dementor, just to name a few.

Whether it’s a new word all together or a new meaning for an existing word, or even just making a verb out of a noun (see John Pinnette’s rant on the verb “to juice”) authors do this all the time and you can, too.  Pull your diva-ness around you like an invisibility cloak, proclaim your new word to the world and own it.

Today’s Secret: You can be an inventor – maybe of something that will last long after you are gone.  We aren’t all Billy the Shake, but we can all leave our mark.  That’s one of the great things about English – it’s vibrant and there is always room for more.

Today’s Question: Do you have a favorite word?  Do you know where it comes from?  Who invented it?

PS: In case you don’t recognize the scrumdiddlyumptious nerd, that’s Matthew Gray Gubler.  If Shemar Moore wasn’t enough – he’s a second reason to feast your peepers on CBS’s gritty crime drama Criminal Minds.

Don’t besmirch my scrumdiddlyumptious nerd

Hiddey-ho Scribblers!  J Monkeys here.  Before all else, let me take a moment to apologize for missing you last Saturday.  I experienced severe technical difficulty.  In fact, I wrote this butter-lovin post three times because it disappeared into the ether the first couple of times I wrote it.  I thought it posted correctly the third time, but alas, no.  So, in the immortal words of Whitesnake: here I go again.

Other than my undying love of Mr. Alexander Skarsgard, I’m not terribly likely to post pictures of hotties these days, but check out this scrumdiddlyumptious nerd:

Now, before you besmirch my scrumdiddlyumptious nerd by wondering what he has to do with writing, did you know that authors make up new words all the time?  It’s a perk we enjoy.  

In fact, Mr. Will.I.am Shakespeare invented the word ‘besmirch’ along with 1700 other words we still use today.  (J’s favorite Will.I.am song) Check out this cool list.  If you click on the word in that list you will go to a notation of where he first used it – what play.  God I love the internet!

Scrumdiddlyumptious comes to us care of Roald Dahl – he coined that term to describe one of Mr. Wonka’s chocolate bars back in 1964. 

And of course, nerd is an Anglo-Saxon word coming to us from William the Conqueror’s Doomsday book.  Okay, okay – I’m kidding.  Dr. Seuss invented “nerd” in If I ran the Zoo, published in 1950.   I was trolling YouTube for a Dr. Seussish link here and found this HYSTERICAL Epic Rap Battle Shakespeare vs. Dr. Seuss – watch if you dare.  It’s PG-13 esque.

JK Rowling brought us Voldemort, Muggle and Dementor, just to name a few. 

Whether it’s a new word all together or a new meaning for an existing word, or even just making a verb out of a noun (see John Pinnette’s rant on the verb “to juice”) authors do this all the time and you can, too.  Pull your diva-ness around you like an invisibility cloak, proclaim your new word to the world and own it.

Today’s Secret: You can be an inventor – maybe of something that will last long after you are gone.  We aren’t all Billy the Shake, but we can all leave our mark.  That’s one of the great things about English – it’s vibrant and there is always room for more.

Today’s Question: Do you have a favorite word?  Do you know where it comes from?  Who invented it?

PS: In case you don’t recognize the scrumdiddlyumptious nerd, that’s Matthew Gray Gubler.  If Shemar Moore wasn’t enough – he’s a second reason to feast your peepers on CBS’s gritty crime drama Criminal Minds. 

Do Over

Hiddey – ho ~ J Monkeys here.  We had a crazy blizzard here in CT about a month ago.  I was supposed to spend the weekend at a scrapbooking retreat, but got stuck indoors at my parents house instead.  This weekend is a do over.  I’m off to live my postponed scrapbooking retreat.

So to celebrate my do over – I’m giving you a do over too.  You know, in case you missed my post due to all the time you spent shoveling 3+ feet of snow a month ago.

I love a good story and to me, no story is more interesting that the story of our lives.  I can’t tell you how much I wish my grandmother had kept a journal during her life.  She was born in 1909, the 7th of 8 children and she died in 2006, just a couple of weeks short of her 95th birthday.  She lived through so much of what I view as “history”.  WWI, The Great Depression, WWII, the really icy bits of the Cold War, the advent of electricity, the phone, the radio, the TV – all of those were things were new at some point in her life time.  She used to tell us how when she was a child, the ice-man would drive his horse and buggy to their house in East Hartford, CT to deliver blocks of ice for the ice-box.  To her dying day, she called the refrigerator an ice-box.

