Thursday, September 2, 2010

Karma

At my RWA chapter's latest meeting, we finally performed the critique session won at the Spring Fling silent auction. There was a bit of shuffling to schedule our winner because the original date offered didn't work for her. A scheduling conflict, don't you know. We'd offered a date prior to the RWA national meeting with the intention of giving the winner the benefit of getting their 25 pages in front of our group so they could gather some helpful feedback beforehand. Just in case there was last minute polishing needed before any pitch sessions in Orlando. But it didn't work out like that.

Even though life gets in the way sometimes, providence has a way of helping out in the aftermath. If our winner had been able to meet our pre-nationals meeting time slot, chances are she would have read her pages to our group, a VERY sound and strong group with a plethora of published authors, soon-to-be published authors and talented unpublished authors, but maybe to a depleted group since most of our members went to Orlando and Disney World, early. They were gawking at Space Mountain and swilling booze in the bar with their friends instead of worrying about anyone's pages but their own.

As fate would have it, our winner read this past Monday night. Luck was on her side because RITA for Young Adult winner and New York Times Bestselling author, Simone Elkeles was in attendance. The critique winner writes YA and couldn't contain her excitement when she heard Simone's voice on speakerphone. She also benefited from hearing the opinions of other published authors like Marilyn Brant, Blythe Gifford, Morgan Mandel, Debra St. John, Joelle Charbonneau, Beverly Long and Maureen Lang. The rest of our Chicago North group offers equally relevant critique and everyone offered their ideas on making her manuscript shine.

Lucky indeed.

Have any of you ever had a rescheduled event work out better than you expected? Did you consider it karma?


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