Sandra Gail Lambert

Limbo

So, you know, that writing thing.  It seems I don't do that anymore,  

This is not the complete truth.  I do stare at my query letter drafts and sometimes change an indefinite article to a definite one.  Sometimes I change it back.  

 

Writing Below Sea Level - The Cedar Key Project

I've posted about Connie May Fowler's upcoming writing workshops before, but I want to again.  For one thing, the deadline for them is soon.  But also, as the days build up since the novel was declared done, I'm figuring out things.  Like, that you can watch too many episodes of Dexter on too many days in a row, that it's really exhausting not to be writing, and that the workshop I did with Connie May and the connections I made there over a year ago are a big deal.   

Long Past Any Memory - Excerpts

 

I've posted some bits and pieces of the novel here and here.  Or just click on the tabs in the header. 

Oh, and here's an introduction.  There is a river in Florida where sweet water billows to the surface from caves deep in the earth.  Using a mosaic of time and shadowed history, Long Past Any Memory tells the stories of women who may have lived on its edges. 

Enjoy. 

Long Past Any Memory

 

I am finished.  The novel, Long Past Any Memory, is done.  Really.  Done, done.  It's printed out, wrapped in a pink and an orange rubber band, and flopped at the end of my writing bed.  I pat it from time to time.  Three years of work and there it is.  Oh my, I feel like I'm wandering around outside of myself. 

Despite the weirdness of it all, the work on the agent query letter proceeds.  The drafts have progressed from horrid through moderately awful to moderately okay.  Not that I have any perspective.     

 

Nostalgia

It's odd, but listening to Pandora on my new I-Touch is making me remember a road trip I took in 1976 (7?).  It was me, barely out, and the only two other lesbians that I knew.  We drove from Augusta, Georgia through back roads for hours.  They knew two more lesbians who lived in a single wide in the middle of a patch of North Florida pine woods.  We arrived.  And then the five of us listened to two albums - Chris Williamson's Changer and the Changed and Meg Christian's I Know You Know.  Then we drove all the way back.  It was a huge deal.   

Soon after, a lover gave me Linda Tillery's album Womanly Way.  And now, here I am with my I-Touch.  Somehow, today, it all seems so connected. 

Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund - there is still time

Are you a lesbian-identified poet or fiction writer?  Have you had at least one piece of writing published somewhere but no more than one book?  Could you use an award ranging from $1500 to $10,000?  Astraea Foundation has extended their deadline to July 15th.  Check out the other requirements and apply now.  

Here's some info about Astraea from their website:

"Astraea is a dynamic global foundation providing critically needed financial support to lesbian-led, trans, LGBTI and progressive organizations. Separated by continents, language and culture, Astraea grantees are seizing opportunities, and laying the groundwork necessary for women and LGBTI people to claim their human rights. Astraea staff, board, members and grantees all share a deep commitment to feminist principles, racial and economic justice and human rights."

 

Alligator Princess of America's Nile - the St. Johns River

 

And this is just the preview Michelle Thatcher's still in production film of her solo kayak trip along the St. Johns River!  

The beginning makes me cry.  There is so much joy in me when I'm loading my kayak in the "early half-dream of dawn."  

Apropos of Nothing - Baby Armadillos

This is sort of related to writing.  The poet Renee Ashley fell in love with the armadillos that snuffled around our lodgings at Atlantic Center for the Arts.  This post is for her. 

The photo credits go to Lee and Taylor Savage.  These babies live under their house.  

 

 

 

How to revise a novel

 

Wander your kayak around mangrove islets.  Watch for crabs skittering along prop roots.  Surprise a burst of night herons.  Be ignored by an eagle.  Push against a rising afternoon wind to reach home. 

And in the middle of the post-kayak eating of shrimp and crab (caught in the same Gulf waters you just left) you will know what is important and how to begin. 

"My fingers press into clay.  I balance at the edge of my mind.  The excitement rises and wants to spill into bright colors and glare.  It whispers out of my bones and demands that I continue.  It says that I will not fail, that I know enough, everything."

Tayari Jones on finishing the first draft

I don't often do the touchy feely thing, but the truth is my heart just spread all the way out of my body as I listened to this. 

Any day now, after letting my novel rest for a few weeks, I'm starting the next revision .  Inside my head I've been doing the tough love thing - you must be unrelenting, you must have no mercy with extraneous minor characters, you must cut all that part about the young Seminole girl who charms snakes and wants to know how to sew bathing suits.  There's been more tough than love.

