Friday, friends. I have to get my act together by Friday.
So, in preparation to “get my act together,” I printed out and started reviewing the workshop listings for all three days of the conference. This included heavy debate over which color highlighter I wanted to use to highlight my picks, the time, and the conference room it would be held in.
And then a few days later I got an email saying several workshops had changed. But whatever. That’s neither here nor there.
As I was reviewing the descriptions of the workshop, I stumbled across the description for the one minute pitch panel. You know, the one I wrote my one page synopsis for. The one where, if an agent or editor in the panel likes your one minute pitch, they’ll ask for your synopsis on the spot.
However.
It’s not the synopsis they’re going to ask for. It’s your query letter. And the first ten pages of your manuscript.
Well, son of a gun.
Only I didn’t say gun.
It was kind of like that moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie drops the hub cap and all the lug nuts. “Oh fuuuuuuuuudge….”
Honestly.
So, crisis averted. Luckily, I am a colossally huge fan of Nathan Bransford and was in process of writing a one paragraph pitch and a two paragraph pitch. As luck would have it, the writing gods were smiling down on me (for once) and I was planning on using my two paragraph pitch in an eventual query letter. A query letter that’s going to be happening a lot faster. And when I say a lot faster, what I mean is: tonight.
I realize that the above is a bizarre paragraph. If you want to learn for about Nathan’s process for the one sentence/one paragraph/two paragraph pitch, click here.
Meanwhile, Happy Mother’s Day! I am, as often mentioned, a mother. And in retaliation of that, I celebrated mother’s day by eating like a drunken sailor! We ordered my absolute favorite pizza–chicken, bacon, ranch–and my mother and I ate an entire pizza between the two of us. Okay, it was a small pizza. But it was crazy awesome. Fun fact: for my 30th birthday, my mother, The Toddler, and I polished off an entire chicken, bacon, ranch pizza on our own. Granted, it was over the course of like, two days. But I digress.
This is the cake I made to honor myself and my mother on mother’s day.
It is a chocolate flan cake. It is pretty much as amazing as it looks: a layer of caramel ice cream topping, a ginormous flan layer, and a layer of dense chocolate cake.
This cake also caused me to almost have a minor mental breakdown last night. Here’s why:
1. The buttermilk I bought earlier in the day glopped out of the container like drywall spackle and I wasn’t entirely sure that meant it was okay,
2. The flan batter (?) was too colossal to fit in my blender, therefore, I had to blend part of it in the blender, dump all of it in the stand mixer, and mix it prior to adding it to the tube pan,
3. The chocolate batter didn’t spread right and floated to the top as soon as I dumped the fan batter in,
and last, but certainly not least:
4. I’d never made sour milk before, never made flan before, and never cooked a cake in a water bath before. It had to bake for over an hour, cool for two hours, and then chill in the fridge or at least eight hours.
After that much dedication, I was pretty committed to the cake. Nevertheless, my backup plan was to go to the farmer’s market and buy pie and ice cream. Because you can never go wrote with pie and ice cream.
Happily, it didn’t come to that and it was fabulous. I ate more than I want to admit.
So, hey, happy Mother’s Day to all my fellow momma’s out there! Every day should be Mother’s Day, but today we can throw nutritional constraint to the wind and partake in deliciousness and fun. And if you’re me, followed by panic and writing a query letter.
Bring on the conference! If I can conquer a chocolate flan cake and destroy an entire pizza, I can survive a one minute pitch. Especially now that I’m going into it actually knowing what’s going on and actually being prepared. Well. Maybe prepared. That still actually remains to be seen.
