Samantha Garner, Freelance Web Writer & Editor

No really, do. Akismet is really good at catching them and keeping them away from my blog, so all I have to do is delete them. Except, first, I read them. And some of them are hilarious.

I got a couple of different variations of this one in my spam queue:

Intimately, the post is actually the sweetest on this notable topic. I harmonize with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your next updates.

Let this be a lesson to you writers out there: if you have a voice, just go with it. Don’t think a thesaurus will make you sound any better! It will make you sound kind of like Yoda!

I also recently got one advertising Blind Melon torrents. Blind Melon? The same Blind Melon that had that one hit in the ’90s? Aw. I kind of almost feel sorry for this spammer. I think he might be a narc, actually.

I’m proud to say I haven’t gotten tricked by a spammer since the last time I, embarrassingly, did. Now, they just provide amusement for me. Don’t ignore your spam queue, people! It can provide minutes of fun!

Anyway, I should get back to my writing. I’ve got a couple of enewsletter articles to write, as well as making my middle-of-the-night story idea scrawl into something that makes a modicum of sense. Hope everyone’s having a good end of the week!

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about different confusing things that’ve happened around my name. He mentioned it’d be a good blog post, so here it is. Let it not be said I don’t take suggestions well!

Over the years, both before and after I got married and changed my name, I’ve encountered a few other “Me”s. Here are my favourites:

1) My Twin From the Other Side of the World

The main reason I took my husband’s name when I got married is because I liked it better than mine. Another – minor – reason is that my old last name was often mispronounced and misspelled and, after so many years, it really bugged me. However, I received some comfort when I stumbled upon another woman with my exact name online. The funny thing is – she was a writer too! We even had similar writing styles. If she didn’t live on the other side of the world I might have been a bit more creeped out about it than I was. Shortly after I’d Googled myself and found her, she’d Googled herself and found me. We exchanged emails and she was quite charming, though emailing “myself” was very surreal. My name was unique enough that I’d never encountered someone else by that name before. Sometimes I feel like I should email my twin now and tell her, “You win – the name’s yours!”

2) The Bizarro Me

On a certain social network which shall remain nameless, there exists a Samantha Garner who is my age and lives in my city. However, she is very much not me and, if prospective clients Googled me and thought she was me, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t ever hear from them. Don’t get me wrong, whatever Bizarro Me wants to do on her slice of the internet is cool and I don’t begrudge her anything, but it’s why I put a photo of myself up on this site in the latest redesign. My name is my brand, so I want to make sure I’m representing myself accurately. Future clients need not worry – I keep my private life locked down tight on this here internet.

3) The Other Wordscience

The name of my blog, Wordscience, follows a theme I’ve used often in names for things online. It started from a phrase I misheard on TV: “new science.” At the time, it resonated with me. I thought that new science would be a pretty neat thing to experience. The sound of the phrase and its attendant imagery stuck with me, and I used variations of it over the years. So, it made sense that I’d call my blog Wordscience. The problem is, when I went to register Wordscience as a Twitter name, I discovered it already existed – and her name was Samantha too! Fair enough, she got there first. And so WordscienceBlog is my Twitter name. It’s also why I use the word “blog” in the blog’s name even though that’s gauche. Sometimes necessity is the mother of gaucheness.

Yup, this is another end-of-2009 blog post!

A paid-for URL, a few redesigns and some hilarious spam – this blog’s seen a lot in 2009! I took a quick look back at some of my earlier posts and thought I’d share some of my personal highlights from Wordscience. Here are the blog posts I liked the most in 2009:

• My Life With Robertson Davies
• Office Culture for the Self-Employed
• Three Ways my Mother Can Help you be a Better Freelancer
• How the Web Has Changed Since “My Day”
• Three Ways to Find Writing Motivation When You Just Don’t Care
• Quotes on Writing and Art

Oh, this one’s not a post of mine, but I kind of wish it was, given my Spelling Thing: Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling from The Oatmeal.

I hope everyone has/is having a great New Year’s Eve!

(Photo from stock.xchng user Staszkinse)

This weekend was spent with a few fun people I know in a small-town B&B cabin. It was meant to be a ski trip, but only two people went to the mountain. The rest of us spent time in a coffeeshop in an old church, and browsing a very small but very amazing secondhand book store. There was good food, board games, lots of loud laughing – all ingredients of a great trip! My husband and I left Friday and returned yesterday morning. We were tired and relaxed and it took some time do “recompress” and come back to real life.

When I returned, I checked my usual links (that I’d ignored over the weekend) and saw that the Freelance Writing Jobs Network posted this: From a Man with a Pen to a Lady with a LapTop: An Inteview with Deb Dorchak a/k/a Harrison McLeod. It seems that Deb D was the person who “outed” James Chartrand.

I’m not going to comment too much on it here, as I know this story is already huge. I jokingly compared it to a soap opera in my last post about it, but real people are involved and I don’t want to stir any pots or whatever metaphor you like to use. I just wanted to link to another part of the story since I’d brought it up earlier.

Anyway, go check out the post on the Freelance Writing Jobs Network. Deb N does an admirable job with it, considering both parties involved are friends of hers!

A lot of blogs I read have been talking about this post on Copyblogger: Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants. For the tl;dr crowd, here’s the gist: Female writer struggles to find writing gigs worthy of her skills and education, so after a process of trial and error, she chooses a pen name which happens to be male.

James’ blog is one I read fairly often, for a while, so at first this announcement felt kind of like a real-life episode of Coronation Street (not a bad thing, mind). Others have written about it quite well. For me, it got me thinking about pen names in general. Some of you may remember my own failed attempt at a pen name. Basically, I could never remember to use it, even though it was just my intials, “SK,” instead of “Samantha.” Part of the reason I chose that name was for privacy, yes. But honestly, another reason I chose it was because it was gender ambiguous. I was enchanted by the idea of someone reading my work with absolutely no preset gender bias. My little pen name experiment obviously didn’t last, but part of me wonders how my career would be different if it had.

Despite what I just said, to be honest, part of me is always a little upset when I hear of things like this. I have a possibly naive belief that, as a woman, I should be able to pursue any career I want and be treated 100 percent the same as anyone else. But I know that in some situations, including James’, it’s just not that easy. So while I wish that we could’ve seen her triumph under her given name, I do completely understand her decision.

Anyway, I just wanted to chime in along with all the other blogs in support of James now and in the future.

I have been a bad blogger. I haven’t been feeling the love lately, to be honest. I’ve been viewing blogging almost as a chore, rather than the fun hobby it’s been since 1997. To be honest, a lot of it is down to a couple of projects I’ve been working on that have taken up a lot of my time. I’m having corrective eye surgery next week (ack!) and won’t be able to do any work for a few days and so am making sure things get done early.

Don’t get me wrong, these are fun projects and I’m not by any means complaining about them taking up the time they are. But they are sapping my will to blog, a little bit. This, I suppose, is exactly the time that the “write posts in advance and queue them” advice comes in handy, non?

Anyway, blogging, I hope you’ll forgive me. I could use some tips on blogging despite complete disinterest, if anyone has any they’d like to share.