Remind me to never sign up for an A-Z challenge again. Not because it isn't a worthy challenge, but because I'm a slacker at heart and I can't seem to keep up. But nevertheless, here I am again. Today's post is brought to you by Elizabeth Corrigan and her delicious demon, Bedlam from the newly released Raising Chaos. 

So I was struggling to come up with a guest post topic for Erica, because I wanted it to be something that properly reflected our relationship. And then I remembered the initial thing we had in common: The letter E. 

Okay, really, I was like “OMG, Erica, I need a guest post topic!” And she said, “Well, alphabet challenge. Your day is E.” And I said, “E? E is my very favorite letter!”

Not really, but sometimes I exaggerate.

By all accounts, E should be my very favorite letter, as it starts my name and all. There’s even scientific research to back it up. Studies have shown that people prefer the letters in their own name to other letters, and the first letter tends to be their very favorite. It’s part of a phenomenon called “implicit egotism,” which describes the fact that people tend to prefer places and things with the same name as them. Like, there are a disproportionate number of Virginias in Virginia and Pauls in St. Paul. I confess, I myself have always had a hankering to live in Elizabeth, NJ, but thus far I have avoided the urge. Something about having a job in Maryland. (Though my friend Mary lives in NJ. I wonder if there’s a connection.) I was looking this up on Wikipedia, and I discovered there is also an effect that people tend to consider their initial letters to be more oriented toward their gender, as in, I should consider E to be a feminine letter. I’m not sure if that’s true.

Honestly, though, I’m not sure that E is my favorite letter. I mean, it’s nice and all, but liking it conflicts with my need for distinctiveness. Basically, I prefer to be as unique as possible. And E is the most common letter. I mean, people go to special effort to write things without the letter E in them. (Which makes me now wish I’d found a way to write this entire tribute to the letter E without using the letter E. But that would be too meta for a Monday.) I’m more partial to the Z in my name. And the B, though that’s implicit egotism, too. My family calls me Betsy.

But clearly I love the letter E enough to name my series after it: Earthbound Angels. And all my angel and demon characters at least have E’s in their names, because they all end in EL. I had been aware that angel names tended to end this way, but it wasn’t until I did research for my series that I learned why. Apparently “El” was a word for God in Aramaic, so the angels all had God in their name. Gabriel, for example, means strong man of God. I found out my name followed this same pattern, but put the “El” at the beginning. For fun, I decided to flip around my name for one of my angels. Siren’s real name is Zabethiel, which means oath of God.

Erica told me to be entertaining in my post. (E for entertaining!) And I worry I have actually been more educational. (E for educational!) But hopefully I have been at least a little of each. (E for each!) Thanks to Erica and the letter E for having me!

Thanks for coming by Elizabeth! And also, thanks for leaving us with the excerpt (another awesome E word!) from the new book (we love those!) And let's not forget the prizes (Elizabeth has an awesome giveway for us today too!) So, keep reading to the bottom, that's where we hid the good stuff!

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