Funny Story

🏆 AWARDS 🏆

Marian Kelly Hall of Fame Award for Best Writer Charlotte Frost/charlotte_frost

My phone is sort of funky in that it doesn't always ring and doesn't always log missed calls, so sometimes it's only via checking voicemail that I find that a message has been left. So, last Saturday night, I happened to check my messages right before bed and found that there had been one left a few hours before. It was from a good friend who was attending SHareCon.

So I listened. Her voice was low and gravelly -- like she had laryngitis -- and the tone was grim and serious. She was saying, "I just want to tell you something before you see it on Facebook or something like that. I'm here at the con and I want you to know something." She then repeated, "I wanted you to hear it from me before somebody posts it on Facebook."

I thought, "Oh, my God! Somebody DIED at SHareCon!" What an awful time those fans must be having, dealing with something like that. And my upset friend was passing along the information before it hit social media.

So, with my stomach twisting, I waited for the gory details, and after a couple of more sentences, my friend finally said, "You won the Marion Kelly award for best writer."

Oh.

It took quite a few minutes before I got past my relief that nobody had died, and then past the humor that the way my friend unintentionally presented the message made me think that somebody had died, before I could get to, "That's really cool!"

I emailed my friend the next morning -- "I thought you were going to tell me somebody died!" -- and she called and so we had a conversation for a while. There were reasons why her voice was so gravelly and why she sounded grim and serious, and she apologized for presenting her message in such a way that I momentarily thought something horrible had happened. But she was very, very, very happy for me, as she'd been with me through my whiney years, fifteen to twenty years ago, when I used to complain that as much as S&H fans might say they loved my writing, I never won or even got nominated for awards.

So, now that it hasn't mattered for quite a number of years, I won something that was quite prestigious within this small but highly interested fandom.

Cool!