2nd & Church

Being an Intern 0.2

Time Management 

 

Something that has come to my attention in both of my internships (that's not necessarily an issue) is time management. Oh, yes. The English major's worst nightmare—or at least mine.  I've been a college student for seven semesters now, and each time I've tried to predict how I would manage my time between classes, assignments, work, and free time. I've always been wrong (very, very wrong), but that didn't stop me from trying again. It's my first semester as a senior and it's been my busiest semester at WKU by a long shot. I have numerous ways that I've tried to keep track of my time: two agendas, a to-do list, a spread sheet on excel, a notebook with details on assignments, an eight-pocket folder, and more. Before I knew it I was needing a check list for my check lists. Yeah, call me me crazy.

 

So I decided to throw them away. Don't ask me why, but I did.

 

I have one thing to keep track of it all. I use my computer (which never leaves my side—must be a writer thing?), and I separate my information based on classes in a hierarchy of what needs to be done first. I ask myself, "What it the most important thing to be done?" I also go week-by-week. I find that it's the easiest way to avoid being overwhelmed. I also have a monthly calendar that I use as an appointment book—to keep track of all important meetings and assignments.

 

Still think I'm crazy? Well, it's probably true.

 

Im the kind of person that has to have step-by-step rules, lists, and schedules. As an aspiring writer and editor it's important for me to keep training myself to stick to the habit of deadlines. Now, I still have a lot of training to do but I'm getting there. Slowly. I'm a Taurus, so at my nature I'm stubborn and a slacker. Combine the two and you learn the trick to my trade.

 

When it comes to managing things for the internship (I wish it was my job, already), it's fairly easy. I plan what I intend to do for the following week, and then I work on it. Press kits are prioritized first and foremost, and then the rest follows: blog posts, ezines, social media work, etc. I generally work on the internship during my free time (when I'm not in class, doing homework, or working) and I have to say—without a doubt—that it's my favorite part of each day. It's relaxing, and I'm doing what I enjoy most (next to writing and reading, of course).

 

Don't let all of this steer you away from completing an internship. It's hard to find the perfect opportunity to gain experience while being a full-time student. Internships are going to be the best bet, especially if they also allow you to gain course credit. Even if it doesn't exactly cover everything you want to do in your career still try to absorb all the knowledge that you can.

It's worth every drop.

 

Being an Intern 0.1

An introduction from the new intern.

Greetings Everyone!

My name is Brittany Eldridge, and I am the editorial assistant intern here at 2nd & Church for the fall semester. I am currently a senior at Western Kentucky University working for my B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing.

Exciting Stuff.

I wanted to create this blog post to talk about what it’s like to be an intern! This is my second internship, and so far it has been such a rewarding experience. I’m finally getting into editing while still writing, of course, and I’m getting to do hands on work. I’m organizing press kits about authors and his or her new books, I’m updating and adding content to the website, working with social media to blast the new information, communicating with the editor, Roy, and the wonderfully nice people at JKS Communications. And I was even able to write a book review!

I know it might seem like a lot, but I only wish it was my full time job!

This has further confirmed in my mind that this is the field I want to be in, and I think that your internship should do just that. You should be having fun and communicating with your supervisor, whomever that might be, and you should be reassured of career path you have chosen to take.

Being an intern for 2nd & Church will open a lot of doors for me, and it’s giving me the experience that employers love. I think the most important thing so far is that I’m having fun with what I’m doing. I’m learning and growing as an aspiring editor and writer, and I’ve been welcomed into a whole new world of information.

It’s incredible.

I never knew there was so much information about the editing and publishing industry. (There’s just some information that you can’t learn in a classroom.) I hope to create more blog posts in the future, talking about my internship experience—next time having a little more detail and specifics, and I’ll mention a few challenges that I’ve faced.

Until next time,

 Brittany. 

 

 

A Visit with The Waltons….sort of….

I’m thrilled that our Southern Food issue—out this fall—will have a connection to The Waltons, that decades-old television program based upon the words of writer Earl Hamner, Jr.

I mentioned this fact the other day, sort of bragging, to a fellow writer at my corporate day job, and she looked at me with a blank expression and said, “Roy, I have no idea what you’re talking about; I’m only 25.” She had never heard of the show, and I was a bit stunned.  Perhaps I was shocked because I realized I would be twice her age this summer: maybe.

