About a month ago, the good people from the Indiana Author Awards contacted me to let me know that I was a finalist for the Emerging Author Award. I’ll be embarrassingly uncool here and admit that this was—and is—a really big deal to me. I’ve been going to the awards ceremony for years, and Indiana is a big part of who I am, so, yeah. A big deal.

But I couldn’t tell anybody. The good people swore me to secrecy. (Okay, I told my wife, because I’m human, but no one else, I swear.) Today was the announcement, and I posted it on Facebook and Twitter and there was this gush of goodwill.

What I want to say here (to myself, mostly) is this: This is the best part of the whole thing. No matter what happens, it won’t get any better than this: Being happy with my friends.

Someone remind me of this in a few days when I turn all neurotic, all right?