A fellow blogger called me out on my last blog post; in which I mentioned that my recent book award was the first thing I’d won since a public speaking contest in grade 7. She kindly pointed out one of my earlier blog posts, in which I mentioned that I’d won a 10k race.

Fair point. But here’s what I was thinking.

That 10k victory and the book award feel completely different to me. One feels deserved and the other does not.

Let’s start with the deserved win – that 10k race. I have this belief that anyone can win a running race. Just put in enough training, and you’ll win. Run endless hills and intervals and ‘suicides,’ hammer your abs at the gym, go for long runs every Sunday, and I guarantee you will get faster. If you add some good nutrition and lots of sleep to the mix, you’ll start to win races. Again, this is a guarantee.

There’s a beautiful simplicity to running. If you put yourself through enough pain in training, you’ll be the first to break the tape. It’s a simple formula: pain in = victory out.

So when I won that 10k race, I felt like, yeah, of course I won. It wasn’t a surprise. I’d earned it.

The book award felt completely different. When I heard the news, my first thought was: somebody made a mistake.

With book awards, there are so many external variables. You have to pray that the jurors won’t come down with stomach flu while reading your book (thus colouring her or his reading experience). You have to hope that they won’t have been bullied by a kid with the same name as your protagonist. You have to hope that last year’s winning book wasn’t ALSO about running, and that you’re not up against Suzanne Collins’ latest bestseller.

And then of course, it’s all so subjective. I mean, how can you quantify the reading process? You can’t. Something as small as a Luna moth flapping its wings in the opposite direction might be enough to put someone else’s book on the podium instead of yours.

Authors have control over their writing. But they have no control over how it will be received. They can suffer all they want, they can put their bodies and minds through years of abuse, they can write an absolutely beautiful 70,000 word thing, and there’s still no guarantee that it will resonate with people.

So as thrilled as I am about this ‘win,’ I can’t lose sight of how idiosyncratic it all is. I don’t believe for a moment that the other shortlisted books are any less deserving of victory than mine (I’ve actually ordered them all, so I’m going to find out!).

Of course I’m very grateful that awards like the Cybils exist. Not just because they give much-needed exposure to authors, but also because they get people talking about books!

I know this must be true because I am writing it in the middle of the night.