In my youth, I watched many of those episodes when they first aired. I remembered them over the years, but they had slipped into the vault of memory. I was allowed to revisit them a couple years ago, thanks to my son Seth.

I walked through the living room one afternoon, caught him watching John-Boy and the rest of the Walton kids having supper around that long wooden table, and asked him what he was looking at: “Some show about a family,” he replied. I sat down beside him and watched the rest of it—explaining what he was watching and sharing with him how I used to watch it as a little boy, while growing up in Kentucky. He pushed some crazy combination of buttons on the DVRs remote and told me that we could watch some more together sometime—after they recorded—if I wanted.

If I wanted?

Hanging with my son and watching The Waltons?  That’s a win-win for a semi-old guy like me!

So, on-and-off throughout that year (whenever we needed some “Dad and Seth” time), we’d hang out and watch The Waltons.  Alone.  Always alone.  No girls allowed.  (Sorry girls!)  Of course, he’d get a season of Waltons for his birthday and a collection of their movies from Santa at Christmastime. 

Fast-forwarding to the summer of 2014 placed me in a cafe in Southern Kentucky to meet up with Molly McCaffrey (our literary film columnist) and her husband, the novelist David Bell. I was headed to Louisville to launch our Spalding MFA Homecoming issue, and I wanted to deliver some back issues to Molly and visit with her and David.  She said that they were meeting with a friend, and if I wanted to join them, I could stop by for some Earl Grey. 

Sitting at a table in a café in what once was the Confederate capital of Kentucky, I had no idea that I should have brought Seth with me to the gathering.  In walked Molly and David. Among those with them was Erin Walton—Yes, THAT Erin Walton. Okay, fine.  Her civilian name is Mary McDonough.

Since her television days, she’s gone on to teach acting classes, she’s a life coach, and she delivers keynotes and speeches.  Oh….and as I learned from the conversation over tea, she’s a published author.  A few years ago, she published a non-fiction account of what it was like growing up on television, Lessons from the Mountain: What I Learned From Erin Walton.  And this month, she’s published a novel, One Year.

The visit was short, but the experience was well worth pulling off the interstate.  And I knew immediately that as soon as her novel was released, we’d run a review of it. Actually, we’ve been lucky. Mary’s publishing outfit has been kind to us.  Karen Auerbach is the Director of Publicity at Kensington Publishing Corp. in New York City, and she’s arranged for us to do an interview with Erin…I mean Mary.  We’ll publish that along with the book review.  And Karen sent us a press release and bio info, all of which will go live on our site over the weekend. And we’re thrilled to be able to say that we’ve been allowed to include a link to the first chapter of Mary’s new novel.  What a treat! 

Anyway, I was thinking about all this last night.  I did a little channel surfing before bed, and I stumbled upon the Pearl Harbor episode of The Waltons.  Interesting for so many important reasons. One of the main points that remained with me was how that show always treated the elderly with respect. I never had the impression that any of the older actors were secondary characters. Even after Ellen Hansen Corby (Grandma Esther Walton) had a near-fatal stroke in 1976, she returned.  I think she was out for a season, but she returned. She was there last night, and she did a great job!

My son Seth is in middle school now, and he’s entered the “Cool Zone” of adolescence, but I can trick him into taking a trip with me every now and then back to Walton’s Mountain. I hope his generation takes a page from Mr. Hamner’s notebook and remembers that the elderly are equals to them and equally important and relevant in our society—especially since I’ll be one of them soon enough!

(Above:  Photo of Mary McDonough by Chelsea Claus Photography and courtesy of Kensington Publishing Corp. )

A Little Something Extra

Just wrapped up preparing another batch of journals to go out to subscribers.  The first ones hit the post office yesterday.  These envelopes will go out on Monday.  And it will take another order or two for all of our subscribers and contributors to get hard copies, but they have finally started to arrive and go out.  For those of you "out there" waiting on copies, they're coming.  Promise!  :-)

We're also slipping in a few extras and surprises in with each shipped order. 

Our business partners over at JKSCommunications were kind enough to give us plenty of promotional bookmarks and other great literary tidbits.  (Thanks Julie!)  We're tucking those into the journals as they go out in the post.  And while at Parnassus Books to see a reading and presentation by JKSCommunications authors A.J. Scudiere and Jenny Milchman, the bookstore was kind enough to let us have some postcards and a handful of bookmarks that promote the store's First Editions Club. And there are a couple of other items, just for fun. 

