Have you ever won a contest? I haven’t. Not the contests I entered as a kid to win a pocketknife with 100 blades or a BB gun to blast Nazis. Not the contests I’ve entered as an adult, like The New Yorker cartoon caption contest, or the time I was trying to win Arcade Fire tickets but ended up with Lady Gaga.

I’ve won a few chess tournaments. That’s not the same. It was hard work. I want something for nothing.

The contests I’ve entered as an adult have mostly been writing contests. As I am white and male, I have sufficient wealth to pay the entry fees without having to skip meals or sell one of my dogs. But the fees add up, even in my privileged life. At the start of 2022, I said enough is enough. But in June of that year, while reading The Practicing Writer newsletter, I learned about the 2022 Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest.

Moment is a Jewish magazine. I’m Jewish, my parents had recently died, I wanted to write about them, and I had eight weeks. OK, I thought, I’ll try. One last time! I wrote the story. I wrote most of it while sitting under a tree at a coffee shop. I wrote it even though I stopped writing for two weeks while I thought about it. I called the story “Arguing with Reinfeld.” I sent it to Moment on the day before the deadline.

The months passed. I forgot the story. Then in May of 2023, Moment contacted me. I had won the 2022 contest.

What?

I fucking won?!

They interviewed me. They posted my story. They illustrated my story. They recorded me reading the story. They printed the story in their Fall issue. And it’s all because a) I never give up, b) I never surrender, and c) I am too much of a nitwit to do anything else.

(Editor’s note: Mr. Bieler was very close to giving up until he won this thing. But he’s still a nitwit.)

The second- and third-place finishers are half my age. That means I’m still relevant.

If you’re wondering how my life has changed since my victory, it’s too soon to tell. I appear to be married to the same person. I am no taller or shorter. I haven’t been a guest or a guest host on a late-night talk show. And I have, despite this victory, broken my record for most rejections in a year.

I will continue to write, but I’ll probably not go on writing short stories. I just won a short story contest sponsored by a magazine that was founded by Elie Wiesel. They paid me a lot of money. I’m done. When the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, ending their run of 86 years of not winning the World Series and lifting the curse from my New England childhood, I felt released. I never had to watch another baseball game again. Baseball ceased to exist in the wake of the ground ball that ended game four.

From now on, I’m only writing novels, which I will report on here.

And no more contests.

Because I won!

Let’s celebrate with some strategies for defending yourself against a corgi.