Meet Beautiful Singles

by Samantha Wilde

Trying out some new thoughts,

The best way to become like the successful people you admire is to think like them. You don't have to dress like them or live like them or write like them, you just have to borrow their thoughts. Sound crazy? All the great gurus of positive thought highlight the powerful idea that if you change your thoughts you can change your life.

after the publication of my little book.

Think of it: everything we do begins with a thought. Makes you want to choose wisely, doesn't it? Where I'm from, negative, doom-saying, unhelpful thinking is called, "stinkin thinkin." And who wants that?

In other words, for the New Year, you need only one resolution: to think differently.

But then you don't want to think any random person's thoughts, not if you're determined that 2014 is the year you write a novel, finish a novel, get the best idea yet for a novel, market a novel, or find success as a writer.

Do you really want to take advice from this woman?

No, what we need is to think the thoughts that got our literary idols fame and fortune and deep personal satisfaction. Because I know some of those people, I can share you with the top ten secret thoughts of the most successful writers.

10. "No fool ever wrote, except for money." --Samuel Johnson

9. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." --Ernest Hemingway

8. “Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”--Virginia Wolf

7. "I am as bad as the worst but, thank God, I am as good as the best." --Walt Whitman

6. “I hate writing, I love having written.”--Dorothy Parker

5. "Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.” --Mark Twain

4. "People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

3."Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." --Robert Heinlein

2. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”--Nathaniel Hawthorne

1. “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”--Kurt Vonnegut

And there you have it! Can you think like these amazing people? Then you can have their fame and fortune.


But if changing your thinking seems too hard, you can simply take a lot of pictures of yourself LOOKING famous and get the same kind of inner satisfaction (minus the money). Like I do.

Happy New Year! Happy New Thoughts!

Samantha Wilde is the author of This Little Mommy Stayed Home, I'll Take What She Has, and Strange Gifts, some writings on love. Even though some people find it hard to believe, she's an ordained minister with a progressive spiritual radio show and a long-term yoga teacher who can put her feet behind her head. In real life, she takes care of her three children who give her lots of opportunities to work on her "stinkin thinkin." She wants you to like her on Facebook because it helps with her self-esteem.

So, you were expecting the expert on how to jumpstart your writing, were you?

 In that case, I can send you to about a hundred authors I know who have masterfully jammed their noses to the grindstone and have become frighteningly prolific.

Me, on the other hand? Not so much.

 But I'm here to tell you I'm trying realllllly hard to get my collective act together. And here's what I'm attempting to attempt.

 But before that, how about what NOT to do?

Things you should actively avoid if you actually want to succeed in writing a book: 

1) All things Facebook. We all know, it's the dirty little secret of the Universe: Facebook is the world's greatest procrastination tool. It's masterful in luring an unsuspecting author who might just happen to be Googling some research question for her book but then, oh, right there at the top of the screen there's that easy quick link to Facebook. Maybe just a quickie stop by to see who's chatting and what interesting thing you might discover. After all, you might just find something vital to that work-in-progress there, right? Wrong. But never mind that. It's alcoholism, Facebook is, minus the alcohol. And it's so simple to fall prey to its temptations. I urge you: DON'T! My kids are always telling me to use Self Control. No, no, not the actual act of self control, although that actually wouldn't be such a bad idea. Rather an app that locks you out of the internet. I did attempt to find it one day online, but then one of my other kids warned me he'd had problems unlocking it eventually, which naturally stopped me in my tracks: you mean I might not be able to get back on Facebook and Twitter while watching The Bachelor so I can join the "conversation" about (i.e. mock) the program? God forbid, right? I mean, life just wouldn't be the same without that on my plate. You'd think I'd get the message: Facebook = potato chips. But I still haven't accepted the message about potato chips in the first place, so why would I actually choose to extrapolate it to this conceptually?

 2) Bye Bye Birdie Twitter (or Instagram or Snapchat or fill-in-the-blank). Yeah, all things social media lump together ultimately. Anything online that can lure you away from your book must be shut out. I actually have basically walked from Twitter. I just couldn't deal with it any more, all the time sucks. And Twitter was simplest to ditch: 140 characters is as easy to write as to not write, when it comes down to it. Originally, both Twitter and Facebook had become part of my gigantic time suck because I'd grown to have to spend so much time online with marketing and publicity. It got to the point that those monsters had gobbled up my mandate to write. And it's easy for this to happen because sometimes it's much simpler to do those little tasks than actually sit down and create. And it's easy to self-justify a little time here, a little time there on social networking sites than force yourself into the hard-core focus required to write a book.

