I’ve been arguing with myself recently about how I define myself as a person. Wow, that sounds a little…uh. Anyway. I remember every detail of the first short story I ever wrote. I was six years old and it was written on orange construction paper with a purple crayon. It was about alien abduction and the fact that my dog couldn’t be seen in the snow.

I know.

This year has been hard. Writing is one of those things that you know is very likely to go nowhere. If you focus too intently on it and nothing else, the chances of being broke and living with your parents with a 20 year old car and a barely functional computer are high. I’ve been wondering, despite the fact that I’ve said since I wrote that first story that someday I was going to write something that I loved and people cared about, if I should give up. I know I’ll never stop completely; I’ll always have notes scribbled on napkins and piles and piles of red-inked manuscripts on the floor beside my bed, but I realized not too long ago that maybe I shouldn’t gauge how well my life is going by the number of words I’ve written that I’m satisfied with.

This past weekend was a teeny tiny poke with a very long stick to guide me in the right direction.

Every December for the past few years, I’ve made a point of coming up with a tactic for winning a writing contest put on yearly by a writing group in the state. And every year, except for the year I turned 18, that tactic has failed (and the year I turned 18, I had no plan).

It failed again this year, with one exception.

At the conference (if the conference was a person, I’d hug it and kiss it and beg it to marry me), there’s something called the Writers’ Wall (which is actually three walls – one for prose, one for poetry, and one for youth. The youth wall this year had one piece on it), and the Writers’ Wall entries are judged by the people at the conference. I showed up this year with something ready – something gold. I’d decided to enter something that let anyone reading know exactly what age group I fell into. What I’m going to say next, I’m not saying to be rude, but because it’s an observation I’ve made year after year – the conference is full of people who are quite a bit older than I am.

So, armed with a poem (ew, one of those?) that included the term ‘Netflix,’ I arrived and, apparently my plan worked, because I conquered.

And I don’t know what that means, really. I don’t know how many people voted, but I know it was more than just the one person who judged the categories I entered in the main competition. I fully respect those judges because it’s got to be hard, but the winners are chosen based on the opinion of a single mind. So, even though I won little more than a coffee cup and a certificate to put in the box with the two from the last time I won, this carries more weight.

This is not a report on the entire conference; too much happened and there were too many talented people to wrap it all up on a blog (ha!), but let it be known that while I am far from an advocate for the destroying of unfair West Virginia stereotypes (because I’ve learned in the past couple of decades that in a lot of cases, the unfair West Virginia stereotypes are anything but unfair), this piddly little dent in the mountains keeps a lot of secrets.