A Major Award (that I won't get)

“Well, why aren’t you excited?” Priscilla asked me.

“I am.”

“Well, you don’t act like it. If my book was up for an award, I’d be excited.”

“I’m happy about it. I’m not going to win because my book is such a downer.”

“Are the others upbeat?”

“I don’t really know, but I gotta figure some of them are.”

My book, Evil is Always Human, is a finalist in the General Adult Fiction category for the 2013 ForeWord Reviews contest. I told Priscilla about it because she has been supportive of my writing and her mother actually read the book. She expected me to be excited. I am pretty pleased with that fact, but there’s no point getting excited about it. I kind of think excitement is for suckers because ultimately nothing works out and you’re going to die anyhow. I mean, you can be pleased because something good happened, but by no means should you somehow think that the other shoe will hover in midair in perpetuity.

“Oh, look,” she said. “Here it is on their website.” She was online throughout this conversation and we only made eye contact twice and then briefly. That's how I like my conversations: brief and distracted.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s not a picture of the cover because apparently I effed that part up.”

“Still, it’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah.”

“So when will they announce the winner?”

“I think it’s in June,” I said, but I really didn’t know. “It’s judged by people in the field in some way. I don’t remember exactly who judges, but I remember thinking it was a group of people who knew something about writing and reading and books and stuff.” There I went, being all eloquent with words and stuff.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Well. My mom really liked it.” Priscilla still hasn’t read it. “You might win.”

“I’m working on the sequel.”

I don’t recall her reply to that. I think by then, she was surfing Pinterest for shoes or something.

“I have had a lot of people want me to write the sequel,” I told her. Then I did the math in my head and realized that “a lot of people” was probably twenty, max. Well. That was still twenty people who actually verbally told me that they wanted to know what happened next to my miserable main character.

I can go ahead right here and tell you: Nothing good. At least, not a lotta good. But it’s okay because he doesn’t get really excited about things either.