Last week was sort of a surprise.  I received two awards in one week.  It’s not every week that you snag even a single award, but two in one week?  Well, that is cause to celebrate.  We went out to Canlis and had a wonderful meal on Friday night.  Well, the Canlis thing was for his job and had been in the works for weeks, so my awards had nothing to do with it, but really when you are in Seattle’s finest restaurant with a roomful of engineers, it is much nicer to imagine that the entire affair is to celebrate your greatness than to have to listen to what happened on “the MD-10 program when they went down to Edwards for that testing!” Like that was earth moving or worthy of guffawing for hours on end about.  Engineers!  If they had just eaten their crab legs and goat cheese appetizers for a few moments, I would have had the perfect opening to share really cool news. About something other than testing wind sheer on a 747.

Now the first award was for Love Letters from a Duke which was named one of the Top Ten Romances of 2008 by Booklist.  Booklist is the review publication of the ALA (American Library Association) and is a very respected magazine in librarian circles.  To say I was shocked would be no exageration. I mean Top Ten? Wow!  There were some good books over the last year, so getting named in that company is an honor.  If I had explained this to the engineers they would have had the same polite, glazed look I wore most of the evening.

The second surprise was being given The Hoyden Award over at the blog, A Hoyden’s Look at Literature. The Hoyden Award may not be as famous as an Oscar or an Emmy or even a RITA, but gosh darn, it sure fits me to a T.  Or rather it fits Something About Emmaline, which actually won the award, but I sort of hog the awards away from my books.  I consider them separate entities until they do something great, and then there I am, on stage, pushing them aside and taking credit for all their glory. Which goes along perfectly with the Hoyden Award, since it is given out to “swashbuckling, silly, or general feel-good books with well-disguised Growth (if they bother with any).”  Yeah, that sort of fits me to a T.

Of course the problem with the Hoyden Award is when you go to brag about it to your family and friends is that they are all happy for you even as they then turn to each other and ask, “What the heck is a ‘hoyden?'” And that is exactly what happened.  I told the DH as we were getting in the car to go to Canlis and he murmured his usual “Oh, congrats, honey.” And then about five minutes later piped up with the hoyden question. His reply was that “all my heroines are hoydens, because look who created them.” Lucky for him we were on our way to Canlis. But to his credit, it was an awarding week and he was sort of numb over trying to keep them all straight.  Happily, I’m hoyden enough to remind him when flowers and applause are due.

So there is my awarding week. And I think everyone should win an award from time to time.  What award would you like to win?