Update- 2012

Did it!  Emailed back to the agent to whom I'd sent my revisions in November, asking whether she'd received them and whether she might be getting back to me within the next few weeks, since I plan to attend the SCBWI winter conference at the end of January and, if she's not interested in the book,  I would like to be able to shop it around.  Heard back from her a few hours later.  Yes, she did receive my revisions, but it's been a very busy reading time for her and she hasn't gotten to them yet.  But, by all means, go ahead and shop the book around at the conference - it will be good practice for me, and agents are used to getting multiple submissions.  But if by chance I do get an offer from someone else before I hear from her, she wants the right of first acceptance; that's "customary."   Hmmm.  It's not a kick in the teeth, I guess, but it's a long way from "besotted!"  Perhaps my friends' insistence on buying me a celebratory drink that night at the conference was a bit premature, wot?  I'm feeling reasonably philosophical about this - I guess her month and a half of silence might have meant that reading my revisions had left her wordless with rapture, but it did seem a little unlikely.   So... moving along.  Researching Book #4.  Trying to write a worthy pitch for Novel #3 to present to unsuspecting strangers at the conference.  My husband informed me today of something known as an "elevator pitch," which evidently is exactly what it sounds like: a machine-gun-like barrage of facts about one's book, designed to be inflicted on the hapless industry professional who had the misfortune to get on an elevator with you.  Excuse me, but isn't exhibiting that type of behavior the recipe for becoming a pariah, rather than a published author?   If I were the industry professional in question, I suspect that either I, or the one delivering the pitch, would end up at the bottom of the elevator shaft.  No, but I do have to prepare a normal, polite, dignified pitch, just in case someone is actually willing to hear it.  Like, through the door of a bathroom stall.....