 3) Let go of all that life crap that's bogging you down. Okay, I admit, that's not easy. And it got me, big time, over the past few years. Between legitimate life demands (kids activities, which increased in time and demand over the years despite your time being slightly freed up once they start to drive) right on through that senior year for each child, which took up gobs of time and then the treks back and forth to/from college however many times each year. And then all the burdensome things, those emotionally taxing life events that truly do sap your creativity. Those things. Get rid of them. Don't ask me how! I clearly failed in that regard, being that I haven't written a whole lot of anything over the past two years. But I'm working on it. Ideally I'd say maybe some mindfulness would be in order. But it's so damned hard to be mindful with your mind is full! A little meditation to get you back into a quiet zone, not a bad idea. But that takes time! And who can take that time when you're already not devoting the time to what you need to be doing? Oy. There's no simple answer to that one, I'm sorry to say. But I guess at least recognize it and try to work within the confines of it as best you can. I wish I could say I was good at that but I'm basically a drop-out in that regard. But I'm working on it.

 4) Coffee shop distractions: I find often I'm much better at focusing while at a coffee shop. That is if I don't get the WiFi password, and if -- this is a big if -- I don't start paying attention to the lives of those around me. It's so easy to get caught up on eavesdropping (so fun when it's a blind date, listening to the awkward banter). Put the blinders on. Those people you don't know sitting nearby discussing their former spouses and why they're no longer with them? Potato chips. No different than the blather you're attending to on Facebook and Twitter. No nutrition and ultimately putting on the pounds (in this case pounds of stress and anxiety because you're not getting your writing done).

 5) Professional distractions: I can't tell you how much I allowed myself to be kneecapped by industry nonsense. What's selling, what won't, why this book isn't going to work, etc. It created such a crisis in confidence after a while that i struggled to figure out what I could write that an editor would want. After having a few books nixed for nonsensical reasons despite having editors who loved the books, I just couldn't fathom what the hell I could write that would ultimately be acquired by a publishing house. It made me crazy, which made me doubt myself and my writing. The good news, is indie publishing allowed me to stop worrying about that. But by then I'd been so sucked into that mentality, it was hard to escape it. I'm pretending I'm halfway to my solution since I recognize the problems…Humor me, would you?!

  Things I'm trying to do to Get My Act Together: 

1) Facing my demons: I'd like to believe that this can be half the battle. To recognize my shortcomings and see where I can work around them. I'm having moderate success here, but it's a work in progress.

2) Schedule my life:  this sounds crazy. But for one who was a stay-at-home mom with little real structure, it's now time to create structure. I think part of my lifestyle turned into self-imposed ADD. One of the things I'm great at now is herding cats. And I think motherhood often comes down to just that. What that means is I'm great at focusing on those weird, disparate, useless have-to's that don't require intense focus, whereas at some point earlier in my life, focus came much easier for me. I'm hoping that by actually scheduling my day I can allow myself time to fit in everything, but in a mindful way, so that I don't ultimately feel badly at midnight when I didn't achieve what I wanted/needed to achieve because I wasn't organized enough to do so. I hope that scheduling will reintroduce focus in my life. Wish me luck there…

 3) Follow that AA mantra: One Day at a Time. It's a pretty good way to approach a lot of seemingly insurmountable things in life. Take small bites, and go from there.

 4) When stuck, stop trying to plow through it and instead work around it: I have found myself so frustrated at points in my writing when I just can't find the words for the next sentence, let alone the next chapter(s). So now? I'll write some other chapters. I'll go to the ending and write that. I'll jump ahead 30,000 words and write something that happens in the middle. Eventually I think the piecemeal will turn into whole cloth or some other mixed metaphor like that.


Okay, outing myself for truthiness: there have been some hiccups in this plan so far. Right off the bat, being diverted from writing by having to write a blog, well, it doesn't fit in with my Grand Plan to Get My Act Together. But sometimes you have to make concessions. And yes, over the past few months I've actually knocked out a good third of a book FINALLY (mostly before the holidays took over and demanded too much undivided attention). But I'm a work in progress, trying to vanquish that demon Attention Span Failure Syndrome.

