Sandra Gail Lambert

Banning the I-Touch From the Bedroom

For the first time in my life since I was six, I wasn't reading anymore - all because of my bedroom relationship with an I-Touch.  There was self-delusion (one more game of Scramble and then I'll pick up that novel), justification (I've had a hard day and deserve to relax and surf the Huffington Post articles.), rationalization (I have to see what's new on Media Bistro.  It's important for my writing.)  I was doing better and had even deleted all the games, but then one night I checked my e-mail just one more time and there was that acceptance from North American Review.  It set my recovery way back. 

Two weeks ago I willed myself into a cold turkey docking of the temptation every night in its charger in the kitchen.  For awhile I woke up in the dark lonely and lost, but now I've made new friends to play with in bed.  Like Carol Anshaw's brilliant novel Carry the One.  Or Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?  Really, it's a party every night. 

And last night I woke up at three, pulled the always-waiting, long-patient yellow pad over, perched it on a pillow on my lap, and scribbled down what might be the first scene of a novel.  This was so much more than a just a good time.  It's too soon to say, but there might be a relationship developing. 

Turtle Agility

So, I'm a bit stressed these days.  An interest is being shown in my novel that-will-most-likely-not-turn-into-anything-but-right-now-I'm-both-hopeful-and-preparing-myself-against-the-sadness-of-a-rejection-by-making-a-plan-for-what's-next-and-watching-this-silly-video.  

Maybe it's because of the obsessing, but don't you think this turtle's journey is a metaphor for the writer's life?  The steadiness, the determined focus, the struggles - all for a nibble of lettuce.    

Preparing For a Reading

Yikes.  First of all this means I have to go look at the novel.  Which my agent has sent out to publishers.  Which means I might find too-late-to-correct, horrendous errors.  So, I'm avoiding this by trying to identify a few self-contained, perfect length, dramatic excerpts - without looking.  I figure that way I'll limit my exposure to possible shame and panic.  

So far I'm thinking the chapter where the woman born without legs learns to swim from manatees - the writing is sort of pretty in that part.  Or maybe the cynical clerk in the Silver Springs gift shop selling alligator mugs made in China - I think it's funny, people like funny, right? Or, for a completely different mood, the death scene of the saber-toothed cat?  Dangnabbit, I'm going to have to just hold my breath and open that file. 

Come to the Larimer Arts Center in Palatka on Sunday, May 15th at 3pm to see if I've survived.   

 

      

Matterings by Rose Simpson

 
 Notice the size of these clay pieces.  Notice the size of the door.  Rose Simpson created her art in this small room.  The staff at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe told us of arriving each morning and there it was, more done, more revealed.

And this morning I'm in my small writing studio, settled into the pillows of the day bed, a blanket pulled over me, determined to write.  Finish that essay on being a swimmer, start the new novel, revise at the old one - anything, something.  

I'm remembering being in that small gallery and placing my wheelchair on the intersection of the clay lines.  On one side the perfect square, on the other the perfect circle, each with its clean-edged cut-outs, and in front of me a huge-in-that-space woman reclining and crumbling red earth over the floor. 

That question about how to address the specifics of our lives without being categorized - Rose Simpson says "It is simply that these subjects, issues, predicaments, thought, and feelings matter and they deserve to be given the time of day." 

Somehow all this is combining in my brain into something.    

 P.S. Today's post-Santa Fe food yearning - I want that lovely woman to roll her cart of aromatic, multi-colored bowls of ingredients up beside my table and create guacamole as we watch. 

Lift Off?

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but these days my posts have been about everything but my own writing.  One can only whine for so long about not writing.  Well, actually I can keep at it with an inordinately fulsome flair that makes friends pretend they have another call, but I've tried to spare my on-line community.  

Don't worry.  This week, twice, there have been writing mornings - ones that left me with that whole, all-is-right-with-the-world sense of myself.  Perhaps a writing groove is being etched back into my brain.  

Writing and the Hydrologic Cycle

Remember this picture? Is it still in all the elementary school science texts?  With all the associated words - evaporation, transpiration, precipitation, surface flow, infiltration?  

In writing there's revision, submitting, rejection/acceptance, publication, pondering, and, well, writing.  That's where my cycle is interrupted.  In this tortured metaphor, I think writing is the precipitation part.  It's not happening. 

But recently I've been feeling a bit of surface flow and, most exciting, infiltration.  Perhaps my aquifer is recharged.  Perhaps my plant self is ready to transpire. 

I think this essay is done.

I used to have a life with uninterrupted, day after day time to write, but that went away.  I've mourned the loss, whined about the inefficiency of having to re-immerse over and over, despaired that this hour here and there crap would produce nothing worth anything. 

But today, so far, has been a gift of duty-free time and I think I finished the dang essay.  I'll let it stew for a few days, but I have hope that the next time I read it there will be a minimum of clunky-sentence shame and overwrought vocabulary embarrassment.  And if I'm lucky, only quiet groans of bad-ending anguish.    

Developing Zen

 
This past week I received three of those friggin' "like your writing, not quite right for this issue, please send more" rejections.  As I yearned for someone to smooth my hair and say "there, there" in a quiet voice, the lovely Moonrat posted the website equivalent.   Here's an excerpt.

"I must get published" fever hurts a lot of people. It causes people to do things in desperation that will hurt or limit their long-term options. My recommendation to authors--and I know this sounds much easier than it actually is--is to try to develop zen about your books. You write because you love to write. You continue to work on your projects, whatever they may be, because you want them to continue to improve. Some projects, however good they are, never need to see the light of day, because they've been stepping-stones on your road to self-development. They are what will train you to write the book that really matters.

   

Novel update

 

As you know, I wrote the novel, I wrote the query letter, I wrote the friggin' synopsis.  There is a lovely chart of the agents that have received some combination of the above. 

And there has been some "interest."  (Yes, I know I'm using the passive voice all over the place here, but it helps to put a little distance between me and this weird emotional existence.  

So.  Now, I wait.  And write.  And wait.  And walk the dog, visit friends, and wait.  

P.S.  The photo is lifted from Moonrat's blog.     

Paynes Prairie as writing aide

La Chua Trail is only five miles from my house.  It's open most days, all day.  Each visit the place is stunning, always in a different way.  Today's trek was midsummer lush and lotus.  And purple spears of pickerel weed.  Immature night herons.  Fluff-necked adolescent gallinules. 

It took a couple of miles before the twisted-up, has-anyone-responded-to-my-queries-yet, I-could-check-my-email-on-the-phone-right-here anxiety unraveled.  But it did.  I felt it.  Right in that place behind my stomach and in front of my spine.  Whew.  

I think I'll leave a few notes around my house to remind me to get out there more often.  Feel free to nag me about it.     

Writing While Waiting

Here's an update on my writing life. 

I am having one, moving forward from the recently finished novel, doing all those things you're supposed to do.  But mostly I'm waiting.  A batch of query letters are out.  There has been some interest.  Which means a flurry of sending out what has been requested and now - more waiting. 

Each time the computer dings that a new message has arrived, I scurry to open it.  If the internet connection is wonky, I scream things.  Bad things.  Today my cell phone rang.  It was an area code I didn't recognize.  I thought, this might be it.  It wasn't.  

Does anxious heart racing count as aerobic exercise?

   

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.  

 

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.