So when Tayari spoke of finding that "other kind of love," I sort of started crying.  And now I think I'm ready to begin this ending of three years of work.   

Visit - ability

 

Twenty years ago I made the switch from braces and crutches to a wheelchair.  My life opened back up.  There was less pain, less exhaustion, and everywhere I went, all the places I could get to now, I smiled - which was quite a change.  However, everywhere I went no longer included people's homes.  There was this one night back then - I was feeling lonely - that I tried to remember the last time I'd been in someone's house.  I couldn't. 

Join the campaign for CONCRETE CHANGE - make every new home visitable. 

Writing Below Sea Level with Connie May Fowler - The Cedar Key Project

Writing Below Sea Level - The St. Augustine Project was a year ago this week.  Here and here are links to my reporting of all the ways the workshop helped my writing.  It's certainly one of the reasons why, today, I have a finished novel. 

And now Connie May is offering The Cedar Key Project this October and then again in November.  Four days, six fiction writers with Connie May and six creative non-fiction writers with Zilpha Underwood, good food, the Gulf, pelicans - the woman knows how to put on a conference.   

I can't go this year, but I encourage anyone who wants to take that next movement forward in their writing to apply.   

The query letter, a synopsis, and my underwear drawer.

This is an odd time for the progress of my novel.  It's done, sort of.  Another revision go through is needed, but I'm waiting.  It's out to a couple of readers and I want to hear what they have to say, and it should fester for awhile anyway.  

So, what to do?  My underwear drawer is very neat, my closet less crowded, and the toaster oven sparkly.  I've sorted through all the piles of photos and papers from my mother's move out of her apartment, and they are in a box under my writing bed.  (Perhaps, my next writing project?  But I'll have to sit on the idea for awhile.  Get it?  That's a pun.) 

Yes, I am a bit rambling these days.  But I have put together a query letter (halfway decent) for the novel and a, so far, horrid synopsis.   

 

  

Judy Horacek Fun

 

Not that I have an editor, yet.  But if I did, and wanted to send a present, I'd order a print of this cartoon from Judy Horacek .  

The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory

Last December I posted about Kenny Fries' memoir Body, Remember.  I've had another of his books at my beside since, but I put it off until now. 

Well.  At least The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory doesn't make me relive childhood loneliness and hospitalizations (except for the sawing off the cast part - I could smell the plaster dust).  No, this one just delves into the feeling I've always had that if things got tough in the world, I'd be an early choice for the ice flow. 

But instead of shutting his eyes to all that and carrying on, Fries looks right into the history, theory, and applications of "survival of the fittest."  He mixes it all up in with his own life, shakes, and pours out words that honor Darwin and himself (and me) and our place in the world.  Read this book. 

 

Something to Declare

 

This anthology is coming out from the University of Wisconsin Press in September.  Check out the list of contributors!

Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Louise A. Blum, Rebecca Chekouras, Jane Churchon, Tzivia Gover, Kate Lynn Hibbard, Jourdan Imani Keith, Gillian Kendall, Sandra Gail Lambert, Pearlie McNeill, Lesléa Newman, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Suzanne Parker, Sima Rabinowitz, Ruthann Robson, Lauren Sanders, Patty Smith, Lori Soderlind, and Hannah Tennant-Moore

 

The Hay Festival

Can you imagine a literary festival where Sarah Waters and Desmond Tutu are interviewed in the same podcast?  This is the literary world in Great Britain, specifically at the Hay Festival going on right now in Wales. (The homeland of my grandfather and probably where I get my pale skin and straight used-to-be almost black hair.) 

Check out the daily podcasts from the festival.  I listened to the Waters/Tutu offering and look forward to the guy who ate only what he could forage off the land for a year - rabbits, rosehips, poisoned mushrooms, etc. 

Marga Gomez takes on the L-Word

It's been raining here for way to many days.  We are not Oregonians.  Our Florida constitutions are in sun-deprivation shock.  So, take a break from being irritated by everything and laugh.  This video gets funnier and funnier. 

Southern Women Writers Conference

Mab Segrest, Natasha Tretheway, Sharyn McCrumb, Connie May Fowler, Thulani Davis, Sarah Gordon, Melissa Fay Greene, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Allison Hedge Coke, Natalie Daise, and Marsha Norman - this is the line-up at the Eighth Biennial Southern Women Writers Conference.  September 24-26 at Berry College near Rome, Georgia.  

