22 thoughts on “Speaking of What Makes Me Happy: Best Writing Post Ever”

  2. Currently writing My Hero flinging himself off a cliff to attack an airborne dragon with his bare hands. No arguments here about the Sharknado moment.

  3. I’ve been watching the David Suchet Poirot series. A recurring character it’s the novelist Ariadne Oliver. I love it when she talks about all her annoyances with writing.

  4. Thank you. Today I was reminded of a book by a NYT bestselling author who popped up on Twitter today. I immediately started to fret about my idea for a story in a completely different genre, because overthinking and self-doubt are my superpowers.

    I’m going to print this off for when I forget to just have fun.

  6. Thank you Jenny. In high school I read a lot of Harlequin romances. It was the seventies. My brother gave me such a hard time, I’ m wasting my time, they’re stupid etc. They were comfort food for an adolesent. I still read some authors from Harlequins. Right now I want happy endings and silliness. If someone doesn’t want to watch Airplane with me, so be it. I am a mass. Maybe a mess too. Sometimes a miss.

    1. I guess there was Snakes on a Plane, which did indeed deliver snakes on a plane as promised.

    2. We did get a Lake Placid vs Anaconda. I think they’re up to 6 movies, counting the original Lake Placid. Which is giant crocodiles in Maine, if anyone needs an explanation.

      And I think the Sharknado stuff is up to 5 movies. None of which I’ve seen. Someday.

  8. That sent me to watching the trailer – I’ve never seen the movie either, but I love what you’re saying. I find it way too easy to talk myself out of things before I’ve even got started.

  9. I watched it when it came out. It was fun and silly and something my DH and I enjoyed for the fun and the silliness. (I think we also watched at least one sequel).

  10. I also loved this post. As someone who occasionally writes stuff that’s out there, and who tends to push the boundary of believable for some people, it made me happy. It also made me think it’s time to exercise my imagination and let it out of the box.

  11. I enjoyed your post! But now I have a burning desire to know: did you ever sit down and watch Sharknado one dark, buttered-popcorn-filled, Saturday night, Jenny?

      1. In Neil Gaiman’s book, •The View from the Cheap Seats•, there is a chapter “The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography,” from a speech he made in 2013, that says much the same as Jenny was saying in the “Carpe Sharknado” post. I can’t resist pulling out this one long paragraph:

        “… my ninety-five-year-old cousin Helen Fagin, who is a holocaust survivor and was professor of the holocaust at the University of Miami for some time, and a wonderful, remarkable woman, and she was telling me about when she was in the Radomsko ghetto in 1942. She had been at Kraków University until the war interrupted her studies, so she was assigned in the ghetto to teach younger kids (she would have been nineteen, maybe twenty), and in order to assert normality, these ten- or eleven-year-olds would come in the morning and she would teach them Latin and algebra and things that she was uncertain that they would have any use for, but she would teach them. And one night she was given a copy of the Polish translation of Gone with the Wind, and she explains this is significant in that books were banned. … And each night she would draw the curtains and put the blackout in place and read, with a tiny light, two or three chapters, losing valuable sleep time, so that the next morning when the kids came in she could tell them the story of what she read, and that was all they wanted. And for an hour every day they got away. They got out of the Radomsko ghetto. Most of those kids went on to the camps. She says that she tracked them all later and discovered that four—out of the dozens of kids she taught—had survived. When she told me that it made me rethink what I do and made me rethink the nature of escapist fiction, because I thought actually it gave them an escape, just there, just then. And it was worth risking death for.”

        1. That’s amazing.

          I think all good fiction is escapist, but then I think literary fiction is just another genre. I’ve never found a good definition for literary fiction aside from “story that some people think is better than other forms and that some people think is dull and boring.” It’s not a good definition.

          I’m still caught by the “only four survived.” Story as a temporary way out of a nightmare.

      2. They are ridiculously stupid and tongue in cheek and very entertaining. I have seen them all but the last one which is on my list. I would recommend with a lot of popcorn and maybe some wine 😉

  12. Don, *I LOVE THAT QUOTE*. It’s in the reading section of my teacher record file. Because I need to remind myself…and management. 😉

  13. Oh, that post is awesome!

    Full disclosure: I have seen all the Sharnado movies because my daughter is a Millenial who throws watch parties, complete with theme snacks and decorations, and drinking game rules posted on the walls. It’s definitely a fun story to watch in a group. Maybe a Zoom party where everyone brings their own gummi sharks.

  14. “Never ever start thinking about the objections to your story before you’ve written your story. Never ever second guess an idea that makes you breathe faster, that makes a million story moments race through your head, that makes you think, “It would be so much fun to write this story, I want to write this story.” ”

    Pure gold… GREAT article!

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