"Sideways" is one of my all-time favorite movies. The scene where Paul Giamatti's character goes beserk and sloppily chugs the spit bucket of red wine at the tasting room of a winery is a classic. Do you remember what caused him to go beserk? It was talking to his literary agent. Today, I communicated with a literary agent for the first time. No wine buckets were spilled in the process, but I am going to refer our agent as Miles going forward in homage to my favorite fictional author. Miles represented Mike for his book and was key to getting it published. So when Mike suggested we see if Miles thought we had a good book concept, I instantly agreed. Mike and I spent the next several days polishing up the simple outline I had so we could get Miles something to react to. Mike emailed it to Miles under the subject line "Next book" last Friday. Miles replied surprisingly quickly with a "I'll get back to you next week. Have a good weekend." I wonder how quickly - or even if - Miles would have responded if I had sent the email cold to him. I checked my email inbox about 100 times a day for the next several days. Today, we finally got a reply from Miles - "I like this quite a bit, and think it is definitely worth developing... Let's discuss." I'm not sure what I was hoping or expecting to hear, but this sounded pretty good. I don't think I will be chugging a spit bucket of red wine ... at least not today.