Lillian Smith would be proud.   

Half done

I've revised my way through 140 of 230 pages and, to my great relief, at least so far, I think this novel is okay.  I mean, I don't hate it in general and sometimes, in particular, I'm sort of thrilled.  For me, about my own writing, that's pretty good.  

Another thing I'm noticing is how much help I've searched out and received these past three years.  I bid on a charity auction and won a chapter critique from Martha Southgate, and another section was brought to the Writers in Paradise Conference with Thisbe Nissen.  A whole year ago, (has it been that long?) Connie May Fowler brought together a fabulous group of writers for a week.  That's where she set me on the right, final path for the novel.  Then there was Kelly Cherry and the rest of my Atlantic Center for the Arts group who read a long, long segment, and just this week Laura van den Berggave me thoughtful notes as her contribution to a fundraiser for Dzanc Books educational programs. And right now, a novelist friend and her editor are reading the entire thing.   

Early on I had feedback from Suzanne Carlton who teaches a fine fiction writing class here in Gainesville, my poet friend offers support on an almost daily basis, and all along, most months, the Lesbian Readers Group and Potluck has listened to me read bits and pieces.  There is nothing like reading out loud, in front of other people, to make evey flaw evident.  

Okay, enough looking back.  It's time to get this done.   

Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

It's seven hundred and ninety five pages of teen-antsy type.  It has sentences whose clauses wander off in all sorts of directions.  The religious and literary references are beyond me.  It has words and phrases like "mawworm of bachelors," "nullifidian," "hustings," "custos rotulorum," and "family quartering are scuttle-fish sable and commentator rampant." (Huh?) 

It's only because of Moonrat's Middlemay Middlemarch reading project that I've reading it.  We're doing about a hundred page section every week and commenting online every Monday.   

I've been hooked ever since the first time Mrs. Cadwallader made me laugh.  I mean how does Eliot get me to feel like I know her characters through and through with just a few words?  And how perfect is this comparison - "... about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamber."?

We're only two weeks in.  Ya'll could still join us.   

The Compleat Novel

For all these three years, I've had this dragonfly scene scribbled in various forms on various pieces of scrap papers.  I've tucked them in with each chapter's notes as I work on it.  I've never found a place for it. 

So, on Monday, I was struggling again with this last little bridge thingee (highly technical craft term) that was all I needed to have done to have the whole book written and ready for revisions.  It was coming along okay, but.  In my mind, there was always the "but." 

I flipped through all the notes trying to figure something, anything out.  I found my latest additions to the dragonfly scene - "living veil," "riding her breath."  I closed the bridge thingee file, opened the computer to the last scene of the novel, wove in the dragonfly scene, and really, truly, right outloud, gasped.  I knew the novel was done.   

My skin tingled, my face flushed, all sorts of muscles tightened and released in waves (Yes, I know what it sounds like), and I just had to go outside and twirl around my yard.  

So, I've risked rereading the ending.  It needs some work, but yes, the novel is complete.  Not done or finished with revisions or anything like that, but still, let's celebrate. 

Ursula K Le Guin: Guesswork & Archaeology & Virgil

This audience was lucky enough to have afternoon tea with Ursula K. LeGuin.  She talks about her novel Lavinia and how, for her, science and historical fictions are metaphors for the here and now.  She emanates beauty. (Not that I'm gaga for her or anything.)

Everyone Matters: Dignity and Safety for Transgender and Transsexual People

This is excellent, tender, strong, and offers a clarity that often only comes from first person accounts.  It's presented by the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. 

Yodeling Lesbian Twins - Jools and Lynda Topp

I want to move to New Zealand and have one of these sisters (I don't care which one.  Either or both would be fine.) leave her girlfriend for me.  My far distant second choice is that this movie is soon available from Netflix.

The Whitehorse Poetry Festival

Remember the poet Clea Roberts?  She's and the rest of her poetry collective have been busy back in the Yukon putting together the second Whitehorse Poetry Festival.  

Michael Ondaatje, C.D. Wright, Don McKay, Erin Moure, and Adam Sol will be part of readings, panel discussions, craft talks, and a youth poetry workshop with an open mic.

If you've ever wanted to visit the Yukon, this is the perfect event to anchor your trip.  Here's a guide to visiting Whitehorse in the summer. 

Writer friends

From the people I met years ago at a writer's conference who click "like" on my Facebook announcement that I've finished a draft to the fellow novelist who, in the whirlwind, anxious midst of preparing her own revised draft for an agent, says "send me the chapter to read," there is no way I'd be able to do all this that I'm doing without writer friends.  

