I spent the weekend going to a writing conference on the other side of the Cascade Mountains. I forget how spectacular old Highway 2 is, especially on a sunny May day when the rivers are running full and the wildflowers are shouldering up through whatever snow remains along the road. But I digress.

There was an agent attending that I had particularly wanted to meet in order to pitch my book. At this conference you got ten minutes to do that, which is a huge amount of time as these things go. The goal is not to sell the book. Or to have her agree to read the ms. The goal is to have her agree to look at a synopsis and maybe 10 pages. If she likes that, then you move to round two. By the way, she gets 200 queries per week. Jeesh.

Anyway, that’s a year of my time up against ten minutes of hers. In theory, she would be paid by me but let’s never forget where the balance of power really is here.

Driving across the mountains, I practice a pitch. I’m very good at presentations, have done a million of them. No worries. I figure maybe two minutes to get her to like me, three minutes for the actual pitch, and five minutes for her to heap adoration atop my justifiably proud noggin.

So for the first two minutes, I pack along my hand puppets, tonette and Uncle Eldon’s best joke.

Second, I work out what I will bleat out at her in the next three minutes. I begin:

TITLE is my 90,000 word psychological thriller.

Ah, good opening. Terse, meaty. She knows how long it is, that it’s fiction, and that it’s a category where a new writer could still muscle her way in. I go on:

It is the struggle between a psychologist and the psychopath who is brutalizing her clients. When she discovers him working against her behind the scenes, she uses every ethical means to fight back.

Okay, okay, hey now. We have tension, we have a very bad guy, we have an upright heroine and we have BRUTAL. Eighty miles into my journey, and I am really rolling now. I continue:

In the process, her lover is endangered and her best friend is murdered.

Hold on to your hat! We knew about that brutal stuff so murder is not really news. But lover? That means sex, right? Hot fucking damn! I build toward the big finish:

Finally, she realizes she must use the psychopath’s own cold-blooded methods to save her son.

Holy mother of god! A threatened child? The good girl goes bad??????? That’s character arc all over the place. And wait for it, wait for it:

She triumphs … or does she let the real danger get away?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! Even a surprise ending? I will own this agent. She doesn’t stand a chance. All I have to do is ask for the order.

Pitch day comes. I — good at presentations as those of you who are paying attention may remember — forget almost everything. I babble. I narrowly avoid drooling. I imagine she wonders why I am clutching a puppet.

Finally, in mercy, she asks me enough questions that I manage to regurgitate a few key words. She gets the idea I am thinking about writing this project. Not that I’ve completed the goddamn thing. Seriously. That’s how piss poor a job I did.

Happy-ish ending. Once she finally gets the quivering mound of humanity seated before her to confess that the fucking thing actually exists, she says she would be happy to read the first thirty pages. She is a goddess on earth. I consider going gay for this woman if it would please her (somehow, I doubt that it would).

So the pitch succeeds, no thanks to me. And now I look forward to the next conference to try with yet another agent. There the pitch is only two minutes long.

My heart is already pounding here on the back nine.