RWA Swag

The DD has a long standing tradition of posting swag pix from her various forays to Comic Con and even Japan (where it's actually booty), so we couldn't resist posting our daily swag from the conference.

Not technically swag is the coat and sweater underneath the books and bookmarks. We blew off the AGM yesterday morning, opting for a nice walk instead, and came across an H&M store. I quickly started drooling over the styles and the prices and found a nice black Gina-style sweater that I couldn't resist. Meanwhile she found a Paddington-bear style coat.

The lunch was surprisingly edible. Chicken (as to be expected) and some rather gluey rice, but the salad was great, the ice-tea sublime, and the coffee strong enough to carry me through the rest of the afternoon. I went to the PRO retreat, mainly for the agent panel, but I also enjoyed listening to Linda Howard who spoke about following your personal dreams and writing your very own story.

At the agent panel was Nathan Bransford, whose blog I enjoy, Jennifer Schobar, Laurie McLean, Laura Bradford, and Barbara Poelle. I go to hear agents mainly to get an impression about them and decide who I want to submit my work too, also to hear if they have particulars in how they want us to submit. Four of them said they are actively looking for young adult (so that was good!). Barbara Poelle was the lone standout, and I didn't have a chance to ask her afterwords just to be certain.

Next, off to listen to Elaine Spencer (of the Knight Agency--whose party I so badly wanted to crash last night) and Marley Gibson (who I finally got to meet in person after all these years) and their workshop on the agent-author relationship which was very interesting and I discovered that Elaine Spencer talks really really really really fast . . . and she also reps YA. (Are you sensing a theme here?)

Dinner at Mels Drive-In (yummy yummy) and then off to working on the WIP (rather getting unstuck--good thing the DD had an excellent crowbar in her toolkit) and memorizing my pitch for today's agent appointment.¹

----
¹ Why can I still remember the Winnie the Pooh poem I memorized in the fourth grade but not the pitch to a book I wrote and know inside and out?