Day 108/Day 16: World's Greatest Stalker

Yesterday afternoon, after grinding on Chapter 6 for four or five hours, the phone rang. Someone in Boyfriend's family was having the kind of meltdown, Category 5 Bad Effing Day that a certain writer we know used to experience on a weekly (or daily) basis.

This person needed our help. So we jumped in the car and drove to Banff, where she lives. Boyfriend and I "slept" on her couch and are now crack-addled and half-insane from lack of sleep.

I am also facing a day where I didn't complete yesterday's chapter (FAIL) and have overprogrammed the schedule with a lunch-date with Grandpa and Canmore With A Two-Year-Old for the next day and a half (EPIC FAIL BEYOND ALL HOPE OF RECOVERY). The idea of 'falling behind' is such a drastic understatement, I can't even begin. Nor can I face the raping and pillaging of my writing space – raping and pillaging of my own doing.

Sometimes being a good Samaritan is a very bad idea.

But it's hard to beat myself up too much, having had such a lovely time in Banff (despite that mockery of sleep) and looking forward to time with people I love. It's also hard to process the fact that the Eyeshot editor FOUND Sunday's blog post in which I extolled his editorial virtues and emailed me at 4:43 a.m. to follow up and futher explain.

I just got a free writing lesson from the editor of a journal in which Zadie Smith (White Teeth, ridiculously famous) was not only a contributor but his illustrative example.

He'd been Googling 'Eyeshot rejections' and found his way to me. The writing assessment I gave myself on Sunday was on the completely wrong track, by the way. It's not sensationalism I need to be working on, it's subtlety. Form, craft, narrative nuance. You know, the nuts n' bolts of good writing. He sent me to an essay by the divine Miss Smith published in the New Yorker to make clear his comments about my work.

And then this person, who has officially bought the Beyond The Call Of Duty t-shirt, apologized if his email came across as stalkerish. As far as I'm concerned, he can stalk me any day of the week. Christmas came early for Miz Jones. And I will now work triple-extra-hard to get my work up to snuff and in his journal. And really, as far as I'm concerned, this is the best day ever. Despite that mockery of sleep.