So, be on the lookout for these items as they arrive, and if you'd like to be on the receiving end, we'd love to have you as a subscriber. 

1999's Tempest

Each issue's From the Editor column is a time of reflection. The one for our issue on the theatre has been this weekend's assignment, well...the start of the column, anyway.  Research, actually.  I've been putting it off because discovering the answers to my questions would require me digging through our storage room, unearthing my old Navy trunk, and digging through old Boy Scout belt buckle merit badges and newspapers--under which I would reach my destination: two decades worth of journals.  What's the big deal?  A nasty case of tendinitis in my elbow. My doctor gave me a week's worth of meds for it, but they didn't help.  So, I grunted and hunted my way through my memories this afternoon as I searched for the source of the column's inspiration.  Of course, it was in the very last journal that I went through.  That's okay.  I had a great time flipping through all those memories.

Anyway, the theater column....

Fifteen Years.  Wow: it's been that long, that long since I've seen Bill's The Tempest at the annual Shakespeare in the Park, here in Nashville. (That's me, or it was back in '99 when I saw the play.)

As soon as I knew we were going to publish a theater issue, I was hoping I could find it.  After all these years, I wasn't even sure if it was true, if it happened at all.  Memory is so unreliable, at least mine can be.

Many years ago, we took some of our friends from out west with us to Shakespeare in the Park.  We had a wonderful time.  I sent a local paper a letter to the editor, saying how much we loved it.  In my mind, there was a follow up letter to the editor, in which I was slammed because we took wine with us to the park. 

I justified taking the wine to the park because I had lived in Europe for several years, and over there it's allowed and normal to have a little wine at a public arts event/performance.  Honest mistake.

I was sad when I reached the last journal because it was the one for 1999, and I felt that I went to a performance closer to my return from Europe, the start of the '90s.  There it was, in late summer, just where it was supposed to be: my letter to the editor.  Since I had been home for a decade, I suppose I can't blame my Shakespearean libations on European influences.  Oh well.  And there was no counter letter to the editor, either, but something similar had happened. The paper had published my email address, and I had received the attack first hand, thanks to the Internet.

But that's really not what is going to inspire my column.  You see, all these years, I had forgotten that there was someone else involved in this story...all along.  A key, important player in this company.

Can you believe it?  Denice Hicks, the In Depth Interview/Cover Story person!  I promise: this is no hustle.  I was shocked, flipping the journal pages from 1999 to find an email from her, in reply to my letter to the editor.

That's how long she's had a vested interest in our artistic community.  Longer, actually.  I'm sure she's been writing letters and emails to people all over the state for decades.  

You don't have to take my word for it.  Included in this posting is my letter, the journal entry, and Denice's email from 1999.  Take a look and be as happily shocked as I was.  And while you're at it, why don't you plan on coming and supporting her and the Nashville Shakespeare Festival at this summer's Shakespeare in the Park. It starts in a week! She's the director this summer, just as she was back in '99.  You'll have a great time, promise.  Probably best, though, to leave the libations at home.  There's plenty of cold stuff at the food trucks in the park, anyway.  :-)

 

 

 

 

Monday Night Message (MNM): February 24

It’s quiet, silent beyond the fan in the bathroom or the tick-tock of the alarm clock. The family is asleep, recharging for another full day of the nursing profession and first grade liberal arts and fifth grade science. I just packed tomorrow’s lunch in my uber-cool Edgar Allan Poe lunchbox that I scored from a visit to Mysteries & More bookstore in Nashville. 

It’s been seven days since the last MNM, but it feels much longer because of everything that has happened.  It’s been an exciting week. Before I forget, we’ve finally had a chance to do a serious update to our web site, including the addition of many events to our Bulletin Board link. Check it out for a wonderful listing of literary events happening in Nashville over the next several months!

JKSCommunications!

