Awards winners

Earlier this year, an excited teenager told me she was going to D.C. as a result of winning an essay contest.

"And the weird thing is," she said, "I didn't really want to enter the contest. My English teacher made us write the essays. I was so surprised when I won."

That kid was on cloud nine, and she will be there for a long time. I should know, because I felt the same way when I won the Reading Room/WriteOnCon Aspiring Author Contest last year. And, yes, one year later, I am still on cloud nine.

Like that kid, I didn't expect to win. I simply entered to see if there was ANYONE out there who liked my writing. So imagine my surprise when the top five finalists were listed and I saw my name. Sadly, my insecurity about my writing led me to think, "If my entry made to the top five, then there were probably only about ten entries in all. And the five that didn't make it must have really sucked." You see, when you've been querying for a while, without the desired results, you start to lose confidence in yourself as a writer. And that's where I was.

The morning the winner was scheduled to be announced, I found myself at my computer at about six a.m., checking The Reading Room site. That morning, I didn't have to bother waking my kids for school, because my running through the house screaming, "I won! I won!" woke up the whole neighborhood.

I will never forget that day. The contest win renewed my confidence in myself as a writer and helped me keep going. And the money from the contest wasn't bad either. It helped me get some new living room furniture that I had long been praying for. And, because I was so grateful to WriteOnCon for hosting the contest, I donated $100 of the prize money back to them. So, thank you WriteOnCon and The Reading Room for your generosity and for renewing my confidence as a writer!