New Year’s Questions

I’ve been double-tagged! 🥳 Yep, both Sadje and Rory tagged me to answer the NYQ’s that are going around Blogville. Thanks for thinking of me! 🥰 I’m happy to answer the questions, but I’m not going to tag anyone else.

1. If you could celebrate the New Year anywhere, where would it be?

I celebrated the New Year by going for an early walk in Huntington Beach Central Park. It was beautiful.

2. What is your favorite snack food for New Year?

I began the New Year right by not having snacks.

3. Have you ever kept a New Year’s resolution? If so, what was it?

l kept today’s ~ exercised, ate right, worked, wrote, cleaned, did laundry, etc. Tomorrow should be another good day too.

4. What do you want to do with your blog next year?

I’m happy with my blog the way it is.

5. Do you prefer a big party or a small gathering to celebrate? 

I like staying home with my kitty on New Year’s Eve. Too many drunks on the roads. As far as New Year’s Day, I celebrated by getting stuff done on my to-do list, lol.

~*~

My favorite New Year’s Memory…

Staying up all night to chat with a new man I connected with on a dating site. That was fun. I miss chatting with people who live far away and don’t expect to meet anytime soon or even ever, but love to talk just because. No agenda other than to exchange written words. Those are my kind of peeps.

We did meet though, months later, after chatting daily. It was a bit disappointing.

~*~

Images from Bitmoji me.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Laura’s Music Challenge 38

Laura ends the year on a musical note by bringing back her song challenge and asking us to post 5 videos about beginnings, endings and/or looking forward.

Happy New Year! 🥳🥳🥳

~*~

Image from Bitmoji.

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Looking Forward

I have been enjoying other bloggers’ recaps of the year past and usually I do something similar. This year however I’m skipping that type of detailed post. One reason is that I’m just too lazy to copypasta links to my top ten posts in a new post. Another is that I just don’t care which posts received the most views ~ and if I don’t care, why would you?

Lots of times a post I love (usually a poem) gets fewer views and comments than some picture of an old flower or whatever, so I find the stats pretty meaningless. I guess if I were monetizing the blog, I would obsess over such things, but I’m not and don’t. Also, it matters which day of the week and time of the day a post goes live, but I’m too busy to check that further. Plus, it’s boring.

The most important part of recapping the year in my opinion anyway is to thank everyone who has read my blog, whether regularly or sporadically, and interacted with my writing. So, would like to extend a hearty thank you to all my readers! ❤️ I appreciate all of you! 😍

Looking forward, my intent is to keep on blogging as usual but perhaps a bit lighter on quantity, since I’ve been refocusing on my unfinished writing projects. I began a new humorous story recently and it’s now taken priority over every other piece of fiction ~ I hope to have it available for sale on Kindle in the next few weeks. After that, I want to get serious about cleaning up my writing to-do list, like I said I would last year. 🙄

I spent a fair bit of time dealing with audio books last summer and was disappointed in the small amount of sales. I thought the talkers would do promo. I also assumed the site itself would market me. All wrong. Oh well. Since that was no fun at all, but writing is, I’ll stick with the written word.

I also need to read more books. With my move and other busy-ness, I’ve been in a reading lull. Writers need to read! Not just blogs and news, but real books. I can always feel my creativity and imagination begin to bubble and boil when I dive into the worlds that other writers have created. It’s a crucial component of the craft.

Dream big, my friends! 💖✨🥳

~*~

Image from Bitmoji.

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Chocolate Lady’s Eight Candle Book Tag ~ Day 8

To celebrate Chanukah this year and my friend the Chocolate Lady, I accepted her challenge to participate in the Eight Candle Book Tag. This was a fun game. Thanks for coming up with it, Davida!😀

I’m pretty sure I said “wow!” or something to that effect when I finished Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. This book was a revelation. First, it’s simply a great romance novel full of interesting, complex characters, lots of wit and humor, loads of sexy times, a quirky setting, and an actual plot. Second, the sex isn’t as unrealistic as it’s often portrayed in the “bodice rippers” set in the 1800s or whenever. Third, WTT is a contemporary romance, written in a breezy style, which made me think about my own writing.

What I thought was, hmm, ya know, if this kind of writing gets published, then maybe I too could write a romance novel!

And indeed I can write one. Did write one. More than one actually. Getting published, however, is another matter entirely…

Happy Chanukah!

~*~

Images from The Chocolate Lady’s blog

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Chocolate Lady’s Eight Candle Book Tag ~ Day 7

To celebrate Chanukah this year and my friend the Chocolate Lady, I am accepting her challenge to participate in the Eight Candle Book Tag. This is a fun game and very easy to play ~ just visit her link for the options. I am of course doing the most complicated version. 😀

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb was a light in the darkness for me. I bought this book by mistake, grabbing it on impulse as I checked out, thinking it was the story of the ballerina movie that starred Natalie Portman, which I had just seen with my daughter. No, Taleb’s Black Swan is about trying to assign predictive values to future events by analyzing the past along with other factors. It’s a combo of history, math, science, statistics, and human psychology. Utterly fascinating.

