The Agents and Editors Conference 2008
If there's a heaven for writers, it was temporarily translocated to the Austin Sheraton for one very long yet maddeningly short weekend road show. I got more done there in forty-eight hours than I had in the previous year and a half of query letters, partials, fulls, and rewrites. No exaggeration. I'm still trying to pull together all of my heart and head impressions of the 2008 Agents and Editors Conference. I was going to do updates on my website as the weekend progressed, but I found that impossible to do in part because the only downtime I had was spent in deathlike, dreamless slumber, and in part because it took me three days to figure out what the hell happened. A lot of stuff happened. All of it was amazing. It reminded me a lot of the feeling I had when I was on a roll once, publishing everything I sent out, first market, first submission. I looked around my living room in the middle of this roll, feeling swimmy and surreal, thinking, is this really happening to me? It was. It is. Life is good, my writing friends. Man, I love this job! It was a little like the Ray Bradbury story, Mars is Heaven, but without everybody revealing themselves to be ravenous writer-eating monsters on Sunday afternoon. Which is a good thing, in case you wondered. It was, in fact, a hotel swarmed by maniacs. Night of the Living Book People. Imagine, if you will, the string of miracles required to make this a reality. Some people get an idea that it might be fun, interesting and educational to ask some agents, editors and publishers to come to a hotel for a weekend and talk about books. The people with the idea make phone calls and write emails to a bunch of the busiest, least appreciated, most overworked people on the planet and say, Hey, I know you had that Aspen ski excursion planned, but how would you like to give up your entire weekend to come on down to Austin and spend about twenty hours listening to a whole bunch of would-be bestsellers try to tell you their stories in a minute or less? I know what I would have said. Gee, it's very kind of you to ask, but I've got that bunion removal surgery coming up, and I really need my rest. So sorry. You could be forgiven for having a similar picture of the world. Tough old place, right? But a bunch of them said yes. Some of them probably did have things going on, but a bunch of them said yes. Over twenty literary agents said yes. And that's just the agents. Editors showed up, too. And writers. Oh my word, yes. 450 of them. Mere anarchy, loosed upon the Austin Sheraton. The price of admission included workshops, panels, round-table discussions, and one ten-minute pitch session. You could get another one for a small fee, and sign up for a pitch workshop. I paid. Happily. Money well spent. I paraphrase The Warriors: we had literary fiction guys next to horror hacks (I'm the latter, so no insult intended). The scriptwriters were right by the book doctors. Agents cozied up to cozy mystery writers. Everybody smiling, pitching books, talking shop. Talking books. Everyone in the entire building was there to talk about books. That is a miracle. And miracles, my writing friends, is the way things ought to be. Don't blame me for the bad grammar. I'm quoting here. So. This is what happened. Click here to read about Friday, 20 June Click here to return Home from Conference
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