Live It, Read It, Write It

I'm a 33 -- okay, almost 34 -- year-old stay-at-home mother of two who is still writing professionally when I get the chance. I was a marketing consultant for many years before having kids, and now I just write because I love it. What do I write? Just about anything. I write for the local newspaper, I do corporate writing (speech writing, byline articles, etc.) and advertising writing (brochures, Website copy, etc.).

I used to work for a big agency where I ran large international corporate accounts, worked 65+ hour work weeks and travelled a fair amount. Now I live in a beach town and enjoy life, hence the name of the blog, though I'll be honest, time to read anything besides research for projects is scarce these days.

What do I want to do? Well magazine writing is something I'm working at now. But, finding the time to outline and pitch story ideas is difficult to find. Expanding from a corporate writing to features/magazine writing is difficult. I'm slowly building my portfolio. It's kind of ironic because the corporate writing is a lot more lucrative, just less fulfilling for me as a person.

My pet project is a children's book I have been working on with the Santa Barbara Zoo for some time. We're hoping to go to print next year. Here are some of the illustrations.

Basically you place a photo of your child's face at the back of the book. The hole you see is a die-cut so that your child's face will show through each page. The premise of the book -- for a kid to imagine themselves as each of the animals.

I approached the zoo about writing the book awhile back when I was looking for a Santa Barbara Zoo book for my little girl. The zoo, which we frequent at least once if not twice a month is smaller than other big city zoos -- though more beautiful in so many ways. It doesn't have as wide a variety of animals that other zoos have, so I wanted to get a book that features the animals she sees regularly at "our" zoo. When I learned there was no Santa Barbara Zoo book I approached them about writing one.

This book has become something very dear to me. It will not be a money-maker for our family, but the idea is it will become something vastly more important to my daughters. It's something I've written for them.