Now, my grandmother and I had issues.  I’ve probably alluded to them in the past; she wasn’t a happy woman and like to be sure that many of the people around her were unhappy, too.  But I bet, if she had kept a diary of some kind, I might be able to figure out why she was so unhappy.  And that would mean a lot to me.  Her siblings weren’t unhappy.  My aunt Grace (my g-mom’s next oldest sibling) was a very upbeat lady, with a ho-ho-ho belly laugh.

When Auntie died (that’s what we all called Aunt Grace, now I’m Auntie to a new generation, which is really cool) I helped clean out her house.  In her basement, I found an old photo-album.  The pictures were likely taken in the 30′s or 40′s or something.  They are glued onto black construction paper-like stuff and the whole thing is tied together with twine.  The worst thing is this: there are no notes or captions for the pictures.  Clearly, the pictures, people and events were important enough to her to go to the expense and effort of making the book, but she’s gone now and those stories can’t carry on.

So one of the things that I do when I scrapbook is to write notes of what the picture is about or why I liked it.  Those in the Scrapbooking trade (and if you don’t know about the scrapbooking trade you are missing out on a billion dollar business!) call that “journaling.”  I do some journaling, but I’m more of a snarky-caption kind of girl.  I think that my boys and even my grandchildren will (hopefully!) realize that those captions say as much about me as they do about the photo.

And one other thing about scrappin’ before I leave you and go do it – I don’t have any photos of my life before college, which is when I started my very first photo-album.  My mom has some albums of my childhood which I’ll likely inherit someday, but I don’t have anything now, when I think my kids might find them interesting.  My mom doesn’t have them handy, they’re packed away from her last house move before the kids were born.  So in addition to making albums for me, I’m making albums for my kids to have when they are older.  Each kid has an album.  When they get old enough to be interested in doing the crafty part of it, I’ll have him or her help me.  Yes it means I’m printing 4 copies of a few hundred pictures each year (this year I’ve printed 4 copies of more than 500 pictures) but I think it’s a small price to pay.  Pictures are cheap these days.  I think I’ve paid something in the neighbor hood of $125 for all the 2012 pictures.  If I hadn’t left it for the last minute, I probably could have gotten them even cheaper online somewhere.

Today’s secret: take the time to print off some of those zillion photos you have on your digital camera and phone.  Stick them in an album and write a few notes so that when you are gone, your descendents will be able to know you a little.

Today’s question: what do you do with your extra photos?  I invariably print more than I use and the extras are sitting in boxes in my office.

Bonus Secret: I almost forgot to tell you what the title of this post (The Mother of all BLTs) has to do with scrapbooking!  YIKES.  My annual scrap-retreat is down in Westbrook CT.  And every year, when I get there a moment or two after the places opens (Papercraft Clubhouse – it’s awesome!) on Friday, I go over to the Westbrook Deli and order a sandwich that is good enough to wait a year for: The Mother of all BLTs.  It’s a grinder with like a pound of bacon on it!  YUM.

An Audience of One

Hiddey-ho Scribblers!  J Monkeys here.  Has this ever happened to you?  You change “careers” and one of your areas of personal strength becomes a weakness?  Well it happened to me!

Before I became a Stay-at-home Mom, my bosses used to rave about my efficiency.  One guy who was kinda a tough boss even went so far as to let me work part-time because he said I got as much done in 25 hours a week as his other folks did in 40!

But now, 4 years into this new career, I’m so scattered it’s a miracle I remember to wear pants!  (quickly checking to be sure I’m wearing pants – jammies count right?)  Have you seen those funny things going around Facebook – If you give a Mom a Muffin?  Click here.  That’s me!  Hubby laughs that I’m forever being distracted by the sight of something shiny.

