Bright Lights, Big City Pt. 2

Saturday morning, I was feeling much more refreshed and spent the majority of the early hours (I wake up with the sun) revising my pitch and getting my time down to ninety seconds.

Early morning excitement! This is what happens when I have too much caffeine. 

Ten minutes to nine, I rushed to the elevator so I'd have plenty of time to get to the Fifty Shades of Publishing session in the Vanderbilt room on the second floor. Because many attendees were staying at the hotel and going to and from sessions at the same time, finding an elevator with enough room to ride had become a Herculean task. As I raced to the elevator, I spotted a woman walking toward me, her lanyard bouncing off her chest. Dang it! I had forgotten mine. I dashed to my room and back to the elevator. The woman was kind enough to hold the elevator for me, and we shared a laugh at how disheveled I was.

She told me she was a literary agent, and in effort to drive the conversation away from pitching (because it would be kind of expected that I'd pitch her if she represented my genre), I started babbling about the obvious.

"Are you going to the Fifty Shades of Publishing session?" I said.

She showed me her badge. "Yes, I'm the speaker!"

And then I died a little inside. I should probably know or at least recognize the names of the people I'm about to watch speak.

Anyway, her session gave me a lot of insight into the world of publishing as it stands today. There used to only be traditional publishing (through an agent and the Big Five) and self publishing, but there are now so many different options. While there, I met a woman from Wise Ink, which is an indie publisher out of Minneapolis. There's this whole new wave of publishing coming around called partner publishing, which uses crowd funding companies like Pubslush to help raise the overhead costs of printing. Then the partner publisher helps the author build a grass roots effort to cultivate an audience and bring their book to the masses. It offers another opportunity and some hand holding for new writers in a way that's begun to disappear from traditional publishing. I didn't even realize that was possible until attending this session. Some food for thought.

Finally, my pitch rolled around. In years past, the Pitch Slam was one large three hour session where you formed lines in front of the agents you wanted to pitch and waited. I'd read several blog posts about the experience and made the rough estimate that I'd get to pitch 2-3 agents. I had my list of five to work with. This year, the session was split into three 1 hour blocks with 1/3 as many people. And boy, did it work!

Lines were much shorter than I anticipated. I pitched to six agents and received business cards from all SIX requesting material! I even had a request for the full manuscript. My strategy was pitch the #1 on my list and work my way down. I thought it would be like ripping a bandaid off, in that I would be  relieved and laid back after pitching my first agent.

No! Not at all. My anxiety just got worse. Halfway through, I was sweating and fanning myself with my schedule. As I accumulated more and more cards, I worried about finally getting a "no." With several minutes to go, I found myself standing in the center of this room frantically reading through my pamphlet to find agents looking for New Adult, thriller, or suspense. At six minutes to go, I decided to call it a day (a great one, at that--pitching was a total success) and head out.

Then I was floating on cloud nine. I had a stack of business cards bouncing around in a pocket of my shoulder bag. I had people, who were in no way related to me or friends of mine, who might actually want to read this thing I'd been working on for years. WHAT.  The rest of the afternoon blurred by until Harlan Coben's keynote speech.

In the grand ballroom waiting for Mr. Coben to arrive.

Now in all my years of reading, I've never read a Harlan Coben book! He's published twenty-six of them, by the way, and sold over sixty million copies worldwide. So he's kind of a big deal. He's also incredibly tall and super funny. He shared all the horrific covers his publisher came up with for his first few books, one of which included a bloody football.

They seemed to like bleeding sport equipment? IDK. 

He'd shown up a bit discombobulated, claiming he'd forgotten the subject of his speech, and had written some basic do's and don't's of writing to share with us while in his cab. After his speech, I tweeted him that it's nice to know you can be a bit of a mess, but still successful. He favorited my tweet! So I'm basically famous now.

After the keynote, there was a cocktail reception with free booze (huzzah!), and the air buzzed with an almost summer camp/college orientation vibe. Everyone was interested in hearing what genre you were pitching, how your pitching went, what your background was, and how you were working toward publishing. I met some cool writer friends, even one from my hometown of Raleigh, NC!

Oh hey, Grand Central! 