Who knew?  I didn't.  All I knew was that I had done all I could in my comfortable, supportive home sphere.  In 2004 I searched the Internet for writing conferences that would be easy to drive to.  I found The Atlantic Center for the Arts, applied, and was put on the alternate list.  A week before the residency I got the call, and I'm still getting support (and giving it, I hope) to writers I met there.   

A poet friend called today to say she's been accepted at a writers conference this summer - her first.  She's taking her poems out there into the world.  I hung up, held the phone to my chest, and thought about how precious we all are to each other.  Thus, this post.   

Mobi mats

The Ochlockonee River State Park camping trip was grand.  I have a first revision (except for this pesky little bit I need to write set in 1704) done.  It's actual fun to go through it all with a whole book perspective - with a wide, unobstructed view.  Which segues quite neatly into Mobi Mats.

I don't think I've ever blogged/ranted about my aversion to these boardwalks they're building at State Parks.  They get all this money, spend all this time, have good intentions, and then build "accessible" boardwalks with railings so high that I feel like a steer in a slaughter house chute or that I'm in some 1700's jail and should have a tin cup to bang against the wooden slats.  I don't think you get to call it "accessible" if I can't use my binoculars, take a photo, or lean my elbows (or at least my chin) on the top, stare into the vista, and ponder the meaning of life. 

Well, at Bald Point State Park, in addition to the mean jokes of boardwalks that other parks have, they have Mobi Mats.  I found it stretched out over the sand.  No one was around.  I thought "what the heck, my phone has bars, and took off.  I ended up at this lagoon.  I pondered the meaning of life.  

 

Here at home, online again, I looked up the Mobi Mat website.  This technology is brought to us by Deschamps the "world leader in tactical mobility since 1860."  Check out the promotional photos of tanks rolling over sand, helicopters landing in sand, troops disembarking in sand.  Yikes.  The park volunteer said that one strip of Mobi Mat cost $27,000.     

Looking for Sarracenia

Hey All,

Tomorrow I'm finding my way over the flooded Suwannee River to the Ochlockonee River State Park.  For ten days, I'll be living in my van, parked between a bay and a pine flats chock full of wildflowers.  I've packed my six pillows, printer, extra ink, binoculars, computer, protein powder, two bags of books, camera, and only four sets of earrings.  I'm ready. 

My goals include revising this next chapter all the way through, writing up an application for a residency, visiting with a writer friend and her partner, and searching out sarracenias (pitcher plants).

It is unlikely that I'll be on the Internet until I return.  Here's the link to the eaglets.  Please check on them for me while I'm gone. 

The Sound of Music - it's not baby eagles, but it's fun.

I first saw the sound of music in Oslo, Norway on one of those fabulous theatre screens that curve so much that if you sit in the front rows (which I did because those were the cheaper seats) you have to turn your head to see from one side of the screen to the other.  Close-up shots are faces as tall as two floors. 

I was thirteen.  I loved Julia Andrews.  I had little awareness that most of the audience seated around me had fresh memories of the Nazi occupation of their country. 

Spring Native Plant Sale

Are you tired of ruining another little piece of Florida with a drug-addicted, water-wasting yard? Come to the Native Plant Sale this Saturday, April 11 from 8:30am until 12:30pm here in Gainesville at the Morningside Nature Center. 

  

But if you want to be one of the cool kids, then come on Friday from 4:30pm to 6:30pm, join up, and shop the members night.  I'll be there cashiering.  Some vendors sell right out on Friday.

Every image on this post is a native plant that grows in my yard.  Butterflies, reptiles, and birds abound, and I have not watered or fertilized, or really done anything at all to the plants but throw dirt around - and admire them. 

There are chicks!!!

Memories - Brought to me by Facebook

Lorraine in Atlanta has been posting old photos on Facebook, and there I am, thirty years ago, in photographs I've never seen before.  It's odd and wonderful.  Here are a few of the images - some I'm in, some not.  To see them all, here's the link.

 

 

 

Eagle Cam

The three eggs in this nest (in New Jersey) are due to hatch starting on April 4.  That's tomorrow!

 

The Inbetweens

The inbetweens nerve-wrack me.  Four days ago I tucked away a revision, pulled out the next chapter, copied Draft 4, renamed it Draft 5, and then closed everything - the computer files, the physical folder, the yellow pads. 

