MFA Residency: Day 5

For those of you following along, today was day 5 of my MFA residency. I woke up still feeling slightly dizzy and sore but I took some Dramamine and Advil and those seemed to do the trick.

The morning workshop I attended was "Teaching Creative Writing to Non-Writers." The instructor was really great and she gave us some awesome ideas for ways to engage non-writers. We participated in several very fun and productive writing exercises that I can see being useful for teaching both creative writing and adaptable to academic/composition writing. So I was inspired after the workshop.

Then it was lunch time and I started getting really nervous because this afternoon at 2:00 was the agent Q and A panel followed by agent meetings...and I was signed up to meet with an agent. The panel Q and A was fantastic. Four different agents representing vastly different genres, all in the same room and available for us eager writers to pick their brains...which we did. They were a wealth of information.

After the panel it was meeting time. I was totally freaked out trying to remember my one liner pitch, but as it turned out I didn't even need it. Several weeks ago we'd sent intro letters, synopsis and first 10 pages of our projects to the agents we were meeting with, and she didn't even ask for a pitch. She just launched into a discussion about my project and basically said she really liked my story and characters and thought the writing was good, etc.

I was really worried because it's not completely revised and polished, but apparently the agents make allowances for that when they meet with MFA students. Whew.

So she finally asked me, "you'll have this edited in, what, 1 month? 2 months?" and I said, "definitely!" She said, "good!" She said she only has one romance client herself, but she just hired a new agent who handles more romance and she said when I have the manuscript finished to send it to her new agent, then she gave me the new agent's e-mail address.

I'm so stoked!

So now I'm going to give up sleeping and spend every waking minute that I'm not working, eating or doing other vital survival-related activities on editing.

Today was definitely an awesome day. *sigh*