First, I have super duper awesome rainbow sparkle glitter news. Remember a couple posts ago when I announced my lucky #13 contest entry over at Lascaux Flash?

Like all of the entrants, I’d impatiently waited for the finalists to be announced. I didn’t envy the judge’s task of reading through 283 entries, sorting them, thinking about them, and then discussing them with other folks who would undoubtedly have different perspectives. I really hoped to be a finalist, but with numbers like these, it was unlikely. And I was definitely might have been having a little bit of a pity party for myself.

And so when I checked the Lascaux Flash site this morning and saw that the winners had been announced, I took a deep breath and began scrolling. “Self,” I said, looking through the list of finalists. “Don’t feel bad. You knew it was a long shot. You saw scads and scads of stories that deserved to win.” I scrolled some more. Underneath the list of finalists was the gold medal and beside it, I read, “Winner: #13 Camille Griep: Circumstances.”

I’ve never subscribed to the nonsense about doors closing and windows opening (seems like a good excuse to hire a contractor) but it was just last Friday that I was sobbing into my Chardonnay over my annual Clarion West rejection along side the usual weekly story rejections.

We all go through periods where we aren’t sure where we fit in, if we fit in, how we fit in. The solution for me has always been to keep writing. When you do, you open yourself up to those magical moments like I found with this story. Circumstances and all of its characters came to me because I waited for it. I wrote until it surfaced and I edited and scrubbed and tweaked and fussed. And then I tried to put it in a place where it would be understood. I couldn’t be prouder of its final destination and the company it keeps. Cheers. xo