Samantha Ling

So you know that meme going around about who you write like, well, I plugged in various blog entries and I got a whole slew of stuff.

My Crafty entry told me this:

Feed me, Seymour was written in the vein of Ernest Hemmingway. The funnier 4 years ago entry says I write like Dan Brown. And my TV entry is like Chuck Palahniuk(whom I’ve never read).

What this tells me is that I should write scary and satirical action adventure stories with characters that find redemption. Does that sound like me?

Who do you write like?

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal

I’m reading The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes. It’s a book that Jennifer Crusie said was a huge influence for her and I am a ginormous fan of her work. So I’m slowly going through it.

The beginning is all about writing struggles and anxieties. Did you know that EB White had really bad anxieties about his writing? He wrote Charlotte’s Web!

And for writers, if it’s not worrying about publishing, it’s worrying that the critics won’t like the work or if it’ll sell or if people think the book is hack work. Basically, there is always something to be worried about.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Writers are neurotic messes. We all know this, we worry about everything. What I wanted to talk about is the chapter about excuses not to write. There was a section about how if only I had the right pen/paper/computer/electronic device/private place to write/nice coffeehouse, I would be able to write. I found this absolutely hilarious because I have fallen victim to this too.

When I was younger, I completely fell victim to this. I was looking for the best portable device to write with. Found a bunch of PDAs and found the alphasmart, which a lot of writers use. I never bought any if them though. But I sure knew a bunch about it!

I sometimes see this on newsgroups too where someone would inevitably ask what the best writing software was and there would be a dirth of suggestions. Then there would be a few people that would say Word, you don’t need anything else! Which is the truth. You could write a whole manuscript in notepad if you wanted to.

These days, I write on the floor in the living room. I lie down on my stomach and I write in a cheap notebook that I stock up on after the school year starts. They are always on sale for 50% off!

I’ve got a huge selection of pens to write with (due to a quest in finding the perfect pen several years ago). But I mostly use my fountain pens at this point. It is my one writerly splurge.

The point of that chapter is that the difference between those who write and those that don’t is that the non-writers will always have an excuse.

If it’s not writing equipment, it’s time or personal life or I had to wash my hair. It’s always something and that root fear boils down to fear of failure. Because if you don’t try, you can’t fail.

And that’s all the waxing I’m going to do today. Cuz I gotta write a new story now that I’ve sent out all that hasn’t been trunked.

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal

With NaNoWriMo happening, a lot of writers are putting down tons of words a day. For those of us who don’t have time or are slow writers, we feel like we’re slackers. We feel guilty for not producing. And for some of us, we should be. We’re watching too much television.

But for the rest of us, we see the uber-producers and feel inadequate. Well, you know what? Dennis Lehane took a year and a half to write Mystic River and look where he’s at now. You don’t always need to be fast.

And for those of us who have day jobs that rob us of time we wish we had to write, write when you can. Don’t beat yourself up for not putting down enough. Just put down some and keep going.

Because, as a friend wrote today, “Every day you put down words is a victory. Relish it.”

Originally published at Samantha Ling. You can comment here or there.

I'm reading this book where one of the characters is stupid for stupid's sake. She's stupid in that she doesn't listen to adults and gets into trouble and then she rails against the unfairness of it all. In other words, she's spoiled. But she's spoiled and she's not clever. She's just stupid. It frustrates me and I just skip the chapters in which she is the main character.

Other things that bother me are characters in horror movies (and it's always helpless dumb women too), where they're told to stay put because it's a safe place and someone will come back to get them. So they're left all by their lonesome, but because they're too scared to stay put, they go after the hero and get themselves into trouble and thus the hero as well. Usually this character screams for help and the hero has to come rushing back. It always seemed to me a cheap way to increase drama. Plus the character is selfish when she does that. She isn't thinking about who else will get in danger because of her stupid acts. Who can root for that? She walked right into danger when she could have been perfectly safe elsewhere.

Now if she had been hiding in a safe place and was somehow discovered by aliens/zombies/bad guys and then she had to be clever to get out of the situation either by hiding or outwiting the opponent, I have no objections.

If she leaves her safe room because she's scared to be a long and walks into a room full of zombies and she's armed with a can of Aquanet and a Bic lighter and she uses that to set the zombies on fire, I can live with that. Because she's prepared or whatever. But then she wouldn't be too scared to be alone would she? She'd have to leave safety because someone more helpless than herself was in danger, like a child. Because someone who was too scared to be alone wouldn't be strong enough to fight things off.

The book I'm reading, the girl is told she can't have something, because to accept a gift from this person would lead to situations she's not ready for, and it would have implications. But the girl doesn't listen, thinks the gift is from someone else (her crush), and opens the gift anyway. Now all I want to do is strangle her. Why are these characters so stupid?

So I was talking to Ben today about an old story that I had that I was going to post on here so that people could read it. It had made some rounds and I'd misplaced the information about where I'd sent it, but I remember that it had gotten returned to me at some point. I mean, I still like the story and I want people to read it, so I was going to post it online as a free read. But he's like, you've got to try sending it elsewhere. Then he proceeded to give me a list of places to send it to. (They were, unfortunately, all closed to submissions at the moment.) But it gave me the push to send it to yet another place, so I found one that wasn't closed that might be amenable to that kind of story and I sent it off today.

And since I lost my submission list, I decided to look at submission trackers and found Sonar, which I like a lot. So I don't have to write my own. Why bother when someone else has done a perfectly good job of it? And it's portable, so you can stick that puppy onto a USB drive and take it with you.

I have also posted the whole of "Waking Chang-Er", so if you've ever wondered what that story was about you can read the whole thing.

The local RWA chapter is having a little writing dare of sorts. We're charged with writing 100 words a day every day for 100 days. You can write more than 100 words, but you can't write less. It officially starts tomorrow and ends May 13th, assuming you write every day.If you don't write every day, meaning that you skip a day of writing, your 100 days starts over again. It also doesn't include blogging or email or any other multitude of things. It's writing as in writing a story. It's not brainstorming. It's not revising. It's writing 100 new words.

The paragraph above is 100 words.

I believe I should be able to at least attempt this. The theory is that if you make it part of your every day routine, like brushing your teeth or taking a shower, you'd manage to do it all the time after that. I'm not sure if that's true, but I would like to try.

Now, I know some of you are also trying to write (I'm looking at you frabjouslinz.) So maybe you'll want to try too. I'll be posting my progress every Monday to keep me honest.

We are sitting at Branes and Nobles on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Chris usually has a knack of wanting to hang out here when I don't have any of my writing things.

We would usually go to Target beforehand so that I could pick up a notebook and pen for less than $3. But today I came prepared. I brought my newly bought Timbuk2 messenger bag (from Zappos for 40% off, thank you very much).

I had fully stocked it with pens, sticky notes, stapler, paper clips and scissors. I don't know why I have the scissor, but just in case I have to cut a deadly itchy tag from someone's shirt, I will be ready! I also remembered to put my various notebooks in there as I had decided that's where they go when I'm done with them. The only thing I forgot was the laptop, well, sort of..

You see, I was writing on my main computer and remembered to save it. I save after every paragraph. Call it paranoia. The only problem was that I failed to save it onto my thumb drive. And since I didn't have it on my thumb drive, I decided not to bother to bring my portable laptop. I know, you're all ashamed of me. But at least you get this lovely journal entry instead.

Now enough about procrastinating. Let's get on to the real work and the reason why we're even here in the first place. I am going to write. Oh yes, people, I said writing. I will finish another story someday!