Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Jetlagged!

Well I’m back from San Francisco. At least in body. My brain has yet to make it over the border. Jetlag has hit me big time today. I’m at work and barely able to function.

As for conference, I had a blast despite only averaging about 3 hours of sleep a night until Friday. Nothing like going to bed on San Fran time and waking up Halifax time. Who knew four hours could make such a huge difference. I spent a lot of the conference feeling like I’d been, as my friend says, ‘rode hard and put away wet’. Despite that, the conference was a huge success for me, more so than I had been expecting.

For starters, I was thrilled to get Brimstone out the door to Berkley before I left. I had a slight heart attack on Saturday morning though. I switched it over to Courier and double spaced it (I was working in single space TNR during revisions) and my 187 pages increased to 478. ACK!! So from 7 am to 2 pm I worked like a mad woman going through larger scenes and cutting them down, then I cut one scene out completely. I managed to cut 38 pages, then on the advice of some of my chapter-mates, I switched back to TNR 13 and came in at 373 pages. Whew!

At the conference, I had requests for two full manuscripts: The Outlaw Bride and Brimstone (as well as the blurbs for the next 3 books in the series), a partial for Brimstone by the agent I met with, and another partial for Brimstone by a different editor thanks to a mention from a friend about the series to that editor.

I also got to crash the Harlequin party with Julianne MacLean (who has a new book out, The Mistress Diaries, check it out!) and had an awesome time dancing and snapping pictures. I got to run into some blogging buddies: Michelle Willingham, Rene Miller & Amy Ruttan, plus Christine D’Abo who moved to Toronto, and my former critique partners Christine Wells and Jennifer Haymore.

I'll give a better run down of the conference once my brain starts function again and post some pictures through the week, but if anyone wants a quick preview of pixs zip over to my Facebook page and have a look.

For now, I’m going to go and tap a vein and hook up a java IV…

14 comments:

Julia Phillips Smith said...

Your pictures are fantastic, Kelly - thanks for letting me 'tag' along with you. Glad you got such a great response to your pitches - WOO!

Toni Anderson said...

Great great news :)

Amy Ruttan said...

Awesome job on the requests Kelly.

It was great to meet you as well.

I need lots o' caffeine. I can't function today at all.

Anonymous said...

Congrats on the requests for fulls! :)

MJFredrick said...

Awesome news on getting your book sent and on the requests!!!! Glad you had a good time!

Anonymous said...

It was great to see you, Kelly! :) Congrats on all the requests!

Unknown said...

Congrats on the full requests. Here's hoping you'll have publishers vying to buy you!

You'll have to tell us what nuggets of wisdom you came away with.

Lexi said...

You got to crash the Harlequin party! I'm so jealous! It sounds like you had an awesome time and great news on the requests! Good luck getting over the jet-lag.

Melissa Amateis said...

Congrats on the requests! Glad you got to go to conference. :)

Unknown said...

Loved the pictures Kelly. Sounds like a very productive conference.

Tess said...

Looking forward to hearing more about the conference :) And congrats on getting that ms out the door!!!

Annette Gallant said...

WTG on all the requests, Kelly! Glad you enjoyed your trip to SF. :-)

Unknown said...

It was so fantastic to get to see you again!! I wish we'd been able to spend more time together, but my head was spinning the whole time I was here.

Congratulations on the requests! Keep us posted. :)

Dixie Belle said...

Sounds like you had fun at the conference! Congrats and try to post when you can. I've fallen behind too.