Lots of things get started in my life and very few get finished.  It’s awful!  It’s not me.  It’s some kind of horrible, mutant new-me.  I’ve tried all kinds of tips and tricks.  From the Fly Lady’s Control Journal to the Mommy Calendar to using my phone to me to things I have to do.

“That’s all well & terrible, J,” you’re thinking, “but in your – did you forget that this is a blog about writing?”  In the wonderful words of John Pinette, “Nay, nay.”  (Click here and have a 5 minute laugh-break, on me!) Wanna know what has finally helped me?  Writing a book for an audience of one – me.

Last year, I Indie Pub’d a calendar/organizer/budget just for me.  After using all those other systems, I took the best of each and created my own.  I used it all year – kept track of my goals, my meetings and appointments, my household budget, my daily To Do’s.  I LOVED it!  As an added bonus, it only cost $6 (including the shipping!) as compared to the $22 I spent on the last Mommy Calendar style thing I bought.

Now, here it’s March and I haven’t created a new one for this year yet.  Well, I had, but then I got a job which takes up a LOT of my previously free time, so it needed adjusting.  Honestly, I really miss my old book.  I’m excited to tell you that I really focused on that project this week and today, I’ll upload my March 2013 – March 2014 organizer.  Hey – I’m writing it, no reason it has to end in December!  I can’t wait to start using it!

Today’s secret: The Indie Publishing movement isn’t just for bestsellers – you can publish anything!

Today’s question: Have you developed an organizational system that works for you?  Care to share?

The Change in Circumstances

Hiddey-ho Scribblers!  J Monkeys here.  I’m running a little late this morning – hopefully you haven’t all already visited today and I’ve missed you.  Why have I been writing my posts when I get up on Saturday morning instead of scheduling them in advance like I’ve done for the past nearly two years?  There’s been a change in my circumstances and I haven’t fully adjusted yet.  In addition to being a full-time mom and a part-time writer, I’m now someone’s part-time employee, too!  It’s awesome and I’m wicked excited about it – but I haven’t figured out how to balance my responsibilities with the hours in a day yet.  It’s a constant struggle for me.

So I’ve had one change in my circumstances and I’m anticipating another.  Earlier this week, I had one of my nearly 5-year old sons tested for Celiac.  I’m still waiting for the results, but it could mean a major change in circumstances, not just for me, but for all the “characters” living in my house. 

Celiac, for those unfamiliar with the…desease, disorder, issue?…means that you can’t eat gluten – no wheat at all.  In his case, it will go hand-in-hand with a milk allergy.  Here’s a link to more information if you are interested.  Now, not only is there a TON of information about celiac available out there, and there’s an aisle full of gluten-free products in my grocery store, but my son’s godfather has the same issue but very severely and can be a wonderful resource for me having lived with it for 40+ years.  So either way, we’ll be good.

But this got me thinking about how we writers need to change the circumstances on our characters.  Pull the rug out from under them, turn life on their head, leave them topsy-turvy.  I enjoy change – I always have.  I love to play “What if” games in my head.  What if we get snowed in and I’m stuck at the mall, all alone?  What if everyone in my neighborhood drops dead from a superflu and society as we know it collapses overnight?  (Don’t worry, my family is usually uninfected with the flu in this head-game.)  What if I won the $365 million lottery?  What if I decided to plant a garden this year? 

As writers, we have to change our characters lives and then help them work through the results of that change.  But lots of people hate change or fear it.  Often that’s the same thing.  Maybe that’s why people like to read – to see how the other half live.  To experience a (usually dramatic) change in circumstances in the safety of our own home.  I know that’s why I like it.  Did I just say I liked to read?  Ha-hmmmm.  I mean that’s why I love to read. 

Today’s not-so-secret Secret: Changes in circumstances can come from anywhere and involve anything.  If you run out of ideas, or realize that you haven’t changed your characters circumstances enough, look to your own life for inspiration.

Today’s Question: What’s your favorite type of change-in-circumstance story?  I love historical romances and more modern day, they’ve-kept-these-secrets-from-us-for-millenia-but-now-it’s-all-coming-to-light-and-boy-are-we-in-trouble type stories.

Today’s bonus secret: click to here to see what changes are in store for our beloved Eric Northman – they’ve begun filming True Blood season 6!  Yippeeee.