I’m thrilled to share with everyone that 2nd & Church now has a relationship of mutual professional respect with JKSCommunications, a full-service literary publicity firm that represents some of the finest publishers, authors, and books in the United States. Their offices are based out of Nashville, NYC, Chicago, and Denver.  They’re helping us promote the written word in a variety of ways, including the promotion of a kickstarter campaign that will start soon.  In return, we’re promoting their publishers, authors, and books via a special “JKSCommunications” page on our site.  You may access it via their link at the top of our site. In addition, we’re thrilled to announce that starting with our next issue, Julie Schoerke (founder of JKSCommunications) is our newest columnist, covering the book business.  We are happy to give you a sneak peek at her first column, located at the following link:

http://secondandchurch.typepad.com/2nd-church/jkscommunications-columns.html

She has a lot of wonderful things to share with our readers about the book and publishing industry, so stay tuned for those words in the coming issues.

Welcome New Team Members

In addition to Julie, there are some new arrivals to the 2nd & Church team starting with the Hemingway issue, our next one.  We’ve been advertising for some time that we’re bringing to our Nashville readership literary stories from La Crosse, Los Angeles, Portland (the one in Oregon!), Mobile, and Louisville.  That’s happening, and we welcome Gayle, Deidre, Charlotte, Janelle, Linda, Katy, and Mary.  We’re also adding a photographer from Louisville. Luke is a photography and art student at the University of Louisville, and he’ll be taking photos for us there to go along with the Louisville literary pieces.  Oh, and there’s Jennifer.  She’s a native of Canada, but she’s a writer living and working in Sweden.  She’s our first foreign correspondent, and we’re so happy that she’s joining our team.  She’s a new mom, so her first piece won’t appear until the Theatre issue in the summer, but we know she’ll have something worth reading to share.

New Look-n-Feel!

Yes!  Starting with the Hemingway issue, we have a new layout and design for 2nd & Church…thanks to our creative director, Kristy Galbraith Dye and her creative partner, Fredrick A. Dye. (This is not the first time you’ve seen Fred’s work.  His great photographs have appeared in many of our issues, including the current one!)  To see this new, wondrous approach, visit the Hemingway issue’s Web page at:

http://secondandchurch.typepad.com/2nd-church/issue-5-the-hemingway-issue.html

In Other News…

My long-suffering better half Leslie and myself had the chance to eat dinner at Lockeland Table restaurant in Nashville with some wonderful literary folks this week, including the Southern civil defense attorney turned author Robert Bailey and his wife Dixie.  They were in town to promote his debut novel, The Professor, at Nashville’s East Side Story Books. The shop’s owner Chuck and his wife Emily were there; Chuck is also one of our columnists.  And Julie held court, along with her friend Brent Miller.

Later next week, I am off to Mobile, Alabama to speak to the Pensters, a literary group on the Gulf Coast.  (Check out our current issue to learn more about this great group!) Linda’s bringing me down for this event, and I’ll be sleeping on her couch, I suspect.  Linda was one of the first mentors in The Writer’s Loft, a creative writing program that we all started at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  When she drove up from Mobile, she slept in my little boy’s room, with way too many toys in the bed.  Who knows what sort of “pay back” she has planned for me next week! :-)

Oh, and this week I jumped at the chance to be the fiction judge for the Alabama Writers Conclave annual competition.  It’s a tremendous responsibility that I accept with a great deal of appreciation and respect for their conference!

Much more has been happening this week, but these are the highlights!  Good night everyone.

Roy

Finding the Time to Write

This is about the time in my junior-level English research course when I give the students the below list of ways to find time to read, write, and research.  Of course, I know that it's impossible for someone to do all of these things, but I urge the students to apply two or three of them to their weekly routines.  Thought I would share....

Less sleep.  It's true.  This is the easiest way I've found time.  You need to have enough energy to function during the day, but eight hours of sleep each night may not be possible or realistic.  Get up an hour early or stay up an hour later than usual, and use that time to read and write.

Less television. If you are watching ANY television, then you are making a big mistake this semester.  You have your entire life to watch television.  And your favorite shows will all be on DVD in a year, anyway.  And you'll sleep a lot better (when you do sleep!) if you don't watch the news.  If you cannot get away from the television, at least cut the viewing time in half.

Less lunch, more reading.  Your lunch hour is a great time to read.  After all, you can eat...while you read.  Bring your lunch to school or work and find a place to sit and read.

Expanded Lunch Time.  If you are working and you have vacation time, take an hour of vacation each day for a week and have it connected to your lunch hour.  That way, the rhythm of your day (your life!) stays intact while you force time for studies to appear. Two hours in the middle of the day to read and write is a big, big deal.