Since then I haven't written anything.  Part of it is having a somewhat workable wheelchair again and needing to fly around town doing things.  The other part is that same part that always happens - the I'm not a real writer, there's no point in continuing, I can't do this thoughts.  

This morning I woke up early, brushed my teeth, splashed my face, and instead of going to my writing bed went back to my sleeping bed.  When I woke up again, I had all sorts of thoughts - how to do the omniscient thing after the 1858 chapter, what the lady would be thinking about the tailor, and how the word "thicken" will be perfect in that problematic sentence in the 2006 chapter.  

Whew.   

Too cool

73.5495%

My wheelchair is in the shop.  There are parts to be ordered.  Who knows when I'll be getting out of the house again?  After the anxiety, claustrophobia, and bouts of bureaucracy-induced rage, there is the part where I get to write more.  

So, here's the revision update.  According to the calculator on my cell phone, this go through is 73.5495% done.  It's inescapable.  If I keep working, I'll get to the end.      

Dancing with a twist, hitch, and tremor.

I went dancing last night.  It wasn't like this.  I'd like it to be like this.  I'd like to watch this.   

Revision Update

It's been a week of rejections.  Sigh.  But, it's also been a week of finishing another chapter of revisions.  (Need I say it.  Not finished, finished.  Nothing is ever finished, finished.) 

I wasn't quite ready to delve into the next chapter so I did math.  I've revised 47,674 words.  The remaining,unrevised chapters add up to 28,797 more words. (So far.  That could go up or down, and then there's this little, interim, maybe omniscient voice segment set in 1703 that I haven't written yet.)

Anyway, that adds up to a novel of 76,471 words of which I've revised (this go around) 62.3426 per cent.  Okay, enough.  I'm going to open that next folder.    

Gainesville - Vote No on One

This is a reason why.  http://equalitygainesville.com/

And here's another. MassEquality.org || Take Action | Everyone Matters: Dignity and Safety for Transgender People  

Early voting starts today.  It ends on Tuesday, March 24th. 

Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions

Do you want your writing to receive affordable, right in your own home critique by skilled, generous authors?  Do you want to support Dzanc Books' writing education program for school students? Dzanc Books' creative writing sessionsare a fundraising effort for their educational programs.  Writers donate their craft, some of us pay for the help, and the money goes to fund writing classes for fourth through twelfth graders.   

I've already signed up for two hours of Laura van den Berg's time.  I met her at this past summer's workshop with Connie May Fowler.  She spoke to our gathering about literary journals in the most helpful of ways, and one night she read to us from her upcoming collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.  I would like my writing to be that gorgeous. 

Check out the list of available writers.  For the price of the pesto gnocchi with tuna at The Top Restaurant followed by a cup of vanilla espresso gelato, these authors could be critiquing your poetry, editing a short story, or answering questions about form and voice. 

Collective Fallout - Short Story Excerpt

Collective Fallout has published an excerpt of my short story "The Swamp Goddess" on their website.  It appears in it's entirety in Volume One.   

One Hundred Years of Solitude

All those lists people put out of "important" books and people pass them around on places like Facebook, and you say how many of them that you've read - well, every single one of them has Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude listed. I never have, but I've always wanted to lie and say that I had read it.  Or when if came up in a discussion, I would nod knowingly and murmur things like "oh yes, so many people love that book."   

Friday was his birthday.  I started reading it.  So far the second sentence is my favorite - the words are like water tumbling down a stream.  Soon, my life of Marquez obfuscation will be over.

But not tonight.  Tonight is the season premier of "Dancing With the Stars!" 

     

 

Atlantic Center for the Arts, Below Sea Level, and Writers in Paradise - Revisited

I'm revising a novel.  The first chapter was critiqued at the Below Sea Level conference with Connie May Fowler, the second at Writers in Paradise with Thisbe Nissen, the third has had to just make it on it's own, and now I've started in on the fourth.  This one has a fat folder of feedback from this past November's residency with Kelly Cherry at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. 

Yes, last year I was a bit of a conference slut.  Which is why the paint on the side of my house is peeling and my ramps still need to be power-washed and I'm making do with a frig whose freezer won't freeze. (I embezzled the registration fees out of my house repair funds.)  

Anyway, here I am opening these folders with check marks, exclamation points, cross outs, and arrows pointing sentences this way and that.  It's as if I have everyone back around the table with me.  And comments are making sense that didn't at first.  

