Anticipation

Every year I donate to Pat Rothfuss' Worldbuilders annual fundraiser for Heifer International. My motivations are probably equal parts charitable altruism and anticipatory greed. Every $10 donated gets you entered in a lottery for thousands of fabulous prizes. Companies donate books and games, as do authors and individuals. This year the prizes also potentially included jewelry and collectibles.

Usually I don't win. This is my fifth year donating, and I've only gotten a book once. It ended up being a lackluster book. But there's always a chance that I would win a complete series by an author I'm interested in, or the collection of everything Del Ray published over the last year, or an autographed first edition of something cool. So I keep donating and being mildly disappointed when April rolls around and I realize that once again I haven't won anything.

Not super disappointed. I still donated a chunk of change to a good cause, and that's something to feel nice about. But prizes are nice, too.

This year, I got an email in late December letting me know that I'd won something but had forgotten to fill out my mailing address and could I please provide that. I got excited, sent off my mailing address and settled in to wait.

This is a long process. I cycled around from wondering what I had won to wondering if I'd been taken in by a phishing hoax to wondering if I'd even remembered to fill out the form or if I'd just been meaning to and forgotten about it. The organization finally announced that they were beginning to ship out prizes, and I resigned myself to the fact that I hadn't won anything after all.

Until my shipping notice came.

This is a new feature this year, and it's nice, because it pushed my anticipation right back up. I have no idea what I won, but I won something. And it will be here sometime in the next month (with all the prizes they ship out, they use the cheapest, slowest shipping available, which I can't even fault them for).

I'm incredibly excited to find out what I won, even if it ends being another book that I'm only lukewarm about. But maybe it'll be something exciting. It's a bit like Christmas, except I don't entirely know when my present will get here. This anticipation will probably be more exciting than the prize itself, so I'm going to savor it.