award winner?

Recently, I entered a writing contest -& I won! It's a very strange thing to win anything. I don't think of myself as a winner. Nor do I think of myself as a 'loser' (too much of that word in the news recently!), but a winner? 

I try things. I try to write. I try to draw. I try to be a good person. I try to work with kids and their families. I try to be a good mother. But to succeed at what I'm trying? It's weird.

I know how to handle disappointment very well. If you want a model for how to manage failure, I'm your girl! I am tenacious. I learn from my mistakes. I can sort out constructive criticism from the other kind. I know when something is personal and when it's not --I have all of that sorted, no problem.

But winning? What do I do with that?

I have been sending out writing to various venues --albeit haphazardly, but I've been doing it --for ...going on two years now? About that long. A little poetry, queries about children's books I've written, ...things like that. 

Most of the time, there has been deafening silence. That I can handle now. In the beginning, it was confusing and rather off-putting. A couple of times, I got feedback. The feedback was useful both for improving my work and understanding how publishing works. There were the notices that someone else had won. I always read when other people won and tried to figure out what they had done that worked. 

All along the way, friends have read and given me feedback (mostly positive -whew!). They kept me feeling positive when the experiences I was having with the process of sharing my work with a wider audience didn't exactly tickle.

Now it's me. It's a little thing, but everything counts, good and bad. The story, "Melvin the Destroyer" (scroll down to October 2016), was selected as winner for the First Worldwide Flash Fiction Competition. Even odder, they paid me. I've never been paid for writing before. I have a full-time job that is very demanding --that I get paid for. But somebody paid me for something I enjoyed every moment of doing? I'm allowed to call myself a professional now? How does this work?

I think I've figured it out, and I'll share what I've figured out with you because I'm a compulsive oversharer.

I keep doing what I've been doing --writing and trying to improve my writing. I keep trying. I won't expect to win anything again because I might not (not giving up the day job!), but I keep trying because nothing happens if I don't try. I can't not write --this blog post is evidence of that. But I wrote for a long time before I showed anyone. I will keep writing. My voice and my thoughts are as valid as anyone else's. 

And everyone else's voice and thoughts are as valid as mine. I hope you all will keep writing, or drawing, or singing, or ...whatever it is that moves you, too. It's not about winning or losing --it's about communicating, because we all have things to share. Please keep sharing. The greatest award is connecting.