I'm playing a bit of catch-up here on journal entries. Kat and I, after totally busting our asses to get a proposal package together consisting of first three chapters, synopsis, world overview, and pitch, headed down to New Orleans for the meet-n-greet cocktail party at the Hotel Monteleone. We went and picked up our preregistration packets and found out when our editor meeting was and with whom, then went to where the cocktail party was. Dozens upon dozens of eager writers milling about, all trying to sniff out the agents and editors. Kat and I got some food and drink and staked out a table in the center of the milling, and then got enormously lucky when we saw "our" editor milling, and very obviously looking for a table. We oh-so-kindly invited her to sit with us, and we were then able to chat her up for a good twenty minutes. We restrained ourselves from going into full "pitch" mode, but we were able to give her an idea of what we were working on, and sound her out about her tastes in literature etc. She was pretty open about the fact that she doesn't handle science fiction and fantasy, but she also didn't make a face when she mentioned it. :)

So, next day Kat and I went back to the conference. We attended a few panels--and overall I'd say about half of them had good information, which I figure is not a bad ratio at all. We then took about an hour to go over our pitch (since we knew we'd have a whole 15 minutes with the editor) and finally headed up to the big room where all the editors were having their meetings. It was extremely well organized, and we were ushered in exactly when our alloted time began. We shook hands with the editor, then handed her our package and said, "Are you ready to hear our pitch?" She kinda blinked, and then smiled and said, "Sure!" I'm not sure she was really expecting that, since I think most other people were just getting critiques of the partials that they'd submitted. I launched into our two-minute pitch, and she asked a few questions, and then we went into her evaluation of our partial. She had some really nice things to say about it, and the negatives she had had more to do with the fact that it was a partial (and thus there wasn't a lot of room for some character descriptions, etc.) The really cool thing she said was that she wasn't a big fan of fantasy, but that the story and writing still engaged her.

At this point Kat and I were nicely pleased with how it had gone, and had earlier figured that this whole thing would be a good practice for some later time when we actually had a sf/f editor to pitch to. But then this editor surprised us by saying that she'd like to take our proposal over to A Big SF Publisher in the same building that she worked in. Wow, cool! Then she whipped out business cards without us even asking for them. About this time Kat looked at her and said, "What about the writing? Was the writing okay?" I mean, we really couldn't believe that it had gone quite this well. To which the editor replied, "The writing was great!"

Needless to say, we were kinda walking on air the rest of the conference. Even if this goes nowhere, it was still really wonderful validation. (And I hate to say it, but we felt even better after hearing other attendees moaning about the negative feedback they'd received. We knew she wasn't just blowing smoke up our asses!)

Now we just have to finish writing the damn thing. Minor detail.