So, is this blog written by Shani or Camille?

Here’s the skinny.  I’m a writer and I once thought I was a flake.  I’ve always had a tendency to start projects and abandon them fairly quickly.  One day I was having coffee with a fellow writer and I complained out loud about my apparent flakiness.  She leaned over and said, “Shani, you’re not a flake.  You are a perfectionist, so when you continue to write things that you don’t see as perfect, you drop the project.  That’s not flakey, just blatant perfectionism.”

I went home and looked at all of the unedited posts in my current blog, and the half-finished projects in my document folders, and at the mountains of notebooks filled with stutterings and realized that she had nailed it.  Camille Maurice was one of those projects.  I had begun a short story about a woman much like myself (but better because she wasn’t a disorganized, anal retentive mess like me) who was the penultimate hostess.  She literally held salons in her home that were a modern version of what we all read about in our 18th century French literature classes.  She used the parties that she hosted and that she attended as breeding grounds for new culinary ideas, how she might redesign her dining room, or just whatever topic was on her mind at the time.  When I first started blogging at camille-maurice.blogspot.com, I thought it would be neat to use her voice to do just that.  It managed to grow a life of it’s own and a following that I never expected, so I moved over to a freer space dedicated to Camille’s name.  I often refer to my family as the M’s, still, just for fun and also for the sake a smidgen of anonymity (I can hear you locals laughing at me now!), but this is all in good fun, and set up for lively discussion and I hope it will be a learning experience for us all.

I’m also very passionate about my community and want to advocate voluntarism and philanthropy to help make it stronger.  It is so important in a functioning community for people to put forth their best efforts to build one another up and continue to make the community better.  Camille Maurice is an outlet for promoting this attitude, as well!

I am not a professional chef or interior designer by any means.  Heaven help the person who would have me design her home!  I just love to talk with people and hear their ideas.  My grandmother was a little French woman who used to throw her hands around and talk vividly.  To me, doing just that while sharing some delicious food and wine with good friends is time perfectly spent.  Every pretty little thing that a person picks up, every dish that they take the time to create, every get together that they plan has some sort of story that goes along with it.  Those stories make for the some of the best conversation, don’t you think?  The liveliest conversations begin unexpectedly and drive themselves to a bright and unknown destination.  Pour yourself a glass of wine and chat with me!

Thanks for stopping by, and I look forward to sharing with you!

Shani

aka “Camille”