Happy Friday!

This is the start of a holiday week, so if you’re reading this I hope it’s on your phone as you travel (as a passenger) to some fabulous vacation getaway.

For most writers, almost anything in life can be fodder for a story. I’m a collector of the new, old, and unusual. This week in the old category a friend posted a picture of women working for the Red Cross getting out of a small boat and walking onto a beach during World War II. That will nudge at my brain until I find something to do with it.

The other thing that stuck with me was a new awareness of professions I never knew existed.

• Infancy Coach – Was this job created as an effect of the revolving door found on most maternity wards now? Maternity nurses used to walk parents through changing, feeding, bathing, and dressing a brand new living breathing baby. They answered questions from jittery new parents and gave reassuring advice. With mothers and babies spending so little time in the hospital now, has that been lost? Are infancy coaches filling the void?
• Professional Camp Trunk Packer – I read an article about Manhattan working moms paying professional packers $250 an hour (average time needed: 3 hours) to pack their kid’s summer camp trunk. The article left me with more questions than answers. First, what elevates a task from ‘job’ to ‘profession’? Second, what kind of work do the moms do that paying someone $250 an hour is cheaper than taking off the time to do it themselves? Or is it simply a willingness to pay anything to have someone else do a job you don’t want to do?
• Social Media Manager – Apparently someone with this job will tweet, post, and pin on your behalf across multiple social platforms. They also track responses/questions and deal with them. Many work with authors and smaller publishers. I can see the time-saving purpose of this if you can afford to hire someone in this field, but a huge amount of trust is involved in allowing someone else to speak for you publicly.

What’s nudging at your brain this week? What will you do with the tidbits?

Have a fun holiday week!

Lisa