First Sale

In my pen name, I received my First Sale ribbon at the RWA conference just the other night. It was a special moment for me because I made a promise to myself that I would get one at my first conference in 2009.

I had some moments over the weekend when that First Sale ribbon saddened me. This was completely unexpected, made me uncomfortable, and I'm not sure how to manage it.

Firstly, I am not a good person with fame and fortune. I feel tongue tied when I first meet someone "famous" but then I kind of forget about it and treat them as I would anyone else. I was once known as the girl who charged the agriculture minister for his cuppa at a field day because he looked like a farmer! 

So although my First Sale ribbon was an important event and achievement for me personally, I didn't expect it to change me, or anyone's reaction to me.

It did.

Many of my friends have not yet been published, and I felt shunned by them at times. They hung together and excluded me from things. If I insinuated myself into the group, some remark was made about me being "above them now", or something similar.

That hurt.

I don't consider myself any different to how I was last year. I wanted to be with my friends and to be included with them, not excluded because I was now in another group. I'm not. I'm still me.

Maybe I'm being super sensitive, I am tired, so it's highly likely. But I still feel hurt. At the closing session yesterday, I was talking to one of the girls, and another came up and said to this girl, "we've saved you a seat..." I was not included in the invitation. I was not saved a seat in their group. I could have sat down and cried. I didn't shift friends when I had a book published. But somehow they shifted me. In a group of girls I considered friends, I was now left out, the outsider.

I sat at the closing ceremony at a table with two others I had never met. And in a room full of lovely people, felt alone.

I shouldn't have. The previous night, someone commented that she thought I'd received the loudest cheer when I received my ribbon. It was a lovely thing to say, and it had been a wonderful moment to hear the cheer when I went to get my ribbon. I only wish my friends could see me for me, and not for a ribbon that they think moved me away from them.

My ribbon is a personal achievement. It changed me in no way - I hope.