You guys, my weekend was so insanely great that I’m at a little bit of a loss how to describe it. Friday night I attended a party thrown by a good friend that I don’t get to see nearly as often as I’d like, and I found that, despite my intense fear of mixing social situations with the fact that I have a mouth and ears, I was still able to enjoy myself and even speak intelligently. Brian and I are domestics; our idea of fun is drinking a few beers with friends on our front porch. But this! This was a party! To which we were invited! Imagine! We had a great time.

Saturday was a lot of fun, as we got to go to the Brick for the first time in years for a baseball game – for free – and afterwards to have dinner with another good friend.

Sunday was OKC Pride, and for the first time in what felt like years, Brian didn’t have to be out of town for the whole weekend. We met up with friends, stood in the sweltering rain and heat for awhile, and then skipped out halfway through the parade to go enjoy drinks on the patio at Phoenix Rising. I ran into an old teacher of mine, which was great fun, and Brian nabbed some great photographs.

The biggest news was that last night I found out I’ve been accepted to the NYC Pitch and Shop, a writers conference in New York that accepts only 60 applicants per session and is for people with finished or near-finished manuscripts. I’ve got a few copies of my novel out to people right now, but my general feeling is that any more tinkering by me would make the story worse, and not better. This conference features one-on-one meetings with editors from some pretty big publishing houses. I got the news and ran outside to tell Brian, only to find in my excitement I had forgotten the English language and instead collapsed into the grass with a big dumb grin on my face, muttering the words “accepted” ”New York” and “happy!” over and over.

This is the cap on what has been an intense, if not amazing, week. This September trip to NYC aside, there are some pretty exciting things on our horizon. We’re spending the holiday in northeastern Oklahoma with friends. The weekend after that we’re heading to northwestern Oklahoma to visit Alabaster Caverns, the Bat Watch, and, hopefully, the Black Kettle National Grassland.

My 30th birthday is the 23rd, and Brian got us tickets to see Robert Plant and Patty Griffin in Dallas that night, and a room at our favorite hotel in the entire world for the weekend.

The spring was rough – really, really rough – and despite the fact that we’ve been in the midst of some brutal heat, the summer has taken on a gentler, smoother cadence. There’s a feeling of hope, of anticipation, once more.