Gold Medal

Welcome to the land of Friday Travellers.

I've made an important decision, it came to me late in the afternoon yesterday and I know it was the right decision because, after I made it, I started craving something yummy.  Indecision and bad decisions do not make my stomach yearn, only quality decision making engages my appetite, so there you go.

Cue up the Lost flashback violin music:

Back when I owned the cafe, I was always looking for new and delicious things to offer my customers.  I belonged to a trade organization that specialized in upscale food offerings and had an annual convention in San Francisco.  If your are a foodie, then please try to imagine the Moscone Center completely filled with food vendors, all of them thrusting samples at you.  It is paradise, the land of plenty, Mecca, heaven and Willy Wonka all rolled up in one.

This trade organization sent out a monthly magazine featuring new products, announcing contests and general restaurant news.  The last year that I went to the convention, the magazine spent MONTHS extolling the virtues of a small, boutique cracker making concern.  They raved endlessly about the sublime beauty of the graham cracker and heaped multiple awards on the company.  As each new magazine came and we approached the next convention, I became suspicious because it's just a freakin' graham cracker and no graham cracker deserves 22,000 words of praise.

Unless the cracker is curing cancer or bringing Buffy the Vampire Slayer back to Tuesday nights.

That suspicion prompted me to go out of my way to taste this cracker creation of the gods, I simply had to know if the magazine people could be trusted.  That year I went with one of my closest friends, a foodie who wanted to see the Promised Land, and I told her all about the cracker saga.  We searched for that cracker first thing, it didn't take long because they had the biggest booth.

I know the common wisdom is that we eat with our eyes first, I do not because my eyes lie to me all the time.  My tongue has never lied to me, not once in almost 50 years, I trust my tongue implicitly.  Let me just say here that my tongue rejected that grainy, flavorless dog biscuit immediately.  I spit it into my napkin and scraped the little masonry-like bits of my tongue before telling the cracker people they were full of shit.

Those awards had all been bought and paid for, not earned, just like all food awards, it is nothing but a lie to get you to buy the stuff.  Wine is generally the worst offender, it's the joke of the food world.  I never entered any of my food into contests because the fix was in and I have waaaaaaaayyyyyyy too much pride to buy an award.

So why should I think that the publishing world is any less of a whore than the food world?  I doubt that it is, so I'm gonna do me.  I am not entering The Last Prospector in any contest that I have to pay to enter, in fact, I am only entering one contest.

The Amazon Breakthrough novel award is my goal, my only goal in this matter.  Just being a finalist would bring me many readers and the grand prize of a publishing contract is what I covet, although I would spend that fifteen grand in prize money quite happily.  Fresh new socks for everyone!!! (I love socks)

I get an excited, tight feeling around my heart when I think about winning that contest, when I see myself winning that contest.  When you are nearly 50, that feeling is hard to come by, so I'm grabbing on to the exhilaration and not letting go.