Whew. That was fun!
A bunch of things all going on all at once today.

So, I'll start first with the interview with At Valpo this afternoon. I had so much fun. We talked about writing and Valpo, and it was a nice opportunity to reconnect with Valpo life. After talking to my dad earlier today for advice (Thanks, Dad!), I tried to think about what I would have like to have known or heard about if I were someone considering writing as a major and Valpo as a school. Prospective students are the target audience for the newsletter, I believe. (Side note...Ed, do you remember..."I've lost my prospective!" : ) I haven't thought about that in years!)

So based on my dad's advice, I thought of a few things that I wished I'd known earlier or things that had helped me.
And that basically amounted to this...
-If being a writer is your dream, you should go for it. Don't let fear stop you. To quote George McFly (also, ironically, a writer, though a fictional one) from Back to the Future, "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything."
-Rejection is part of the process. Not everyone will like what you've done, but someone will. Learn from rejection, make your stuff better because of it.
-Finances play a big role in being a writer. If you want to write full-time, don't spend all that salary that you earn in your first day job or you'll get used to spending it and it will be hard to stop. Which means it will be scary to think of relying on your writing to come up with that same amount of money. And probably difficult to do, especially in the beginning.

I also got a chance to talk about the professors and classes that influenced me. Which was great, because I'm grateful for all they taught me. That, plus a book-friendly home environment helped get me to this point in my life.

So, right now, I hope that my answers made sense and that maybe someone will find them helpful. I also hope that what I said doesn't offend anyone! The article will hopefully be in the April issue of At Valpo, but I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again to Lisa from Valpo for the opportunity and for Dr. Uehling for thinking of me!

Next...
Contest winners!
Wow, I'm impressed by all the people who know their keyboard symbols. The correct name for this symbol & is ampersand.

So, here, in the order in which I received their answers, are the winners:
First Prize, Ten imaginary dollars: Ed B.
Second Prize, Five imaginary dollars: Stacy G.
Third Prize, Two imaginary dollars and fifty imaginary cents: Lynne B.
Fourth Prize, One imaginary dollar and tweny-five imaginary cents: Mike B.

All imaginary prizes will be delivered by imaginary courier within the next three to five business days.

If more of you have entered, I will check my email when I get home and post your names on Monday. I forgot to mention yesterday that I don't have access to my home email account while I'm here at work. Thanks to everyone who participated. I can't wait to do some real contests with real prizes!! I intend to have some contests here that will net you some cool things, like t-shirts, bookmarks, etc, once my book is released.

And finally...in honor of yesterday's contest, how about some really random information about that @ symbol and the ampersand &? My thanks to Ed for finding all of this on the web.

First, did you know that the @ symbol doesn't have universal name? It's called different things in different countries. Here are a few examples:
-apenstaartje, which is Dutch for "monkey's tail."
-kukac, which is Hungarian for "worm."
-dalphaengi, which is Korean for "snail."

This history of this symbol is believed to start with the monks who were charged with creating books by writing the copy out by hand. No printing presses back then, folks. So, they made certain common words shorter to save pen strokes. @ is believed to be one of those.

All this information is courtesy of coolquiz.com. Here is the direct link to the question on the @ symbol.

Now, the ampersand symbol has an equally fascinating history. A century or so ago, school children were taught the alphabet, and & was considered a letter in that alphabet. It meant "and" just like it does now. However, these poor children, in reciting the alphabet were forced to single out the letters that could be words on their own. A and I, for example, are words as well letters. So the kids would have to say, per se, A, and per se, I. And when they came to the end of the alphabet, where & was located, they would have to say "and per se &," which was read as "and." So there you go. And per se and becomes ampersand.

This information comes from an article on ingenial.com by Micah Goulart. There are a few more interesting details like how they came up with the symbol &. Here's the link to check it out...& story.

All right, I'm tired now. And I have to go home and finish cleaning. We're having an open house this weekend in our desperate effort to actually sell our current house before the new one is finished. Plus, I want to finish going through the line edits for The Silver Spoon by Monday. I'm really, really happy with the edits that have been made. But I want to go through them thoroughly once more. It's important to me that I understand the reasons behind the changes, so I can learn from them. And so I can raise any questions that I might have. Which is another thing that's great about my publisher--very open communication! It's done a lot to help me feel more relaxed about this whole process, which I appreciate.

My thanks to everyone who submitted for yesterday's contest, to my dad for his advice, and for everyone who wished me luck on today's interview. Good karma flowing right back at you guys!

Have a good weekend everyone!
Talk to you on Monday.