It's a major award.

Alright. Something really very rather extremely good happened today. It made me very, very happy when it happened, and I spent about thirty seconds screaming very, very loudly about it, which frightened my mum and sister an awful lot. They actually thought something was wrong, and it took quite a bit before I could rationally explain to them that, no, everything was quite fine and I was actually quite happy. Being now more restrained and calm, trying to replicate my reaction right now would be silly, but I posted a Facebook status in the moment, and I'm going to copy and paste it here, for comedy value.

"AGGCGCGBK;AJL;WPIRAPS'JAER'PGOAJRE;GO'PIAWREJGO'P/;IARSDOIPGSRSLDF

IT'S A MAJOR AWARD IT'S A MAJOR AWARD OH MY GOODNESS YOU GUYS IT'S A MAJOR BLEEDING AWARD!!!!!!

AAAAADGKLCLJKLGHR.HGALPAQVNljer.nhsam!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

It does not, perhaps, capture me at my most articulate or intelligent, but it does give a good impression of what I'm like at my most emotional. For those who do not know (which I suspect is an awful lot of people), "it's a major award" is my codephrase for "a piece I have submitted to a literary publication of some kind has been accepted, which, to me, is such a happy occasion that I feel I must scream and use a reference to A Christmas Story to explain my ecstasy". (Well then. That was certainly an articulate alternate phrasing.)

Details for the interested: the piece, after a lot of retitling, is currently called "After Twelve" and will appear under that name upon being published. It's about time travel (of a very, very wibbly-wobbly sort) and time travel is apparently a rather hard sell, so I feel very fortunate that I was able to get it accepted. (Good thing, too, because I was literally running out of places that might accept it.) The name of the publication is The Fast-Foward Festival (link takes you to their site, on which my story will appear due November 1). This place specializes in time travel fiction, and, in my opinion, they look really pretty cool.

There are a few things that make this acceptance especially significant to me. It is my third-ever acceptance, and I had this sort of self-imposed rule that, if I got published thrice, I could begin to think of myself as something of a published author because of the "rule of three" - something every writer should believe in, I think - and the fact that someone (I don't remember who) said something to the effect of, "If you get one book published, it's an accident. If you get two books published, it's a coincidence. If you get three books published, you can begin to call yourself a writer". Furthermore, it's my first-ever piece of fiction to get accepted. (The other two publications were poems, which do not count as fiction. They count as poems.)

Happily, this story breaks out of the theme of suicide that my two poems set up. (One of them was called "A Suicide Sonnet", the other was about restraining oneself from jumping off a bridge; funnily enough, a friend and I were having a discussion about how these poems were possibly going to set up a certain "image" I would have to work hard to maintain.) Furthermore, this is nice because there was a part in which I could have mentioned suicide in a list of ways to die but, for some reason or another, did not. It does, however, involve death (the main character calls himself up from beyond the grave, which is how the story starts).

But do you know what makes this especially nice? Well, since you're not me, you obviously don't. But I'll tell you. I had been having...well, something of a crappy day earlier today (and "crappy" is not a word I use). Or rather, I was feeling crappy, which is, from some perspectives, the same as having a crappy day. In fact, I was feeling really rather sad/angry. It would sound silly to say the reasons ("sad" because I don't have any friends who I regularly see in real life, "angry" because I don't like human nature and I was just thinking about that and how it's easier for me to find a reason to hate humanity than find a human to love). Well, I've said them. I honestly wanted to scream in sadness/anger/frustration/upset/horror.

I did scream today. I screamed so loud, I scared people. But I screamed out of delight, not horror.