The best moment when writing a book is not holding the book in your hands. The best moment is getting an email that says, “Congrats! Your book has gone to printing!” Then you know the book-writing process is finally over! Well, at least until the next one :)

Thanks to Zain Naboulsi for doing the lion’s share of the work, not to mention keeping the blog series going! I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say I even learned things about the Visual Studio IDE while working with Zain. This is the book to have if you want to master Visual Studio.

And of course, thank you Sean Laberee and Rob Caron! This wouldn’t have happened without your help early on.

And yes, I plan to once again donate my portions of my author royalties to the Save Waveland Scholarship Fund to send Hurricane Katrina survivors of my hometown to college. Because that’s how we roll in New Orleans.

I feel like a zombie. My blog is coming back to life. Words I never thought I would say. But after 8 years of non-stop blogging, I needed some time to catch my breath. Or best put by R.E.M., “it’s time I had some time alone, and I’ll be fine.” A few blog post ideas have queued up long enough, so no better time now than the present.  That, and getting a new Mac Air greatly improves motivation (which it is awesome, btw).

And my thanks to many of you who have emailed me, asking if I was okay or even still alive. I appreciate all the kind words.

On the subject of zombies, an XKCD cartoon (http://xkcd.com/896/) was making the rounds not too long ago.

Even at 33 years old, with 10 years of software development behind me, this cartoon got to me. And not just about computers, but about everything I’ve ever been passionate about: Sports. School. MacGyver.

The key line is “if you like doing this stuff, you are not alone.” Maybe things are different today where a simple Google search yields instant proof that there are other liked-mind people in the world. I don’t know. But what I do know is that every kid should read and understand what Zombie Marie Curie is saying. It’s not a sentence to be taken out of context.

Many young college women have asked me for advice. I always tell them that hands-down the most important advice I can give is to be honest with yourself and do whatever it is you want to do. And if you are still here after that meeting with yourself, then we can talk about specific tactical suggestions.

Which is the subject of my next blog post – specific tactical suggestions, or what I like to call “career advice I learned the hard way.” In the past year, I’ve given several talks to high school and college students on general career advice. It was suggested on Twitter that I post the talk, because the contents could be relevant to more than just college women.

And so here we are. Hopefully there are a few of you left that are still subscribed!