Sandra Gail Lambert

Yippe-Kay-Yay

A first, has-a-beginning-middle-end, very, very, very, very bad draft exists of this next chapter.  Well, it doesn't actually exist by my Luddite standards since the new printer isn't here yet.  (I backed up on two separate flash drives.) 

Anyway, I am pleased with my own, fabulous writer self.  I twirl through my house being all smug and pleased and pumped full of writing ego.  I am disciplined, I am deft with sentence structure, I am the genius of voice, I pace like a marathoner  - please, don't laugh.  I need these moments.  Tomorrow, I have to actually read the thing. 

My Love Affair With Writing

If this were a love affair with a woman, my friends would be having an intervention. 

Gathered in my living room, they'd say they cared about me, they'd ask me to listen. 

My therapist friend would pat my hand and say that it was problematic that I obsessed over every word in the letters my lover sent me.  That she didn't know what to say when I asked her what "the ending fell flat" meant. 

A kayaking friend would cry and say she missed me. 

My blunt friend would shout that one or two moments of acceptance did not make up for the hundreds of rejections, much less the long periods of silence. 

My bookeeper friend would would want to know how much money I had been spending on making the relationship work.  Frequent computer repairs, the new computer, printer ink, postage, conferences, books, more printer ink - this would all be mentioned with increasing despair. 

It would be a long night.

My love affair with writing - group writing project

Sudye Cauthen - after reading the book

"The one cricket that chirped all night hushes, and a tree's limb takes shape against a black sky turning silver.  Like a reflection on water, the tree's foliage quivers against the coming light." 

This is from Sudye Cauthen's book Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place.  My thinking is that being open about how much I love this sentence will thwart my impulse to steal. 

I bought this book at Sudye's Goerings Bookstore reading and have now read it all the way through.  That this book repeatedly spoke to my heart, a heart that resides inside a military brat who moved continuously and had infrequent, tenuous connections to any relatives outside of the nuclear family, is, well, interesting. 

Did you know that Sudye offers memoir writing classes?

P.S. For inquiring minds... Yes, I am progressing on the chapter.  My deadline panic smacks me around from time to time, but mostly I am just doing the work.  This morning I yellow-padded a scene that I hope is fraught with menace.   

       

Connie May Fowler! Dorothy Allison!

I've been accepted for a week-long fiction intensive with Dorothy Allison and Connie May Fowler!  And I have to choose which one to work with!  This is impossible!  Should it be the author of exciting writing like Trash, Bastard Out of Carolina, and The Women Who Hate Me, books that were a thrill to sell in my former life as a feminist bookstore person?  Or a woman whose every book is a love letter to Florida, whose novels River of Hidden Dreams and Sugar Cage have inspired my writing?  What a delicious dilemma.

The intensive isn't until June, but I have to have 30 pages ready to submit by April Fools Day.  Six weeks.  Yikes.  I'm working every day.  I'm at that place where, once again, I have to figure out some sort of plot.  This is always my bugaboo.  I know someone murders this chapter's (set in the 1530's) character, but who and how and why?      

Falling in writer love with Meg Rosoff

First, I read How I Live Now.  Two pages in and I knew I'd found another of "my" authors - the ones where I hunt for everything they've ever written, put their upcoming books on hold at the library, and google their names in order to know everything possible about them.  (Meg Rosoff lives in England.  She quit her job and wrote a book when her sister died of breast cancer.  She has a little-bit-evil sense of humor - but I knew that from her books.)

Next, I read Just in Case.  Often, when I fall into writer love, the  second book can be a let down.  This one was not.  My oh my, what a disturbing, brilliant imagination this woman has.  Her books are categorized as Young Adult, but I don't remember anything like this when I was a young adult.   

This is what these books make me hope for my own writing - that I'll be more daring with my characters and their voices and that, some day, I'll handle writing in first person almost this well.

I know, I haven't told about the plots or main characters or settings or anything like that.  Personally, I don't like to know stuff beforehand.  I just want someone to tell me it's worth my time.  Meg Rosoff is worth your time.    

The Fortune Teller's Kiss - Brenda Serotte

I met Brenda at Writer's in Paradise.  People mistook me for her since we were the only two using wheelchairs.  It annoyed me.  It still does, but much less so since I met her.  We liked each other right away.  We had lunch.  We checked out each other's set ups.  (Ohhh... a bag hanging from the front.  Where do you get repairs done?)  We both had polio.  We both are writers.  We both wrote read-late-into-the-night memoirs that are beautiful and hard and read smooth like a novel - oops, no, that's just her.

The Fortune Teller's Kiss starts "Aunt Kadun had been kidnapped at age thirteen by a Turkish sultan and placed in his harem."  The book traces family traditions and myths and stories from Turkey to a Sephardic community in the Bronx to an isolation ward in a polio hospital. I finished the book last night.  I am still filled with Ladino incantations, northern lights, belly dancing, cruel nurses, pecan nut cakes, and the pinch of braces.     

Whew!

The revision of my WIP chapter is done. (Or as done as I ever get - which means I'll probably finish this post and go rearrange a sentence or two or five.) 

I took all the WIP critiques and consolidated them on one copy. (Thanks everyone.) I reread a bit of historical research. I gathered all the memos where I scribbled those perfect lines that appear just as I'm waking.  I looked over the scraps of dialog I've overheard that I thought might fit in (ie "you don't know him from anything").  I received an e-mail with a little lesson about scene from Lorin Oberweger just as I needed it.  (Lorin was at WIP with me and is an excellent book editor.  Check out her website Free Expressions.)

Then I wrote and rewrote, rearranged and cut, cut some more, added scenes, cut dialog, added dialog, got stuck, let it fester, rewrote again, rewrote again, and, now, I think I like it.

I do have a grammar question.  "Mother walks down the rows as if she was crossing a log over a creek" - is that correct?  Should it be "is" or "were"? 

P.S. Oops, does this mean that I have to get back to the still-on-yellow-pads chapter?  Or maybe I can find more revisions that need to be done somewhere, anywhere.