Happy Chanukah!

~*~

Images from The Chocolate Lady’s blog

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Chocolate Lady’s Eight Candle Book Tag ~ Day 6

To celebrate Chanukah this year and my friend the Chocolate Lady, I am accepting her challenge to participate in the Eight Candle Book Tag. This is a fun game and very easy to play ~ just visit her link for the options. I am of course doing the most complicated version. 😀

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood gave me the oogs. It wasn’t a traditional type of thriller, but a logical “what if” sort of futuristic novel presenting a creepily neat solution to the issues of overcrowding in prisons, the crime rate in general, and our lack of safe, affordable housing for law-abiding citizens. Why wouldn’t we end up somewhere in this neighborhood of horrors is a legitimate question…

Happy Chanukah!

~*~

Images from The Chocolate Lady’s blog

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

PFF30: The First Rule

Welcome to Paula’s Friday Flashback! This is a challenge begun by Fandango and it’s fun to see what we posted back when (as well as the comments). The below is a reblog of a post I made on Christmas Day, 2012.

Violence and Chocolate

Merry Christmas, mah peeps.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies with Sharon over the last several days, mostly romcoms bought for cheap off Amazon, but also some rented classics missed over the years. We saw Fight Club last night and I must say that I am now a fan of Brad Pitt. Never liked him at the beginning when every other woman was in lust for his bod, but lately I just think he’s a good actor. That said, I had a really hard time with all the gore in this movie ~ it was just so ewwy and gross.

Yet today we watched Full Metal Jacket, which was hideously violent in the most disturbing ways ~ and I had no problem with it whatsoever. I can’t say I enjoyed FMJ, because that just sounds weird, but it was a damn good movie. I’d sort of like to figure out if there is a logical reason why the gore in FC bothered me and FMJ did not, or if it’s just my subjective moodiness. The violence in mob movies never bothers me with one exception ~ the horse’s head. I don’t think I need to explain.

Regarding chocolate, I was totally fine all day until I had a bite of a chocolate chip cookie Sharon made and then I was immediately blasted with a migraine. It was totally obvious that there was a connection. Could have been something else in the cookie ~ oats, peanut butter, almond milk, vanilla extra, flour? I think I’m going to do the n0-chocolate experiment again. I don’t even care about choccy that much, only caffeine. The headache was so bad I wished I had a shot ~ it took hours to subside from a pill. But the shots cost so much it’s ridiculous.

Anyway, cool title, no? I must get back to writing soon.

/end reblog

~*~

Image originally from Pexels

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Chocolate Lady’s Eight Candle Book Tag ~ Day 5

To celebrate Chanukah this year and my friend the Chocolate Lady, I am accepting her challenge to participate in the Eight Candle Book Tag. This is a fun game and very easy to play ~ just visit her link for the options. I am of course doing the most complicated version. 😀

People will be surprised by this one, but… Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. I didn’t find this novel particularly engrossing, but I thought I “should” read it, and I’m glad I did. It’s not that the book was hard in the sense of over my head like a physics book; it simply became so tedious at times. But I finished it (unlike Ulysses, sorry Dad).

Happy Chanukah!

~*~

Images from The Chocolate Lady’s blog

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Chocolate Lady’s Eight Candle Book Tag ~ Day 4

To celebrate Chanukah this year and my friend the Chocolate Lady, I am accepting her challenge to participate in the Eight Candle Book Tag. This is a fun game and very easy to play ~ just visit her link for the options. I am of course doing the most complicated version. 😀

This time I’m going with a non-fiction book: On Writing by Stephen King. I knew I’d enjoy reading how the master does it, and I’d already seen a few snippets plus read rave reviews before I began. I was more than pleased. Excellent book!

Happy Chanukah!

~*~

Images from The Chocolate Lady’s blog

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

FPQ54: 🙂❤️🎶🎄🎁

Fandango provocatively asks…

Do you believe that, in social media communications, people are going overboard in their use of emojis? Why or why not?

I love emojis! In social media, they play a good role in helping people communicate when we can’t see each other’s faces and body language. The ones I use frequently are the smile, the laugh, the eye-roll, the barfy face, and the heart. I also use others purely for fun and decoration, such as the Christmas tree this past week or the kitty face and the music notes.

Now, it is true that a serious writer would have no need for an emoji. She would be able to convey her passion for a topic in a beautifully worded paragraph and eschew a 💖. On another subject, she’d skillfully portray her disgust sans a 🤮 and insert a bit of witty sarcasm without resorting to a 🙄. In fact, if someone used an emoji in a piece of serious writing, that would be jarring. I certainly don’t put them in any of my poems or fiction.

But Fandango asked about social media. I consider social media to be a source of fun and entertainment, not serious writing, for the most part. It’s a way to be social, not serious, imo, and therefore I consider the use of emojis to be entirely appropriate. This goes along with my general peevery about what isn’t appropriate ~ asking for money to buy coffee. 😡👹🤯

Merry Christmas! 🎄

~*~

Image from Fandango.

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.