It wasn’t toting home from UT an enormous stack of books about antebellum Charleston and the B&O railroad as research for my Impostors project.

It wasn’t reading a terrific nonfiction proposal from a new friend and then putting her in touch with a children’s literature professional who was just as enthusiastic as I was.

It wasn’t picking up Keep Your Eye on the Kid as a baby gift for a film-historian mom’s firstborn (See? I’m doing better!) and then visiting with a kidlit friend while I was in the neighborhood.

It wasn’t even finding out about another friend’s wonderfully ambitious (and long overdue) historical and literary project.

And it wasn’t finishing my first reads of the manuscripts I’m critiquing for this month’s conference, or successfully shaving 12 pages of my own down to 10 for submission to a critique group, or making plans for a get-to-know-you lunch this week with a couple of local literary folks.

Nope, it was an hour spent at my kitchen table with a pair of preteen writers. They came equipped with loads of enthusiasm and terrific questions about writing and publishing, and I got to share the evolution of my relationship with one publishing house from rejection letters — all of which I saved and was able to show them — to acceptance of one of my manuscripts.

And the best part of the best part was when one of them said, “Little, Brown! Almost everything I read is from Little, Brown!”