Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Tooting My Horn Tuesday Goes Southwestern

But first, we pause for this message:

"She's the birthday girl! She's the birthday girl! The birthday, birthday, birthday, birthday Girl!"

And now back to our regularly scheduled post:

Guess who won FIRST place in the Society of Southwestern Authors Children's Short Story Writing Competition?

That's meeeeee! It was so hugely exciting because for the first time ever I actually got a phone call telling me I'd won! I got a plaque! I got a big, fat check! And I got all that MONTHS ago and had to sit on it till now.


Whew! I seriously was about to bust to get that horn-tootin' toot out there. Here's the picture I sent to Mary Ann (the absolutely lovely Coordinator of the SSA who called from Arizona and now we're BFF's).


I'm holding the Michael Lacapa Award and I really couldn't be prouder. Michael Lacapa, for whom the award is named, was a Native American story teller who worked in developing multi-cultural curricula with the Apache tribe, using story telling as a teaching tool among the school-aged children. You can find out more about him, as well as the Southwestern Society of Authors here. And who knows? Maybe next year, you'll enter and win a plaque! A big, fat check! And get a phone call from the absolutely lovely Mary Ann! Then you can bask in the SSA glow, too.

And now back to birthday business. The glow coming off all the candles is about to burn the house down.