I went to a seminar tonight given by a literary agent/manager about how to get published and produced. Earlier in the evening, I was at the adjoining bar/restaurant to the hotel called "Le Scene" and sat at the bar drinking wine and having dinner. I felt very driven sitting there at the bar eating and working on my novel. My dinner was good but expensive, and cost about $40 with wine and tip and I just had one entree and no salad or dessert. It was fun and a treat, and it did feel fun to sit and write. I was able to start work on chapter 11, and wrote two pages. I might have to sit at the bar of an expensive restaurant once a month and write only because it's a wild experience.

There was a party at the back of the restaurant, and there was a guy at the table wearing red cordurouy pants, a white shirt and leather jacket. Come to find the guy in the red cords was the literary agent guy from New York. I only knew it was him because another guy came in and sat with the party, whom I recognized as the person I took a screenwriting seminar from last year. The screenwriting guy was the one who said in the seminar if you're going to write a screenplay, you need to know about film history. And you know he was so right! I only took the two film history classes because of him, and I think the classes really added to my understanding of how a screenplay needs to be written.

The literary agent guy confirmed a lot of what I've thought about the book publishing business was like. For a book, he said you need a completed novel and it has to be a good product. Publishing is a business like anything else, and agents as well as publishers are looking towards the bottom line and need to know if your book is going to add to it. Alot of agents are also looking at books with movie potential or series potential, and want writers who want to write more than one book.

Literary agent guy said his company gets 200-500 submissions a week. That's a ton. They look at everything, but they're very picky and they only take on people not projects, meaning they want a writer who writes alot and can produce books. I liked this guy alot, and I got an intuition that this guy is going to be my agent someday. I hope it comes true. I have no idea how or why this would happen, but I like that I got the feeling. It means I'm thinking ahead for my writing.

But I'm really getting that I'm going to have to work a ton harder on my writing. I feel like my screenplay is 75% there, and my Texas novel is 50% there, and the only way my writing is going to improve is if I do more of it. No, more like heaps and heaps of it. Literary agent guy said he has a client who's written more than 100 short stories and can turn out a novel in 6 to 8 months. Now that's discipline.

I want that kind of discipline and enthusiasm for my work, and I think I'm getting there. Trying to write every day this month has been hard, but I think it's like anything else. You get used to it and the more you do it, the easier it gets. I definitely have to get a laptop. I love writing by hand, but writing by computer is just so much faster. I'm determined to make 2005 a breakthrough year for my writing, but I have a feeling that like everything else in my life, I'll do it backwards and it will still work. I'm not sure why, but it's just a feeling I get.