Sex, money and rock 'n' roll!

Hellooooooo! I'm back ... again! What a weird and wonderful couple of months it's been. Lots of fun, lots of de-cluttering and a little bit of drama. I can't believe how completely crap I've been when it's come to blogging though. Every day has been packed to the gunnels with exciting, boring, fun, tedious and exotic things I had to do, which somehow made it impossible to write. So much so, that I started not to think of myself as a writer ... which was a bit sad. So, I made a new resolution to properly schedule time to write. Not a New Year's Resolution, as I never bloody keep those, but maybe a Nearly Halloween Resolution. Hmmm, we'll see. But I digress. I am scheduling writing time and top of my list is blogging.

The Write On, Mamas! at Lit Crawl 2012

The slight problem, well, not exactly a problem, but one of the reasons why I haven't been writing is that my AMAZING writing group, the Write On, Mamas! has just launched its brand spanky new, incredibly wonderful website, and I am in charge of editing it and general maintenance. The only incy-wincy teensy-weensy issue there is our new site is Wordpress and I knew sod-all about how to work in effing Wordpress. All I knew was that Blogger and Wordpress don't play nice together. In fact, they're a little like my hormonal teenagers - sometimes sweetness and light and at others nasty, horrid vermin. So, another bloody steep learning curve ... and now that I'm the big five-oh, I really thought I wouldn't have to do that learning thing anymore. Drat and double drat.

Then we launched an Indigogo campaign to raise money for our fabby Anthology project and I somehow got roped into helping with the video as my son did the filming and editing. If any of you have any spare cash fluttering around your undies, and you fancy giving it to a bunch of VERY talented writers, please click here. You can even have some of us Mamas invade your home and perform at your request. Although no requests for pole-dancing in g-strings please. Strictly reading. However, we just successfully performed our "Your Mom had sex" theme at San Francisco's Lit Crawl to a packed house, so we are happy to be a bit risqué.

We even passed out these condoms, which went down well with passers-by. Oh, maybe I should re-phrase that! My piece started: "I opened my underwear drawer and recoiled in shock." I may upload the full script and video soon.

And if that isn't enough, my fellow bloggers in The Kindness Project decided that, instead of posting every 2nd Wednesday, we would have our very own site and blog about kindness all the time. Please go and take a look. I will let you know when I am posting, but all the contributors are inspirational. We shall be doing lots of exciting things in the future so watch this space.

I've also been to see a ton of bands, including America, The Tubes, Ed Sheeran (at last) who was playing free in San Francisco with Philip Phillips and Alanis Morrisette. I'm seeing Bob Dylan this week with Mark Knopfler, Muse in January and Ed Sheeran again in February.

Ok, so that's some of what I've been up to recently. What about you? What have I missed?

Miracles, miracles and yet more miracles!

Source

Oh my goodness. What an exciting and busy life I am leading at the moment, which has meant I have not been able to get posts on my blog. One day I will be more organised and write blog posts in advance (oooh what's that flying overhead?).

So, I wanted to update on my meditating month and a few 'miracles' that have been happening recently. Some are small and some much bigger, some I can tell you and some have to be a secret for a while! Oooh I am bursting to tell something really exciting but I don't want to jinx it, so I'm going to keep quiet until it is all confirmed.

I have been pretty good at my meditating. Sometimes at weekends I have simply got too busy and forgotten, but am working on that. But I can already see the little miracles happening in my life. I know that if I can appreciate all the good things that I will create more things to appreciate and a lovely upward cycle will continue. So here are some of the fab stuff that's been happening:

Work 

I am currently temping (full time) for this amazing events management company. The work itself is quite boring but I just love working here. Mostly because the people I work with are so lovely. But also because every 5 minutes we get a treat of some kind. Here are a few that I can remember offhand:

• When it is quiet (which, thank God, it was all through April) they are quite happy for us to do other things, like write or blog.
• Free bagels every Monday (4 kinds of bagel, 3 types of cream cheese).
• Taco Truck - every so often they hire one to drive into the carpark below and everyone is allowed to eat as much as they like during the 3-4 hours. It was delicious and I discovered I was saying "Taco" all wrong. I was being very English and pronounding it "Tacco" but really it was "Tarco". Well, how was I supposed to know and explains why I have so much trouble ordering at those bloody awful drive throughs at Taco Bell.
• Lunch - they are always providing scrummy lunches if we have training. Last time it was 3 different delicious pasta dishes, 2 different salads and 2 types of bread. Yum. But not good for my gluten-free, dairy-free diet! 

• Easter - they hid eggs with chocolates inside all over the office and then dressed someone up as the Easter Bunny and we were all given an easter egg with a $2 note inside, with random eggs containing $50 notes!
• $100 gift cards - given out when you have worked hard (obviously I have not had one of these). 
• $10 gift cards - given out when a colleague says you have done something really good (I forced my friends to say nice stuff about me and I got a 10 bucks Starbucks card).

