The Muse & the Marketplace conference

Yesterday I attended day one of the Muse & the Marketplace conference at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. The event was fantastic and very rejuvenating for my tired, beat-down writing soul. Plus, I met an agent I would love to work with, Mitchell Waters. Before we get too excited, he hasn't agreed to take me on - yet. He did ask for my card and promised (well, not promised but said) he would read my submission. He represents the key note speaker at yesterday's event, Vestal McIntyre who wrote Lake Overturn which you can pick up on Amazon by clicking on the link - it's on sale for $10!! I haven't read it yet but it won the Grub Street Book Award so it's a no-brainer.

I also got a chance to chat with my friend Brunonia Barry whose new book The Map of True Places is coming out tuesday! I am on page 150 (at the event she had 10 pre-debut copies available and, of course, I scooped one up) and LOVING it. Not sure I should say this but I like it even more than the Lace Reader, which is saying a lot!

I also bumped into Randy Susan Meyers, who remembered, which is amazing considering she must do a ton of speaking engagments over the course of the year, and Amy MacKinnon, who you may recall turned me on to Grub Street and was gracious enough to call me, way back when, to give me some much needed advice. She had actually read my blog and gave me an addiitional pointer that was hard to hear but clearly true and useful, so I thank her again for that.

Other than my brushes with greatness - I attended three seminars. One on the publishing industry's glossary of terms, one on query writing, and one where they randomly selected first pages and read them aloud.

The glossary session was extremely helpful. I thought I knew it all but they discussed a lot of insider terms I have never heard, like "quiet" and "up-market". Having attended the seminar I will be a more savvy marketer of my work.

The Literary Idol session was wonderful until they got to my page, which was the very last one. In fact, the actress who was doing the readings was standing there with my page in her hand for about five minutes as the panel of four agents chatted and answered questions. My heart literally raced and I could feel my face flush as I waited, hopefully, to see if they would get to my page. They did. Which was good and not so good. The agents stopped the actress before she got to the end of her reading but they had very good input and made me see somethings I can fix to better catch their eye in the future.

My final session, on query writing, was a little less helpful only because I feel pretty confident about my query letter. I did enjoy meeting the agent who ran the session, Sorche Fairbanks, because she is local and clearly very good at what she does.

At the end of the day I got to meet one on one with an agent, Julie Barer, who had reviewed 20 pages of my novel and critiqued it. Yippee, she said the writing was great. Not so yippee she said the structure needed work (put it back how it was - and Dad & Karen nod to each other saying "we told you so"). She wasn't interested in taken the project on but she did give me great feeback and, overall I thought the session was well worth it!

The Muse & the Marketplace is held yearly and sponsored by Grub Street. If you are serious about writing it's well worth attending.