I don't know about you guys, but this is the most hilarious thing I've read in a long time.

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So, I suppose I owe some feedback about the writer's conference. It was, um ... not good. And that's not sour grapes (I really didn't get any good bites) , I honestly felt that the thing was poorly conceived and executed in a professional sense. Rest assured that I gave some rather scathing feedback. It was next to impossible to get an agent at the so-called "mixers". I'm a shy violet wallflower, but I can get some steel in my spine when the need calls for it; that wasn't the problem. The problems was the complete absence of the agents, or the few who had showed up were mobbed, feeding frenzy style. Not nearly enough formal opportunity. I mean, Sunday morning they had a round table pitch session, where you had to get your pitch out in a minute. And somehow, we, the writers who had paid to come here, weren't allowed to move. The agents were, but not us. So what did me and my YA/middle-grade writer friends get? A literary agent, a nonfiction agent, and an adult fiction agent. A "no" even if our pitch was passable.

For those of you out there who "just can't find the time to write", let me tell you: it's the easy part. Trust me. I don't care if you've banged out 100k words and slaved over a novel for three years. Condense it down to one sentence and then come talk to me about what's hard. Try boiling it down to a one-minute, hell, even a 10 minute pitch. When people tell me they can't write because of A problem and B circumstance, I just want to laugh and laugh. Because they're not serious if that's what's keeping them back. Agents, if you don't have their attention in 10 seconds, will either cut you off at the knees or (if they're required to stand there and listen to you) give you this rather sullenly glazed look. Which is not a bad reflection on the agents, by any means. They keep crap like Eragon from being published. (Or they're supposed to.)

As long as we're mentioning ideas with terrible execution, some of the book pitches were real stinkers. One guy had a thriller/suspense about a homophobic Senator and homophobic general conspiring to put together an all-gay battalion and send it on a suicide mission, thereby eliminating all gays in the military. If you can imagine the stares he got, do so. They were priceless. In his defense, I didn't have a problem with the story itself, but his world-building. Gays aren't allowed in the military. If they admit to gayness, they get kicked out. So how would they know they were gay? Gaydar? If openly gay soldiers were allowed in the military in the story's setting, he should have said so, but he didn't. The agents reactions were practical and vicious. When the guy said the protagonist was the general, one of the agents said, "I don't like him. I don't want to read about him. Next!" (And for the record he was a nice enough old fellow. Admittedly from Texas, like a lot of us were, but Austin ... dey like-a da gays, so to speak. The rest of Texas might not, but Austin does. So do, uh, other states, which is where some of these agents were from. Maybe he didn't know that.)

If that's not enough, there was someone worse. He had a story about two guys who were best friends, one of which is approaching fatherhood (which is apparently putting strain on the relationship or something). The other guy can't stop talking about baseball, and while on a dream vacation they take to attempt to salvage their friendship, one of them punches the other out. He didn't say who. Yeah. I guess in theory his idea could be a cross between Tuesdays With Morrie and The Great Gatsby (god knows his subject was idiotic enough to qualify for literary), it just didn't come across that way. Personally I thought baseball guy sounded like a whiny pissant stuck so firmly in the irresponsible territory of Guyland that he deserved to be punched in the face. Who would like someone who whines that you're having a kid and won't have time for him anymore? It sounds kinda gay. But don't tell suspense/thriller guy that. He might wanna sign them up for the army.

Anyway, all things considered, it kind of ended up being a massive waste of time. I had fun with my friends, which was great, but I can do that without spending $350. I got some experience, but again, not something worth that much. I think I'm just tired of being told "eh ... not quite." I got Honorable Mention in Writers of the Future, but that's like a consolation prize. "Here, little girl, you didn't win. But you get a certificate!"

On the plus side, it's made me a lot more cynical towards bad writing. I'd mentioned in passing during a college class that my fantasy novel was a finalist for the Writer's League contest (during one of those stupid class orientation things where you have to say something interesting), and another student found me later. He said he knew someone else that had entered the contest, but that she'd purposely cloaked the genders of the main characters in the first ten pages, even going so far as to not use the words "he" or "she." He looked at me hopefully, as if I'd declare it avant garde or something, and I said, "That sounds really stupid. I don't even have to see the writing to know that she got bad feedback on it." He sheepishly admitted that was the case.

So, there you go. The moral of the story is: if you think writing is hard, you're in for a terrible surprise. Yes, there really is something worse than forcing yourself to sit down at the keyboard, worse than getting critiqued, worse than rewriting, querying, or figuring out your one-line pitch. It's called a writer's conference.