I WON! I'm getting published!

Yes.  They announced the winners this morning here -- and my story won!  I'm pretty flabbergasted about that fact, because I wrote a western, as you can probably tell from the title (and if you know me at all, you know westerns are my jam, jelly, peanut butter, honey, and mayonnaise), and westerns are just not all that popular anymore.  They're a hard sell.  And also... not to get too spoilified here, but my story contains no magic.  Zero magical spindles.  And the title of the collection, obviously, is all about magic spindles.  So I kind of expected that to be a big count against me.

However, thanks to an enormous amount of mentorific help from DKoren, as well as many long evenings listening to western soundtracks and beating my head against my laptop, I created a story I was pretty doggone proud of, and God has blessed my efforts!  I've got quite a bit of editing to do in the next few months, of course, but this summer, people will be able to buy a book containing a story I wrote, and that is an absolute dream come true.

Here's what the cover will look like:

I should probably lay off the coffee (three cups before lunch is two more than I'm used to), but boy howdy, I'm too excited to quit bouncing even without its help, and coffee is so tasty...