Odds and Ends

Time Spent: 2 hours.

I took time today to get some things done other than research (which I did) and writing (which I didn't, I'm a slacker). I mentioned not long ago that one of my site visits will be to at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

So today, I was finally able to get ahold of Joanna (busy woman!) and find out what dates worked for her for us to try and get to . Dates in mind, I emailed Richard Newman and voila! We are setting out for STL on March 23. I'm pretty excited about this visit. River Styx is an independent journal instead of one affiliated with a college, so it will be nice to get that different "flavor." College is great, don't get me wrong, but it will be wonderful to spend some time away from a college influence, ha.

Other fun things Joanna and I talked about: I know I mentioned the whole Writer-in-Residence thing, but apparently the English Department liked it so well that it's an Official Thing: I'm the first University of Illinois as Springfield Writer-in-Residence for the English Department. That's pretty darn amazing. The department is even going to help with the public reading I'm doing (later in the semester) because they think this is such a good thing. I'm so excited. So that moves us into the public reading. No date set yet, but Joanna told me to look at dates and gave me a list of places on campus that I could do it. I'll be looking at that later in the week.

Finally, more research, checking on some details on the places I'm submitting the children's stories to. And I set up a gmail account because I need an email account that I'll be able to access from the web and is reliable (my ameritech account is getting less and less so, yippee.)