"The Art of Worship" Just Won 1st Place in the Erotic Short Category of the 2018 International Digital Awards!

I’m honestly not sure what they put in the water in Oklahoma. All I know is that OKRWA loves them some Kilby Blades. This week I was notified that the Oklahoma Romance Writers of America have named “The Art of Worship” 1st Place Winner in its Erotic Short Story category in its International Digital Awards!

Unlike OKRWA’s National Reader’s Choice Awards, the focus of the IDAs is novels or short works that are available ONLY in digital or print-on-demand format. My unconfirmed suspicion is that this award is intended to level the playing field for indie authors, whose work often shows differently from traditionally-published work and tends to be less recognized in some of the industry’s biggest awards.

But, back to this Oklahoma thing: this isn’t the first time I’ve won an award from OKRWA. Attending the awards ceremony at the 2018 RWA National Conference with fellow author friend Daphne Masque as my plus-one was one of the highlights of my conference. I’d been nodded twice for “Snapdragon”—once for Best Erotic Romance and again for Best First Book, and I won the latter. They put on a lovely brunch, hosted a heartfelt awards ceremony, and gave me three certificates, three plaques a tombstone and bejeweled pin for winning! It was extremely well-done.

There’s another reason why OKRWA holds a special place in my heart: after said awards ceremony at RWA Nationals, I was so literally laden with boxes of awards (like I said: a huge tombstone award + three wooden plaques!) that I drew quite a bit of attention to myself while walking through the lobby. Coincidentally, I had a meeting with a prospective agent who had asked to meet with me the same morning, and I also happened to run into other author friend Gail Carriger, who not-so-subtly introduced me to her agent on my way to my own prospective agent meeting. Did every single possible-future-peddler-of-my-manuscripts I ran into ask me what was in the boxes? Yeah. Yeah, they did.

So, thank you OKRWA. And, thank you, Oklahoma! I don’t know why you like my books so much, but I’m gonna roll with it. And I love that you’ve developed an award that is geared toward indie romance authors. We seriously need it!

I kept the lid on this one for as long as I could, but I was so excited that i HAD to post it. But it’s fair to let folks know that as of the writing of this blog posting, not all of the winners have been announced. For those of you who are waiting to hear back on final standings, best of luck!