Nano story (stop me if you've heard this one):

A memoirist goes to an agents'/editors' conference in Austin to pitch her memoir about her first year in France as a poor person, but bombs. She has a few drinks (seriously, though, like only two). On the way back up to her hotel room, she and her writers' group buddies see an agent waiting for an elevator (she recognized him by the yellow name tag he's wearing). She yells, "Agent! Get him!" He smiles and makes a cross with his index fingers. "Get thee behind me! I only work with children's lit!" She rebuts. "Oh yeah? Well, I write YA (young adult)!"

He puts the cross down. "Really?"

And as both of their groups of colleagues/friends take the elevators to their respective rooms, the agent sits down on a bench, pats the spot beside him and says, "Sit down and tell me about it."

The memoirist, never meaning--EVER--to pitch her silly November hobby fiction... does so anyway.

"I want to see it. All of it. The novel, the memoir. Send it to me... but send the first one first."

The memoirist is dumbfounded and spends the rest of the conference stalking the Agent of Her Dreams.

But, when she gets home, the glitter wears off of the encounter. She's in the process of moving to North Carolina. And there's the pregnancy (hence the reason she only had two glasses--hey, don't judge, the kid is half French and is no stranger to wine). And library school. The poor novel to be sits untouched for nearly a year.

Thank goodness all good things come to an end. Like pregnancy. And library school. When things settled down, she revised the book, sent it to her writers' group friends in TX, and revised it again. Then, finally, with trembling fingers, she sent it to the Agent of Her Dreams, happy to be able to put "REQUESTED MATERIALS" on the envelope.

Then, she moved to France. And her mail did not follow her. Luckily, she had a fabulous neighbor who sent her a big package of all her mail, among which was her NC State Library Certification (useless in France, by the way *wink*) and an envelope from the AHD with her own handwriting on it. She prepared herself for rejection.

"Dear You. We'd like to see the full manuscript right away."

The memoirist had to dig her heart out of her stomach and prop it up on her desk. But she did as she was asked. She sent it. And she lived happily ever after....

Did she? Well, I guess we'll see.....
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"It's a liger." ~Napoleon Dynamite