Well, first off, it isn’t losing. It’s not. It’s more… not-winning, but that doesn’t make a catchy blog post title. We Americans tend to reduce things like literary awards (and -ugh- political elections) to the binary lens of sports, with “winners” and “losers” and even making it to the Superbowl is somehow a failure if you didn’t win? That’s a sickness in our culture and needs its own blog post. I digress.
I woke up Monday, May 15th, with exactly as many awards as I had Sunday, May 14th, before a guy ripped open an envelope and read off someone else’s name. And I also woke up still a Nebula Finalist, a title I may wear like a tiara for the rest of my life.
(And I intend to.)
I had spent much of the week beforehand trying to train myself to believe I had already lost, so that I would be gracious in defeat. I needed to be Genuinely Happy, I thought, so that should the winner in my category be at my table, I could immediately and enthusiastically congratulate them.
Leading up to the ceremony, at the reception and the dinner, I was pleased with myself, I was not nervous, just a little jazzed. I wasn’t thinking about winning. Go me.
My one disappointment was … well, I had really hoped to meet all my fellow Novelette finalists. I had dreams of a Team Novelette hangout. S. B. Divya was the only other one at the convention in person, but it was lovely spending time with her. And, honestly, there were so many wonderful people to meet, and I was anxious that I might accidentally snub someone by not recognizing them so my goal was to talk to EVERYONE. I think I hit about 80%?
I kept my focus outward – other people, how cool they were, how lovely it would be for THEM to win. Then that envelope ripped, and the name wasn’t mine, and I FELT. Just this black ball of emotion — disappointment. Shock? Sadness. Despair.
The shock was the most, well, shocking. Had I not looked carefully over the facts? Had I not collected odds and figures… how rarely a person won who had a smaller twitter following than the other nominees? How good the other stories were – I read them all. I noted all their brilliances, and re-read “We Built This City” and noticed every flaw, until I was at a point I wasn’t sure I could in good conscience vote for it. I hadn’t made the Locus year-end list for novelettes and they have TEN PLACES not six. So like… really… not a snowball’s chance. Yet there had been some little bunny in my brain that was 100% convinced I would win.
A moment of silence for Bunny.
And then I started to spiral, because I had FAILED to NOT CARE. What had my face done? Did anyone see? But then they were moving on to Novella and… no, no one was shaking their head at me. No one had even noticed if my “face did a thing”.
Because no one was holding me to that high standard of not caring except me. I had to suck it up and stand up and move on.
I got to go to the Alternate Reality Awards, which I was really looking forward to. The Nebulas has a charming tradition where, immediately after the awards ceremony, they invite all the finalists who didn’t win to give their speech “In the universe where you won.”
I had actually practiced my speech telling myself “This is for the Alternate Reality Awards. I can’t wait to give this speech to a small group of my fellow nominees.” But then the first two people to go up gave HILARIOUS joke speeches, full of “I’m sure George R. R. Martin will do great things some day, keep plugging away, kid.” and the like. So I frantically tried to re-write my speech to be funny in my head. It didn’t work… it was word salad, but the room clapped, and I felt loved.
Here is my prepared speech:
Thank you, unions! Thank you for weekends, for sick days, for retirement. As the child of a laborer in the AFL-CIO, I have benefited directly, but even non-union employees and their families receive more benefits and better pay when there is strong union membership in their area.
Thank you, Dad.
This story was a passion project and a difficult birth. I am deeply indebted to my writing workshops, The Cajun Sushi Hamsters, Scorched Earth, and House of Hair. Thank you, my long-suffering family who supported me getting here today through unpaid domestic work!
Although they said not to, I must thank the friends whose financial assistance helped me be here tonight: Howard, Patty, Mike, and Joelle. Thank you for enabling this amazing experience.
Everyone, hug a union organizer. Or just buy them coffee.
And we immediately had Karaoke after the alternate reality awards! I definitely went up too many times and sung worse than anyone else, but as I don’t mind embarrassing myself for laughs that was AWESOME, and um I got drunk and fangirled embarrassingly all over Lindsay Ellis (Sorry Lindsay Ellis!)
Hubs says I was “clinging” oh dear. I definitely drank too much and shouldn’t have. Monday morning, I was more hung up on my behavior than the award itself.
I realized that I had been afraid my friends and family, especially those who had pitched in financially to get me to the award show, would be disappointed in me for not winning… that I had failed them, their investment in me. But no. The post-ceremony response was 80% We Are So Proud of You and 20% You Were Robbed. (LOL)
The despair was the last emotion to be shaken. I thought about how hard I worked on “We Built” (tl;dr – very f’n hard.) If that was what it took, to get on the ballot … I wasn’t sure I could do it again. And wasn’t it just that it was timely to talk about labor? And I happened to sell it to a Big Magazine that was Online and therefore Free to Read?
“Too much a perfect storm,” I wrote in my journal, “It’ll never happen again.”
But by the next day, my mind was clearer, and as I waited in LAX for my delayed replacement flight for a delayed flight (lolsob that’s a blog post on its own) I wrote, “It wasn’t that perfect of a storm. And didn’t I feel exactly this way after I sold ‘Jupiter Wrestlerama’?”
Yea, varily. My first story sold to a Big Magazine, Lightspeed (TM). My 4th overall story sale, 3rd pro-rate. “If that’s how much work it takes,” I wrote in my journal back then (October, 2014), “I’ll never be able to do it again.”
But I did. And the work got less painful as I learned more about the craft, as I matured emotionally to stop standing in my own way with “secret rules” and “muddying“. These days, I can look back on a story like “Wrestlerama” and see all the ways I made it needlessly harder on myself, how much easier a time I’d have writing it today. Every story I write is teaching me more about writing. So maybe it will happen again.
But I have no control over that – being nominated is in other people’s hands – so I won’t agonize over it. (Not agonizing over things out of your hands is another one of them there “emotional maturity” things.)
What I do have control over is getting to meet others and share my passion for this art form with them. (And not getting drunk and making them uncomfortable — again, so, so sorry, Lindsay. I will buy you a replacement bottle of Jack if we ever meet again.) I met some awesome new people at the Nebula Awards, and I got to visit with friends I don’t get to see in the flesh often… including a few long-time-online-friends I had never seen in person! AND I got to soak in a hot tub with my hubby and sip fru fru drinks in said hot tub! And I got to see fireworks! And I took an insane amount of notes from panels and had a BLAST.
So here I am, today, having lost nothing. And that feels pretty good.
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