I was teaching a student the other day, and we’d been discussing making out. And no, not between us. I’d be in jail right now. He’s never had a girlfriend and is dating a cute girl now. He hasn’t made a move and I’ve been egging him to make out with this girl.

He’s been hesitating for about three months. I asked him if he wanted to. He answered an emphatic yes. What boy wouldn’t. I asked why he hadn’t done it. He’s scared cuz it’s his first time. Afraid of what the girl would think. The fact is it’d be her first time, too. I pushed him to do it.

And for the women, when you like a guy, and he hasn’t done anything, wouldn’t you be pissed?

I’d discussed this with a friend of mine and she threatened to call child services. She was joking but thought my pushing was totally incorrect.

My philosophy is push the edge, the envelope, or else how do you know where your true limit is?

What do you guys think?

The San Francisco Writer’s Conference was my first writer’s conference. I didn’t know how things worked, but the conference was held over three days full of lectures. The crappy thing about it was several lectures were going on within each hour session. So I had to make a decision on which lecture to attend. Because this was my first conference, I really wanted to focus on the business aspect of publishing.

Over the next week or so, I’m going to post a lecture for you to listen everyday. So come back and check on what I’ve uploaded. Each one is about 45 minutes long, giving the attendees enough time to go to the next lecture.

The first one I’m going to upload is a lecture by best selling suspense romance novelist Brenda Novak. Her trilogy, The Last Stand: Trust Me, Stop Me, Watch Me, has become New York Time Bestsellers. She talks about strategies she’s used to make her more visible and credible before her first book was published.

Please feel free to download these. I apologize for the quality of the audio, but there was a lot of ambient noise. The format of the file is .caf, but you should be able to play them using Windows Media Player or Quicktime. Tell me what you think, and come back as I will upload others.

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What you can expect in future audio uploads from the conference:

Key Note speeches from best selling authors

Body Language

How to write plot summaries

Self-publishing

Branding tactics

Q&A with Agent panels for both fiction and non-fiction

Lecture from a top agent, Donal Maass