That night, I met my freshman college roommate and her girlfriend out for a fancy pants dinner in Tribeca. They met me in the lobby of the hotel and showed me the ins and outs of riding the subway in NYC. After dinner, we had drinks at a swanky dark bar. You know the type, the one where the bartenders are mixologists and wear suspenders. We have a lot of those in Asheville.

I don't know which building that is, but it looks great! 

Fun Facts:

1. My hotel was down the street from Grand Central station.

Ew, tourists. 

2. If your bartender has to open another bottle in the middle of pouring your glass of wine (and tells you that you would be smart to drink some of what you're already got while he's preoccupied), do it.
3. Fluke Crudo means raw fish. And it's delicious.

The restaurant where we had dinner: Telepan Local

4. Eye contact goes a long way when pitching an agent. Don't read from a card.
5. Everyone else is as nervous, if not more, about explaining their book to a stranger.

So that was my Saturday in NYC. Stay tuned to hear about the rest of the conference and my NYC adventures on Sunday!

The Weekly Wrap - Flu Edition - 1/21/13

Monday 1/21/13 - This week started off so well. I was doing just fine, right on schedule and then...

Tuesday happened. It's been blisteringly cold (which in NC terms means right around freezing) and basically awful. We've been getting sleet and mixed precipitation, everyone has been driving like a maniac because no one apparently understands how to operate a vehicle during inclement weather, and oh yeah, there's this apparent flu epidemic sweeping the nation. 

I opted out of the flu shot this year since I get sick no matter what. I was sick back in December and thought that was the worst of it, but this past week proved me wrong. Tuesday morning, I woke up with a slight headache and a sore throat. By Wednesday morning, I was ill and basically immobile on the couch, which Boo used to her full advantage. I called in to get off work (because sneezing and coughing around people's food probably isn't the best thing to do) and loaded up on the typical OTC stuff: Emergen-C, Mucinex, Sudafed, Dayquil, you name it. 

My problem is I have crappy lungs. I've had asthma since elementary school and while I almost never run a fever or get sick to my stomach, all the crud that builds up in my sinuses ends up in my chest, resulting in a scary do-you-have-tuberculosis kind of cough. The cold weather definitely wasn't helping. 

By Thursday, my inhaler wasn't cutting it and I was wheezing in all four lung fields. I dashed to the doctor's office as soon as it opened (since I was supposed to work at 11) in hopes of getting some sort of medicine. The doc had me do a nebulizer treatment (aerosol breathing treatment) to open up my lungs, which worked well. However, the deep controlled breathing combined with the fact I hadn't eaten anything in about 24 hours took its toll. I began to feel nauseous, got up to run to the bathroom to get sick, and promptly passed out in the hallway at the doc's office. Totally embarrassing. My BP had dropped too low (systolic around 80 when I normally run around 110) and I was shaking and white as a sheet. The nurses were helpful though; they had me put my feet up and breathe into a paper bag for a bit until the tingling stopped in my fingertips. 

So, after that fiasco, I stayed home again and finally got some prescriptions which have been knocking this bug out of my system. I'm feeling much better now. I'm back on my feet after being couch-bound for about three days, but still have that lovely barking cough, which should hopefully subside in the next week or so.

Needless to say, I have been a bad writer this week. I've been resting up and trying to get well, which doesn't do much for the revision. Or blogging. Or much of anything else, for that matter. I'm off schedule for finishing by the end of this month, but I'm back to it today and will keep everyone posted.

Hope everyone around here is staying safe on these icy roads!

Also, I think Boo enjoyed having me be her snuggle buddy for a couple days:

That is one spoiled dog!

Muse Food for the Week 

Being off my feet did make for some good reading (and movie watching). I finally finished King's Different Seasons, which I started back in December. I took this book in slowly because it is divided into four separate novellas.

First, we've got Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (which the movie is based on). I read that in a morning. Absolutely loved the world of the prison and Red's telling of Andy's story. This isn't, to me, a "horror" story. It's a good story. Go read it! 

Next was Apt Pupil which explores a strange parasitic relationship between a Nazi war criminal and an adolescent boy who becomes obsessed with WWII. Totally strange, but interesting. It's a great character study and presents one of my favorite tropes, the morally ambiguous protagonist. Would Todd have turned out the way he did if he hadn't met Dussander? Hmm...