Writing for yourself

Hiddey-ho Scribblers!  J Monkeys here.  Happy Saturday to you and yours.  I’ve been thinking about audience lately, because I’ve been working on so many different projects this past year and they are for all different audiences.  One audience I’ve been writing for is a very small one – just my family. 

I’m working on a cookbook that features family recipes.  I’ve been collecting hand written recipe cards, some recently penned, and some written generations ago by folks long gone.  There’s something about a person’s handwriting that I think is fun to pass down from generation to generation.  I’ve scanned the recipe cards, and added a picture of the “chef” and a quick blurb about that person. 

It’s hard to sum up a person in three sentences – people are much too complex for that – but one thing I’ve kept in mind is the audience.  What would I want future generations to know about the last few?  I mean, my grandmother and I had major issues, but that isn’t necessarily what I’d want my great-grandchildren to know about her.  And too, some of these recipes come from folks I never knew or didn’t know well.  I’ve relied on others to share their thoughts but I’ve been careful to be sure all of the blurbs have a common tone.

Click here for an sample page from my upcoming book Gastro-Genealogy.  Unfortunately it doesn’t lend itself to cut and pasting.

Today’s Secret: don’t forget the value in writing for yourself and a small (tiny?) audience of loved ones as well as trying to reach the populace at large.

Today’s Question: What kinds of foods do you have at your family get togethers?  We have pretty much the same things at every occasion…

 

 

 

What is in a name?

Hello Scribblers!  J Monkeys coming atcha from inside a snow globe.  Or at least that’s how it looks from my office window.  A fresh batch of snow fell last night and everything in view is covered – trees, roofs, even the sky is white, matching the gently falling flakes.  Quite a contrast from the book I’ve been reading this morning.

How do you select a book at the store?  Usually, it’s one of two things that prompts me to pick something up – either a cover that attracts my attention, or the author’s name.  When it comes to authors, naturally, it’s repeat business for me – I’m buying books by authors I’ve read before and enjoyed.  Lynn Kurland, Julia Quinn, Julie Garwood, Jude Deveraux.  Sometimes it’s a new book written by a friend or acquaintance – especially when they are written in a genre that isn’t typically my cup of tea, but where I know from experience that I’ll enjoy the ride – Kristan Higgins’ contemporary romances, Katy Lee’s inspirational romances or Casey Wyatt’s urban fantasies, for example. 

This morning, I’m reading a book that I chose based on the author, but it isn’t an author whose work is familiar to me.  In fact, the book I’m reading is his debut novel.  Nor was the book/author recommended to me by a friend.  I’m reading Dracula the Un-Dead written by Dacre Stoker – great grand nephew of Bram Stoker.

I’m almost exactly to the half-way point in the book and it’s a delight!  It’s not scary, which is a good thing for me because I do NOT like scary stories.  Mr. King’s The Shinning still haunts me 25 years after I read it!  While I loved The Stand, there were parts that I found creepy – I remember reading it while sitting in a corner, hidden from any ghouls lurking in the ether.   But Dracula the Un-Dead seems more like a drama than horror as I think of it today.  It’s written as a sequel to the original book.  In truth it’s co-authored by Dacre Stoke and Ian Holt apparently written (according to Wikipedia) “Because of the Stokers’ frustrating history with Dracula’s copyright, Dacre with encouragement from screenwriter Ian Holt, decided to write “a sequel that bore the Stoker name” to “reestablish creative control over” the original novel.”  What an interesting idea.  I don’t know the extent to which it would reestablish copyright – but hey.

But if you’ve enjoyed the rise in vampire stories in the last decade or so, you might want to take a look at this homage to the original.  It’s well done (at least the first half!) and worth a few of your hard earned dollars.  And, again according to Wikipedia, they wrote it based on Bram’s original notes and stuff pulled out of the original novel.  Again, a cool idea. 

Today’s secret: Dracula is Un-Dead and available at the bookstore once again.    Oh and by the way, they have begun filming season 6 of True Blood, speaking of popular vampires.  The delightful Mr. Skarsgard has revealed a spoiler-ish something from filming.  Click here to find out what.

