"I swear this is not a writing blog!"

I SWEAR. But it sure does look like it right now, and this post isn't exactly going to help.

Last night, a beautiful thing happened: I received an award for my writing. "One of the most important nights of your life...and you weren't even there!" my friend Debbie says. It's true. I was about eight hours away from the ceremony. It's all right, though; said friend ably accepted the award on my behalf.

This is not exactly the first thing I've won. I mean, I have two Associated Press awards and those mean a great deal, too. The reason this is such an amazing thing, though, is that this win was for my fiction. I wrote something from my mind and people liked it!

There is, to me, something so much more vulnerable about putting stories out there in the world, rather than articles or book cover copy or even blog posts. Those are all, to a large extent, rational things. They describe things many people encounter, or actual books that exist, or events that have really happened. Stories...they're possibilities. The worlds they describe aren't real, not even if I set them in the here and now. I hope they're believable enough that people feel at home there--but my muse and my imagination and my hands have collaborated to create something out of whole cloth. It's SO MUCH HARDER than writing non-fiction! And thereby, so much sweeter when it works. There's more at stake, somehow.

A few months ago, I heard that my old writers' group was sponsoring a very awesome writing contest. I felt no qualms about entering because I haven't been a member for years and the judging was all blind. In fact, many or most of the judges were people with no connection to the group at all. If my work got any recognition, I would know it deserved it.

And I won. No one was more surprised than I.

So last night was the big award ceremony. Nearly 200 people showed up, if Debbie's estimation was accurate. I was NOT one of those people, sad to say.

Here's the thing, here's my point. The coolest part of the night, to me (from my great distance), wasn't the check. It wasn't the number of people who listened to Debbie read my excerpt and told her after that they didn't want her to stop reading. It wasn't even the sparkling happiness of the group's founder at the success of what they'd accomplished (though I loved hearing that).

Nope. It was the woman who went up to Debbie and said in great earnestness, "That story you read? That could have been me," and then went on to explain how she'd given up painting many years ago because she didn't think she was good enough. Now, because of my story, she was inspired and is going to pick up her brushes again. She was going to try to create again.

BECAUSE OF MY STORY!

That was the very. best. thing.