Day two of the Writers’ League of Texas Agents Conference dawned early and got underway in earnest with a warm welcome from the WLT Executive Director Cyndi Hughes, and then the first panel session of the day, the Taco Tweetup Q&A.

I must say at this point that the breakfast tacos were excellent, and made me regret not having much of an appetite for cooked food at 8:30am in the morning. Ah well.

The Tweetup portion of the Taco Tweetup involved attendees tweeting their questions tagged with the #WLTcon hash tag, and having a selection of them read out to be answered by an illustrious panel of agents. While  much of the Q&A was very interesting, I did feel that they spent a little too much time discussing social networking–extolling the virtues of Facebook and Twitter as the means to forming relationships within the publishing industry and publicizing your own work. I have absolutely no doubt as to the importance of these things, and perhaps it’s because my background is in the computer industry, but I just felt that they devoted more than its fair share of the session to the nuts and bolts of social networking.

A bevy of writers descended upon to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the center of Austin this past weekend to attend the 2011 Writers’ League of Texas Agents Conference, and I was one of them.

Only just, mind. A good friend and fellow writer had been badgering me to go for months, pushing me to do something about the fantasy novel of mine that has been languishing in a Heisenbergesque “almost done” state for longer than I care to admit. I managed to studiously ignore his entreaties until the weekend before the conference, when the wily folks at the Writers’ League ensnared me by appealing to the inner Yorkshireman in me (see Wikipedia for the reason why Yorkshire Pudding was invented), by offering up a 20% discount.

Thus it was I found myself walking into the Hyatt Regency Hotel a little before 4pm on Friday afternoon, bringing with me a memorized two sentence pitch and a 250 word written synopsis for my first novel.