It was wonderful…and exhausting. Here are a few highlights from my journal:
Thursday–
I’m completely alone tonight. Exploring the neighborhood, I have decided to stop in for sushi and miso soup.
How many million people share the island of Manhattan with me right now? How many million would be within a 10-minute walk? And yet, this sushi place is small and cozy. If I lived in a place like this, I would have to have routines–places I’d come back to again and again until the wait staff and the hostess knew me by name. I think the only way a person could thrive in a megacity would be to burrow into it, mapping familiar paths and building a warren.
Friday–
9:00 at night, the end of a very long but very good day. Feeling completely drained and wrung out. Need sleep. Need rest. Probably need prayer.
Going into tomorrow’s Pitch Slam without much attachment to outcomes. I am there for the process, and the process will be the crucible that turns me from a writer into an author.
Saturday–
Did the Pitch Slam. Spoke to eight agents. All of them asked for pages, but I feel kind of bruised anyway. Just not used to being questioned that aggressively or probed that deeply.
I’m also feeling some of the same kind of stress I felt the day of my daughter’s wedding. Like, this is fantastic, this is what I’ve always wanted, but the event is just such a BIG F***ING DEAL.
One of the things they had at the event was an opportunity to write your insecurities anonymously and have them calligraphed onto an enormous blackboard under the heading “VULNERABILITY IS SEXY”. It was actually really great reading it. Can you guess which one is mine?
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