For those of you who were keeping an eye on my blog entries, it must have seemed that I fell off the face of the earth! What actually happened is that shortly after I began this blog, my dear mom died. Between taking care of her during her last days and then dealing with the aftermath, I didn't have much brain or emotion left to do anything else. I was her executrix and the trustee of her estate - such as it was - and therefore, I was responsible for such things as cleaning out her house (where she had lived for more than fifty years), selling it, and dealing with all of the many details necessary to close out her long life. And that's not even to mention getting past my sadness at her loss.
However - now I am ready to move on. One of my projects for this year is to finish the book that she and I were writing together. From 1952 til shortly before her death in 2008 she was involved with one form of Scouting or another, and her specialty was scrap craft. All the children who were lucky enough to be in one of the troops she led got to make a variety of fun crafts, and she also taught master classes in crafting to other leaders. My siblings and I were finally able to talk her into making a book of her crafts, and we were almost through with it when she died. I just have to write a couple of intros for the various sections and it will be ready to go!
In addition, I have for some years now wanted to write a book using the columns that I wrote about my dancing career and the early days of belly dance in the San Francisco Bay Area for the ezine The Gilded Serpent as the framework from which to expand. I have actually started on this project, and have been working on the first five sort of chapters - or lumps, as I have been calling them. My husband has been giving me a lot of help - he is good at helping me to extract memories that have been long buried under the detritus of later life. I am also lucky enough to have a friend who is most knowledgeable about this writing game, and she has given me a lot of guidance in my writing. It really is work!
Writing is complicated by the fact that my costuming business continues to demand my attention. I get orders from long-time customers and the folks that they refer to me - I guess it is lucky that I have cut way, way back on the number of events where I take my costumes to sell them. That would have required much more time to make costumes on spec to take with me.
Well, let's see now how I do with my first blog. Here we go....
