The AIW Annual Conference was amazing! I officially suffered withdrawal the other day. Some of the panels were better than others. When I have more time, I’ll go through my notes and post more about my favorite things and all the things I learned.
This week, I will share the best thing about this conference. One of the literary agents I met for a pitch session requested the first three chapters of my manuscript! I guess all that practice work with the pitch really paid off! I let her know that it’s done but I’m still polishing it and I’m swamped until the end of the school year, and she said that I should finish polishing the whole thing before I send her the first three chapters and that the offer never expired and I should just put the name of the conference in the subject line so that she could set it aside and read it sooner than everything else that ends up in her inbox. It was such a delightfully uplifting experience! The other two agents I talked to both said that they liked the idea but that they already had similar pieces and didn’t want to take on another one. It is so relieving to finally meet an agent in person and have a full conversation with them, even the ones who didn’t request anything. It’s true what they say about agents, you know: they really are human, just like the rest of us.