Less friends, more writing.  At this point in the semester's work, if you want a friend, get a dog.  You don't have time to socialize...at least as much as you may have been used to doing before this semester.  Tell your friends that you are still their friend and you think they are wonderful, but they need to leave you alone for a couple months until you finish the Long Semester Research Paper.

Much Less Facebook, Myspace, linkedin, sheflari, more writing.  Nothing more to say here.  Don't waste time with this stuff.  You don't have it to waste. If you want to browse the Web, browse the Web.  If you want to go to college, go to college.  Make a choice.

Vacation Time.  If you work full-time and have vacation time, take a day or two of vacation--get up as usual, leave the house, sit down at your local library or cafe, and read/write.

Sick Time.  If you work full-time and have sick days on the books, now is the time to use them.  If your lunch makes you sick, and you have to leave work early, it's not your fault.  It happens.  Take the afternoon off sick and go....someplace and read/write.  If you wake up and your kids are sick, it's not your fault. You're just trying to be a good parent. Call out sick and stay at home to read. 

Family Time.  You may need to sit down with your spouse or significant other, tell the person that you love him/her, and then say that you will need to "check out" for an hour or so each night during family time in order to read or write.  This can be difficult, but it's possible.

Travel Time.  If you can leave the car at home and take the bus, DO IT.  You can read while you ride.

Read and Walk.  It's true.  You can read while you walk! :)  When I worked at Middle Tennessee State University for four years, I was known as "That Reading Guy," because everywhere I went for whatever reason, I walked and read.  Okay, sure, I fell in a hole one day while reading, but it was a small hole, and I was able to climb out with minimal shame.

Read while in line...at the bank, in the post office, at the fast food place, and so on.  The time you have to read at these locations is shocking.  In short, NEVER go anywhere without a book or other reading items in your back pocket or purse.

 

Looking for something literary to do in Nashville? You’re in luck. The Bulletin Board at 2nd & Church is updated with dozens of things to do over the next few months. Plenty of poetry readings and author events at most of the area bookshops, including Parnassus Books, East Side Story books, and Barnes & Noble Vanderbilt and Cool Springs locations; SHAKESPEARE Allowed! at the Nashville Public Library; the Complete Works of Shakespeare; poetry and prose at Poet’s Corner at Scarritt-Bennett, at the Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series, and at the Lipscomb University's Landiss Lecture Series; And East Side Storytellin’ is on fire this season! Check out Literary Libations for fellowship and networking. Don’t feel like going out? Plenty of literary radio shows, and remember to catch NPT’s A Word on Words every Sunday morning. And Bowling Green isn’t far from Nashville. Consider attending the the Kentucky Writers Conference and the 2014 Southern Kentucky Book Fest. And starting on July 22, the University of the South will host the 25th session of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Even if you don’t apply to be a formal part of the conference, many events are open to the public. Check out the below link for all of the details on these events and keep checking back. New items are going up all the time.

http://secondandchurch.typepad.com/2nd-church/bulletin-board.html

The West Of The Moon Writer’s Retreat-June 22-27

Dave DeGolyer and Terry Price will be leading The West Of The Moon Writer’s Retreat in beautiful New Harmony, Indiana, beginning June 22nd and running through Friday morning, June 27th. This is their third year in leading a retreat in New Harmony and it promises to be our best one yet. Click here to register and learn more about this great opportunity. 

Monday Night Message: February 17

Mercy, I’m tired.  Not fatigued or stressed.  It’s the satisfied feeling of decompression that comes after a stint of productivity.  Oh yeah, this is another Monday Night Message, even though it’s the Friday before.  I missed the one for last week, and I wanted to scribble this down before another To-Do list attacks.  As this picture shows, our second shipment of journals arrived a couple weeks ago, and I’m slowly getting them mailed off to contributors and supporters.  If you’re a contributor and you haven’t received your copy yet, it’s probably in this stack.  It’s coming: I promise!

This moment finds me working on all three of this year’s remaining issues at about the same moment: Issue 5 (Hemingway issue), Issue 6 (Fiction issue with Sena Jeter Naslund), and Issue 7 (Theater issue, featuring Denice Hicks with the Nashville Shakespeare Festival). This weekend will focus on Hemingway issue editing, grading papers for my WKU English course, and getting our Kickstarter site ready to launch (more on that to come soon!).

