Amy and I attended the Writing for Charity event yesterday at the Salt Lake City Library. It was a great event---like a mini WIFYR! Apparently it's going to be a yearly event and I would recommend it to everyone. It's for charity after all!
We got some good advice on writing with children. We also got to hear Amy Jameson (she's Shannon Hale and Jessica Day George's agent) give some advice on dealing with agents. There was also a small workshop session where we read the first pages of people's novels. Amy and I lucked out and ended up in a group with Brandon Mull and his editor, Chris Schoebinger from Shadow Mountain. They had all of us give our pitches for our novels (and, gee, I wish that I hadn't been first and had some forewarning...) and then they critiqued our pitches and told us how to improve them, which was really, really helpful (and really, really stressful to be put on the spot like that). Anyway, Chris Schoebinger said that he loved my title before reading any of the piece and would have read my submission based on that alone, which was great to hear from an editor. He also told Amy and me when we asked him a question afterwards that we should feel free to submit our manuscripts to him. Too bad neither of them are finished yet!
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I heard that the event was a great success. I know several of the authors who participated and they were hoping people would like what they were doing. I'm glad you went. Now flesh out those books and get them to the editors! One thing I found is that they don't actually have to be perfect to the nth degree for an editor to take an interest in your work. There is such a thing as over-self-editing.
How exciting! That is horribly stressful - being put on the spot. I was breathing big sighs of relief when they told us not to pitch at WIFYR. Then guess what happened.
And I agree with Dene about perfection. I liked Brandon Sanderson's suggestion - three or four revisions, no more than a week on each one, and you're ready to go.
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