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Kismet: [1840–50]
Fate or Destiny
Persian, Arabic.

Pitchcraft [2009]
The art of your pitch

Kismet would sum up my weekend. Joe and I celebrated 24 years together last Sunday. We decided to get the party started in San Francisco where Joe was on business. I happened to look up what writing events were going on and signed up for The Donald Maass Breakout Novel Workshop offered as a Pre-Conference event at the sold-out San Francisco Writer's Conference. Everything was perfect.

But then, Snowmagedoon hit and postponed all flights out of New York and the workshop until Monday.

Went to a couple other workshops on Thursday. Loved them. Pitchcraft was taught by Katharine Sands an agent at The Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency. One of her unique ways of seeing a writer's career was as an arc: get ready, get read, get readers. She maintains that a pitch is a sparkle of a book and is more about what you'd tell a friend about the latest greatest movie you saw than about distilling the nuts & bolts of an entire novel in 100 words. The morning session was taught by Julie Salisbury and focused on the readers of our book. Fabulous. Taught me to think about my title in new ways and gave me the tools I need to write a more compelling [let's HOPE so] synopsis. A big thank you to the snow gods for seeing to it that I got exactly the information I need to help me when I'm ready to seek representation this Spring/Summer.

I hit the road back up to San Francisco on Monday for the Breakout Novel Workshop and got so many new insights into my story. Glad I made the extra trip, even though that alarm at 4AM was, um, harsh. Wonderful to go in depth and see what might be more unexpected for my story and look to add a few more layers. I highly recommend this workshop if you can ever go. The day was one of the best I've spent learning how to deepen my story and I left with concrete scenes that I can use and expand upon.

I just checked out this video and loved it, thought you might too:

JK at Harvard: The Fringe Benefits of Failure

San Francisco places you CAN'T miss:

The Tadich Grill
The oldest restaurant in San Francisco

Caffe Trieste
The North Beach location is where Francis Ford Coppola wrote THE GODFATHER

The Top of The Mark

A BIG shout out to my BRO for his 50th! Can't wait 'til we all celebrate together:)