Took a vacation day from the corporate tech writing day job last Wednesday to have journal meetings all day throughout Nashville.  Of course, my life knows when I have literary time…allocated, and I get redirected with way too much ease.  On the way into town, I had to take a detour to a vehicle emissions testing center. My tags have been expired since November, a traffic violation personal best for me!  I didn’t tell the officer that statement.  I may have used some of my fiction writing skills to wiggle out of trouble.  Anyway…I had to get my car tested before I could get into Literary Mode.  That was a joy.

Met up with the folks from over at the Nashville Shakespeare Festival to plan out the items to appear in the Theatre issue.  Had a great brainstorming session with their artistic director, Denice Hicks.  She’s the cover story / In Depth interview for the issue.  (Nashville novelist River Jordan is doing that interview!)  And their development director, Rickey Chick Marquardt, added some excellent stories!  I will populate this issue’s Web page with all the stories soon. I’m working toward it, promise.

While heading to the next location, the threat of a storm caused a lot of elementary schools to close for the day, including the ones in my county.  So, I had to make some decisions—postponing all of the events after lunch.  I hated to do it, but a dad’s gotta do what a dad’s gotta go.  I had a stack of journals in my car for the East Side Story Bookstore, but since Parnassus Books was literally five minutes from my next meeting, I took the copies there, instead.  (Sorry Chuck!  I’ll get you some copies soon!)  Oh, I was and am thrilled to get them to Parnassus and get them, finally, out to the public!  I buy copies and get them to our locations as the money comes in.  (This is still very much a mom and pop operation!)

If you’ve seen the current issue, then you may have read the wonderful column that Carolyn Wilson wrote about our friend John. Carolyn is an associate librarian over at Lipscomb University’s Beaman Library.  The library’s a subscriber, and I took her their copy as an excuse to visit.  And she made me a great lunch!  We ate in a cozy conference room, and upon entering, I had such a strong feeling that I knew it so well, but I couldn’t figure it out until she told me that that room is where we (the board for the Tennessee Writers Alliance) met. A long, long time ago, I was on the board.  As we ate and talked all things literary, the memories came back.  Carolyn is one of Nashville’s modest, hard-working literary treasures.  She will soon retire, and several wonderful books from her will arrive, I am sure. I raced home with ice trying to fall, way too sorry that I had to miss out on the second half of a great literary day.  I did score the latest issue of Poets & Writers at the Theatre issue meeting, and while at Parnassus, I found and purchased Geronimo Rex, by Barry Hannah.  I can’t wait to read it.

Took care of plenty of errands along the way: mailed off more journals; gave the county clerk’s office four journals…I mean $50….for a little sticker to put on my license plate; grabbed some pizza for the kids—no way I was cooking dinner (too tired); ran into Krogers; picked up kids; and arrived home to discover that the jackleg garbage men had left the cans all over the driveway, blocking my entrance.  I just plowed right through them. Whatever.  Cans in. Kids in. Food devoured.  Me horizontal.

Last night after the day job, I was back in Nashville.  Barnes & Noble at Vanderbilt is presenting a series of interviews entitled Stronger ARTS/STRONGER Cities.  Last night, they featured Denice Hicks.  It was a very cool event.  Pretty packed.   I covered it for the Theatre issue.  The Val Kilmer Twain event was cancelled, and I was/am thrilled. I think I’ll just get my money back and spend it on copies.  There’s some great events happening this weekend, but I just can’t make it.  Need to stay home and work on the Hemingway issue, among other things.  Oh, there are a couple of things about to happen.  If you’ve read the current issue, then you may have seen a piece on the Pensters, a literary group on Alabama’s Gulf Coast.  In early March, I’ll be doing a Cannonball Run trip down to Mobile, Alabama to speak to them at one of their monthly meetings.  And I suppose it’s okay for me to say that I will be judging the short story competition at the Alabama Writers Conclave annual competition.  That should be a lot of fun!

We also have something in the works for our public service mission involving a local middle school, but I don’t want to say anything more until I hear back on my proposal to them.  Oh, and we are about to add our first foreign correspondent to our team.  Her name is Jennifer.  She’s a native of Canada, but she’s a writer living and working in Sweden.  More news to come….