The mystery of the missing dial tone is solved. There is a large piece of artwork that hangs over our couch. It is a 3-D affair with cave-style painting of horses and it has some arrowheads in little compartments. Dear little Friendly decided it must be a mysterious lair to be explored, and he tried to climb into it. The thing came crashing down and the kitten went racing, with flue-brush tail, into the other room. It occurred to me, of course, only after two separate half-hours in an electronic call routing maze and camping out on hold, that the phone jack is in the vicinity of the fallen picture. I climbed over the couch and there was the crushed DSL filter, still plugged in, keeping the line open. Problem solved.
The BV conference was very good, as usual. Kudos to Liz Mertz, the BV SCBWI  RA, for doing an excellent job. I was very pleased with my critique. Cynthia said she thought my manuscript was probably one draft away from publishability, and that I needed to dig down to pull it up a level. She recommended some agents she thought would be interested in it. She also said that she felt I had real talent, so I was over the moon about that. We talked about other writing things, like branding (she has three different publishers and writes very different things for each), and what happens if we move to Norway. Another thing she said is that there is a dearth of good MG out there – she was trying to think of her top 10 MG books for 2008 and she couldn’t think of more than 8.
Conventions of any sort always include a variety of interesting characters. There was one lady there who was convinced that she knew me, and I was equally convinced that she did not. Not surprisingly, SCBWI has a huge contingent of both active and retired school teachers and librarians. People under 30 at these types of events are uncommon. And yet, next to me, sat a young man who appeared to be a college student. He didn’t take notes and fidgeted through the whole thing. Which made me wonder why he was there. Lose a bet? Class project? Real interest/photographic memory? Had to drive his mom? There’s a writing exercise right there.