Sandra Gail Lambert

Anhinga Writers' Studio

This upcoming week, right here in Gainesville, is the Anhinga Writers' Studio.  Four days of workshops - a small sample of which include Poetry of Human Speech, How to Sell a Romance Novel, Stumbling over Dead Bodies in Search of Enlightenment, Graphic Memoirs, and, the one I'm doing, a short story intensive with Lauren Groff.

Charlaine Harris of Sookie Stackhouse (True Blood) fame is the keynote speaker. 

The Query Letter

So.  I have one.  Every night, just before bed, I look at it and change a word, change the word back, move a sentence to another paragraph, twist a clause,  

However - and in a few weeks I might be mortified about this - various versions are off to four agents.  I've already noticed that in one of them I did the "it's" "its" thing wrong.  The agents' names were checked over and over so probably only one out of the four is spelled wrong.  

Wouldn't it be great to say how I'm reveling in this lesson in letting go, of moving forward, how I'm celebrating this new stage, that in my head there's a big party going on? Yeah.  For me, it's mostly that after the party feeling - nausea and lethargy. 

Here's a snippet from the query.

"For most of these women it is the last day of their lives.  They are not famous.  None of them have children.  Instead, their stories rise out of the shadowed history of a river in Florida where sweet water billows to the surface from caverns of silent lakes."  

 

She Writes

(No, not me, not yet.)  She Writes is a new social network site for "women writers working in every genre."  It looks good.  So far I've joined the groups Fiction Writers, Feminist Bloggers, Disability Writers, Watcha Readin'?, Memoir Writers, and Queer Issues.  Maybe someday I'll be able to join the March 2011 Book Release group.   

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 - An Excerpt

 

I've posted a piece of the novel here.  Or just click on the tab in the header. 

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.