Today’s question: how do you decide to buy a book?  What changes you from a browser to a buyer?

The Mother of All BLTs

Hiddey Ho Scribblers!  J Monkeys here.  Sadly, I won’t be able to respond to your comments until Monday because I’m at my annual Scrapbooking Retreat this weekend!  Yay!  Let’s just pretend that whole Blizzard thing isn’t looming.

I love a good story and to me, no story is more interesting that the story of our lives.  I can’t tell you how much I wish my grandmother had kept a journal during her life.  She was born in 1909, the 7th of 8 children and she died in 2006, just a couple of weeks short of her 95th birthday.  She lived through so much of what I view as “history”.  WWI, The Great Depression, WWII, the really icy bits of the Cold War, the advent of electricity, the phone, the radio, the TV – all of those were things were new at some point in her life time.  She used to tell us how when she was a child, the ice-man would drive his horse and buggy to their house in East Hartford, CT to deliver blocks of ice for the ice-box.  To her dying day, she called the refrigerator an ice-box.

Now, my grandmother and I had issues.  I’ve probably alluded to them in the past; she wasn’t a happy woman and like to be sure that many of the people around her were unhappy, too.  But I bet, if she had kept a diary of some kind, I might be able to figure out why she was so unhappy.  And that would mean a lot to me.  Her siblings weren’t unhappy.  My aunt Grace (my g-mom’s next oldest sibling) was a very upbeat lady, with a ho-ho-ho belly laugh.

When Auntie died (that’s what we all called Aunt Grace, now I’m Auntie to a new generation, which is really cool) I helped clean out her house.  In her basement, I found an old photo-album.  The pictures were likely taken in the 30′s or 40′s or something.  They are glued onto black construction paper-like stuff and the whole thing is tied together with twine.  The worst thing is this: there are no notes or captions for the pictures.  Clearly, the pictures, people and events were important enough to her to go to the expense and effort of making the book, but she’s gone now and those stories can’t carry on.

So one of the things that I do when I scrapbook is to write notes of what the picture is about or why I liked it.  Those in the Scrapbooking trade (and if you don’t know about the scrapbooking trade you are missing out on a billion dollar business!) call that “journaling.”  I do some journaling, but I’m more of a snarky-caption kind of girl.  I think that my boys and even my grandchildren will (hopefully!) realize that those captions say as much about me as they do about the photo.

And one other thing about scrappin’ before I leave you and go do it – I don’t have any photos of my life before college, which is when I started my very first photo-album.  My mom has some albums of my childhood which I’ll likely inherit someday, but I don’t have anything now, when I think my kids might find them interesting.  My mom doesn’t have them handy, they’re packed away from her last house move before the kids were born.  So in addition to making albums for me, I’m making albums for my kids to have when they are older.  Each kid has an album.  When they get old enough to be interested in doing the crafty part of it, I’ll have him or her help me.  Yes it means I’m printing 4 copies of a few hundred pictures each year (this year I’ve printed 4 copies of more than 500 pictures) but I think it’s a small price to pay.  Pictures are cheap these days.  I think I’ve paid something in the neighbor hood of $125 for all the 2012 pictures.  If I hadn’t left for the last minute, I probably could have gotten them even cheaper online somewhere.

Today’s secret: take the time to print off some of those zillion photos you have on your digital camera and phone.  Stick them in an album and write a few notes so that when you are gone, your descendents will be able to know you a little.

Today’s question: what do you do with your extra photos?  I invariably print more than I use and the extras are sitting in boxes in my office.

Bonus Secret: I almost forgot to tell you what the title of this post has to do with scrapbooking!  YIKES.  My annual scrap-retreat is down in Westbrook CT.  And every year, when I get there a moment or two after the places opens (Papercraft Clubhouse - it’s awesome!) on Friday, I go over to the Westbrook Deli and order a sandwich that is good enough to wait a year for: The Mother of all BLTs.  It’s a grinder with like a pound of bacon on it!  YUM.  Sadly, they aren’t open on the weekend and I won’t get one this year because of the stinky blizzard.  But there’s always next year!