 I think perhaps my ideal way to shut it all out and Just Write might be to escape to a beach house in the dead of winter (i.e. no ready distractions). All by myself, nothing else to do. Gazing periodically out a picture window at the soothing sea in the distance (for inspiration, not distraction). For me the beach (and by extension the ocean) is a place where I feel so at home and at peace. I think it would be divine to be able to escape to such a place and just write. Ahhh, but the little niggling detail is I have no beach house to which I can retreat, so I need to just do it, here and now. Wherever I am, whenever I can. The irony is I did this when I first started out writing, anywhere and everywhere. I'd whip out my clunky oversized laptop back in the day and write while sitting in the drivers seat in line for pick up at my kids' school. I'd take a little chair and move away from the other parents and write while sitting at soccer practice (which didn't always work because invariably friends would walk by and chatting ensued). It's time now to return to that figurative drivers seat and crank out the words, one word at a time. I'll keep you posted.


  Sleeping with Ward Cleaver










Slim to None













Anywhere But Here
































Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me










Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)


















Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)



















I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)



















And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions


















The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck


















Naked Man On Main Street
find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website

by Saralee Rosenberg









In the final stages of labor, it's not unusual for women to swear they will never get pregnant again. But they lie (and many of us are proof of that). Writers are like that, too. After pushing out a new book we insist we will never endure the pain and suffering required to write another. Ha!

Me and my baby girl Alex, circa 1988

Every time I finished writing a novel I went through a brief period of mourning and walked aimlessly around Kohls and Costco. Then I went home and jumped into bed with a whole new cast of characters. It's fine. Call me a book slut. But who are these characters and what is on their minds? Can't tell you until I let 'em talk.

This week in my head I heard two best friends talking over breakfast. Had no idea who they were, where they were located or what secrets they were hiding. All I knew was that they made me laugh.


Scene: Suburban kitchen. Morning. Two women are clutching their coffee cups.

"He came over last night," Traci said.

"Who did?" Meryl asked.

"Mike. From my bereavement class."

"Really? That's nice."

"I suppose... I think he likes me."

"That's very nice."

"No," Traci replied. "He's got kids."

"So do you."

"But his are crazy."

"So are yours."

"No, I mean like out-of-their minds crazy," Traci said. "His older son is a pot dealer and his younger son takes SATs for rich kids."

"Good. They're industrious..."

"...Doesn't matter. I'm not ready to date."

Meryl yawned. "Then why did you join the bereavement group?"

"Because you made me."

"Because it's been two years and you are ready. Is he cute?"

"He's forty-six. I think the cute ship sailed."

"Fine," Meryl replied. "Does he have hair? How is his cholesterol? Does he move his bowels?"

"No idea. Check his Facebook page... he asked me to dinner."

Meryl clapped. "Great. When? Where? Can I eavesdrop at the next table?"

"I told him I'd think about it. We have nothing in common."

"How do you know?"

"Because he's ready to date and I'm not. Plus he has two crazy sons."

"So?" Traci said. "You're not dating them, you're dating him."

"But what if we fall in love and get married and they become my sons, too?"

"Wait. You have zero interest in going out for dinner, but you're already planning the wedding?"

"He's very good looking. Tall. Dark eyes. Nice hands."

"Okay, you know what?" Meryl said. "Don't go out with him. I'll drive home, kill Larry, join your bereavement group and see if asks me out."

"Really? You would do that for me so I don't have to date?"

"Yes, I would."


Hmmm. This could be the start of an engaging novel. Or it could be the only meaningful conversation Traci and Meryl ever have. It will probably take a year to figure out. Or ten minutes. It all depends on whether they stay in my head and keep me up nights worrying about their future. Uh oh. This just in... Mike with the nice hands just texted Traci. Stay tuned.

Saralee Rosenberg is the author of four novels from Avon/HarperCollins including DEAR NEIGHBOR, DROP DREAD; FATE AND MS. FORTUNE, CLAIRE VOYANT and A LITTLE HELP FROM ABOVE. She recently finished writing her first novel for younger readers, THE MIDDLE SCHOOL MEDIUM. Visit her website. www.saraleerosenberg.com