The third novella, titled The Body, tells the story of four boys who go off in search of, you named it, a dead body! Because strangely, that is what twelve year old boys do. I really loved this story. It has the same mythos that It held for me: that your childhood can be viewed through a much different lenses, that it was a cherished and strange time. 

Finally, King ends the collection with The Breathing Method which a story framed by an odd men's club that tells stories to each other. The story, this night, is of a young unmarried woman who discovers she is pregnant and the doctor who takes her under his wing. Not my favorite, but a solid story.  

10 Odd Bookish Habits

Reading can be an obsession, and as with any obsession, we all do it a little differently. I thought I'd share some not-so-normal bookish habits that I have.

1. I read more than one book at once. I know this doesn't sound too strange, but for most people, they tend to stick to one book at a time before moving on to others. Unless it's a novel I read in one session, I typically have three to four books that I'm reading at one time. For example, right now I'm reading Stephen King's On Writing and Different Seasons as well as Life of Pi by Yann Martel and a couple other stragglers where I started them and somehow lost interest.

2. I read while I'm blow drying my hair. No joke. It's totally weird but blow drying your hair is such a boring monotonous task and I try to squeeze in reading time whenever possible. I've also managed to put on makeup and do my hair while reading. Skillz.

3. I have a system for how I dog ear pages (and I'm not a purist where I never fold a page, sorry, not sorry). Typically, you see people dog ear pages at the top right, but I fold in the bottom corner of passages where I loved the writing and I fold down the top right one to mark where I am in the book. I rarely use bookmarks - I have a tendency to lose them - and I hardly ever keep a book jacket on the book, unless I'm using the front flap to put in between pages.

4. I can listen to music while I read. Sometimes, I prefer it. I'm fortunate that I don't get motion sickness so on long car rides, I fire up my iPod and get some reading done. It's like the book has a soundtrack. I love it.

5. I almost never reread books. Unless it's a beloved childhood favorite or one where I need to reflect, I typically finish a book and that's the last time I see it. It's hard for me to recreate the magic of reading something for the first time and I don't want to be disappointed if the book doesn't have the same effect it had as the first time. I will go back and look at parts that I really loved (see #3).

6. When I buy a book, I read the first sentence and the last sentence first. To me, it's important to end with something meaningful, just as it is to start. I've had people tell me that ruins the book. 1) Authors almost never give away the entire book with the last sentence. That sounds like terrible writing. The book should evolve naturally. 2) By the time I reach the end, I've forgotten what the last sentence was. It's like rediscovering those words and after having spent a considerable amount of time with the book's characters, the ending and last line feel that much more satisfactory. 3) As a writer, you want to see how others do it - how they pull the reader in and how they put the bow on top at the end. It's basically research.

7. I love big chain book stores, particularly Barnes and Noble. I know! I'm learning to patronize smaller, local brick and mortar shops, but Barnes and Noble has a special place in my heart. It's where I learned to love to read, where I spent a lot of time writing (I'm a walking cliche), and where I finished my first manuscript when I was 20. When I was a kid, toys and candy were privileges, but my parents never told us no when it came to books. I distinctly remember coming out of Barnes and Noble, my arms cradling my newest haul, with a coffee (this is probably where my caffeine obsession came from). Going into the bookstore makes me happy (new stories!), exhilarated (one day, my book will hopefully be here), intimidated (omg, one day my book will be here), and angry (really, Snooki published another novel).

8. I confuse characters and plot lines constantly. I have a voracious appetite for reading, but a terrible time keeping everything straight because I read everything too fast. I never finished Harry Potter because after I read the 5th book on a two-day bender, I couldn't remember what happened the next year when the 6th one came out. So I gave up.

9. Some books I simply cannot read in public because I will sob. Mostly, anything written by John Green, the end of a beloved series, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, anything about the Holocaust, etc.

10. As of right now, I do not have a library card. Instead, I prefer to spend obnoxious amounts of money buying books, when I have neither the funds nor the space. Books are kind of sacred to me, so it's hard for me to part with one after I've read it even if I'm not going to read it again (#5). I know, it's absolutely insane and completely cost ineffective. Now, I can say it's because I want to support the author, since I'll hopefully be in the same boat one day, but honestly, I just love having a lot of books.

Here's some research for my Future Unsuspecting Significant Other:

You give me a library, I'll marry you on the spot.

-E

Anybody else have any strange book quirks? Tell me I'm not alone!