• But I have saved the best til last ... in August they are taking ALL the staff (there are 80-85 of us, including temps) to Las Vegas for the weekend, just for fun. And we are all going to be staying at The Venetian Hotel, which is bloody gorgeous (and was on my wish list of places to stay). AND they recently decided that instead of sharing, we can all have our own rooms.

How fab is that?

Writing

My writing group reformed at the beginning of the year as the Write On, Mamas! We decided to make it more of a cooperative group with everyone helping out and contributing, rather than driven by one person. It has simply been amazing. All these talents that had been hidden previously have come to the surface. We have gone from a core group of about 5 in January to 38 members and growing, and are going to self-publish an Anthology this year. Here are some of our recent achievements:

• We already have an agent interested in our Anthology, who will also help if we self-publish
• We have a sponsor for the launch party
• We have a spot in the increasingly popular Litcrawl (this is like a literary pub crawl, which happens as part of Litquake - the largest literary festival on the West Coast - in San Francisco). The Litcrawl is really sought after and getting a spot in a real coup. It means that 5 of us will read something we've written aloud to a rowdy, possibly drunk crowd in a bar, or art gallery or even a laundromat! A bit like an Open Mic, I suppose, but not 'open', so just a mic. I will let you know if I get chosen to read. The subject: Mommy Sex!

Also, my very exciting secret news is under this heading, but sshhhhh Secret Squirrel!

Silly stuff

• Kindle. I have a brand new Kindle Fire at home I hadn't yet had time to work out how to use (it's really my husband's which he needs for work, but I am obviously going to nab it). I keep thinking that I really must take it out of the box and then just can't be bothered to work out how to use it. Then, at work yesterday, for an incentive program I am working on, everyone is getting a Kindle Fire and I was shown how to turn it on, charge it, connect it to wireless internet, load up a pdf document, and add and remove favourites. So now I know how to use the damn thing I might actually open the box at home. Any suggestions for my first upload?

• Mountain Play. They do these amazing plays on the Mount Tamalpais in Marin Co which are supposed to be fabulous. I have wanted to go since I got here, but my husband wasn't keen to go again and I hadn't got around to organising it. Last week, one of my lovely American friends emailed me to say she had FREE tickets and would I like to be her guest. Yes please. But my son Tom wanted to go too, and no sooner had I mentioned this but she somehow managed to have another free ticket drop in her lap. Normally you have to hike up the mountain (apparently all part of the experience, but in the hot Californian sunshine with my dodgy knees?) and wouldn't you know it but my friend also has a FREE parking pass which means we can just drive up and park at the top.

There has been other wonderful stuff happening too, little things, but I am in danger of being verbose again!

I love this meditating lark. My manifesting ability is getting really good. Now, just gonna go and work on that red Ferrari ...

Random Kindness and Open Mic

This Kindness thing is contagious. No sooner have I joined The Kindness Project than I see The Bookshelf Muse is hosting a Random Acts of Kindness Blitz to celebrate the writing community.

They are giving away tons of really great stuff and celebrating kindess to other writers. How cool is that? You can win Scrivener software (pick me, please, please) and membership to Query Tracker, The Critique Circle, and more. Head over and take a look here.

One of the suggestions is to pass on gratitude to someone who has helped you or you'd like to honour or recognise. I want to give a massive shout-out to my writing group. We recently re-formed from The Writing Mamas to the Write On, Mamas! and they are the best group of people ever! So supportive and proactive and intelligent and funny and helpful. We are in the middle of sorting out a blog/website so I'll let you know when that's up. Then we are going to write and publish an Anthology, which has to be published by the end of September as we have a slot at San Francisco's Litcrawl. Yikes! No pressure then. 

This ties in nicely to my Open Mic reading last night. I wrote a 5 minute piece that will probably form the start of my Anthology submission. I had to keep changing it as a few people didn't understand my British references, such as "lashings of ginger beer". I keep forgetting that, although we all speak English, we are actually speaking a different language at times. If you would like to read it, I have uploaded it onto Scribd here. It was great fun - the whole evening was organised by the Tuesday Night Writers and it was their 2 year anniversary of these author readings and open mic evenings at Peri's Bar in Fairfax, CA. It was a blast. Fabulous, clever and very funny pieces and I felt honoured to get up there with them. There were 28 people signed up for the open mic bit, but they ran out of time and only the first 4 got to read - phew, I was number 3. It really makes you focus on your writing knowing you have to stand up in front of people and read it out loud. I even managed not to speak too quickly - yay!

So tell me - who else has done Open Mic readings? How did you get on? Which is the best place you've read?