whee! good, good day.

This morning, we hauled the kids out of bed at o-dark-thirty and drove to Brentwood (the town in Northern CA, not OJ's estate).

I spent all day at a writer's conference thing, organized by my local chapter of the RWA (Romance Writers) and the chapter down there in the Delta area.

DH took the kids hiking up Mount Diablo (mouahahaha!) and stepping in cow paddies and then playing on the swings and slides at the park.

The morning speakers were two authors (one who writes romance) who wrote a book about writing, which seems to have ideas and suggestions and things to think about to plot and re-plot your novel. They were very good and I was excited and energized and seeing my way to understanding and fixing my novel.

And I won their raffle and got to choose to have them critique 10 pages from my novel. DUDE!

Then we had a lunch and a speaker who is a life coach and has a radio show. She was pretty good, but a bit rambly.

After that, they did the drawing for the raffles. I won a couple of magnetic boards for notes, etc that are very cute and I don't know where I am going to put them.

THEN the big win. I had bought ten raffle tickets for $6 and put several in the things i wanted most and one in most of the other prizes and I won a 10-minute pitch session with the literary agent who was about to speak next.

So I was trying to listen to her talk about the market and answer questions about genre and so on while scrambling to outline what I would say. I've never pitched anything before, I don't even have a coherent query letter.

I then didn't follow my outline, and was nervous and babbling. She asked me some questions and suggested a way to make what I said stronger (which I think I have some of, but which I didn't articulate well) and...

GAVE ME A CARD AND ASKED FOR MY FIRST THREE CHAPTERS AND A SYNOPSIS.

Maybe she was doing that for all the people who won the raffle, I have no idea, but O.M.G.

I told her that I had a zillion idea skipping around in my head for shifting some thing in my novel and she said that the offer to read the partial was open-ended. I obviously can't wait so long that she forgets she even came to California or anything, but I am going to give myself this month to see what I can do to the whole thing and make the first three chapters the best three chapters anyone has ever read of anything, ever.

And if anyone wants a full-color bookmark of a romance novel, I have about 20. About 20 postcard ads, too. I'll never go without again!

So we drove home. we stopped most of the way here and ended up at Dos Coyotes, a chain Southwest place that had hard cement floors and is NOISY. DS2 hated his nachos, DS1 liked his burrito. My burrito was fine, but nothing exciting. And now we're home.

I am so tired.