So, to all of you who have taken a turn stirring the pot, kept it from bubbling over, suggested I try adding more roots, helped grind out a solution when it was too bland, or whipped up a spicy masala that I could swirl in at the end - Thank You.      

Collective Fallout is out

 

I arrive home after a 14 hour day of tucking my mother's whole life of belongings into one small room and leaving her for her first night in the new place, and in the mailbox there it is - a journal with my name in the table of contents.  It was such good timing.

Collective Fallout, edited by Eric Crapo, is a twice yearly journal "dedicated to queer-themed sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and mystery fiction and poetry."  It's available in print or as an e-download.  Just click here to order.  

Now, here's the place where I would talk about the other contributors.  However, I came home that night, my arms full of old papers of my mother's, tired into stupidity, and after flipping through the journal, I fell asleep.  I woke up, went right back to moving chores, and now, I can't find the journal.  I've looked everywhere.  It might be in that box with my dead father's Army Air Corps enlistment records from 1938 or maybe under the stacks of old checks from just decades ago. 

Looking obsessed me for awhile, but I've given up and ordered a replacement copy.  I can tell you my story has lesbians, the Everglades, a swamp goddess, a serial killer, and infidelity with a park ranger.    

My writing brain - on anxiety

Maybe I'm the only one.  Maybe other writers don't have twisted, folded all over and through itself anxiety. 

For instance - maybe they don't have a morning of writing where things went quite well, where the chapter hardly needed much revision at all and so they've moved way ahead of schedule on completing their novel, where all this smooshy feel good stuff is followed by full-body anxiety because they don't have any friggin' idea about what to write next, after the novel is done.  In fact, (they probably don't think) the best idea is to slow down, not to finish the book too soon, maybe ever. 

The Trouble With Jerry Lewis

 

Talk about Oscar Buzz - the action has already begun at the Academy and the Kodak Theatre.  I've been following the protests on Twitter.  And on the Trouble With Jerry website.  My favorite post so far was when they crashed an Oscar Party and some of the glameratti helped pass out fliers and confided that Jerry was an "ass." 

 

Daily read publishing world blogs

Here's a glimpse of my daily procrastinating life or my educating-myself-about-publishing life or my just-need-a-friendly-voice writing life.  The following are the web links I click on most days.  

New Pages - OMG - this is a fantastic resource for writers.  My deepest appreciation to everyone that devotes their time to its existence.

Bookends - A Literary Agency - these agents take shifts answering questions about queries, ranting, giving glimpses of an agent's point of view. 

Editorial Ass - The famed Moonrat, an anonymous book editor, makes me laugh on a regular basis.  And, like the best of the blogs, encourages a huge conversation about books. 

Tayari Jones - The author of Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling, offers one of the best writer blogs available - loads of links, community support, and all that it is that writer's do.

Swivet- Agent Colleen Lindsay's blog has practical info (Why I Rejected Your Query Letter), rants, Depends-necessary funny stuff - all in a queer friendly, genre friendly manner.  

Nathan Bransford - Another agent who makes me laugh. (Is there a theme going here?)  He has great contests. 

Booktour - Now this is the coolest site.  As an author I can post all my books, appearances, and where I'm based.  As a reader I can find out which authors are appearing when and where in my area.  Or if I want to set up an author reading I can see who lives in my area or who will be passing through. 

MediaBistro - basically a publishing gossip column.  Essential to every writer. 

 

Jami Attenberg and Lauren Groff

Tomorrow, Thursday, at 8pm, Jami Attenberg and Lauren Groff will be speaking at Goerings Bookstore here in Gainesville.  

Jami Attenberg is the author of Kept Man and Instant Love.  Jami has had a website since 1998 and is an advocate of independent and self publishing.  Her novel Instant Love was originally a zine series that she sold mostly through her website/blog. 

Lauren Groff is a Gainesville resident and New York Times bestselling author who is devoted to our local independent bookstores.  Her newest book is Delicate Edible Birds.

These two are bound to offer a evening of good writing, all sorts of options for publication, and encouragement.     

Stairs, stairs, more stairs - and stares

I need more adventure in my life.

 

Now, in my manual chair days, I did this.  Not the stairs part, but the flip over backwards for no good reason as I was crossing the Big Five Points intersection in downtown Atlanta. 

 

And this one makes me hold my breath, cover my eyes, and sweat.  It must be that flashback to when I had a pile of gear on my lap and didn't see that (just) one step in front of me.  I blithely cruised over it at full power chair speed.