Oh my god, hi! I’m thrilled to see you here, especially so soon after I sent you the link to my short story draft. If you’re just taking a peek, no worries. I don’t expect any notes right away.
But I am going to start a timer to see how long you linger here, not-so-subtly disguised as Anonymous Kraken. The length of your stay reveals the extent of my draft’s power to pull the reader in. So even before you’ve given me any notes, you’re already saving me from downward spiraling into self-doubt. Thank you!
Oh dang, you left after just twelve seconds.
That’s okay. Maybe you had to go because your cat started a kitchen fire. Or maybe you clicked the link by accident and were like, “Whoops, this definitely isn’t the URL to activate my twenty dollars in Kohl’s cash.” Or maybe you opened the doc and saw that it’s yet ANOTHER tale about a girl and a horse that everyone underestimated, and you couldn’t X out of the tab fast enough. Just kidding—I know not everything is about me and my silly writing project.
But, just in case, I’m keeping the doc open and clicking back into it every thirty seconds to see if you reemerge.
Welcome back! It makes sense that you’d wait till the evening to dive in—you’ve finished your workday and now have enough bandwidth to leave me comments. I really can’t thank you enough. Not gonna lie, I was genuinely worried I’d scared you away for good, between the middling quality of my prose and the little “gotcha” moment where you arrived in the doc to find me waiting there for you like the killer in Scream.
All right, you’ve been in here for twenty-three minutes, but all I see is the cursor blinking on the last letter of the title. Do you not like the title? I’ve actually been going back and forth myself about whether “The Horse That Galloped Away with My Heart” is too on the nose for a story about a horse transporting a human heart from an organ donor in a city hospital to a dying girl in the countryside.
Aaaaaand you’re gone again. I hope seeing the red-rimmed circle with my initials didn’t make you feel self-conscious about editing the draft, like how it’s awkward to pee if someone’s in the next stall. Speaking of stalls, do you think I need to rewrite the whole thing from the horse’s point of view before you waste your time giving me line-by-line edits?
If you’re holding back because you’re afraid of hurting my feelings, I promise I can handle the feedback. This is an ugly draft—I know it’s not GOOD. A lot of the sentences are placeholders; I’m obviously not going to leave in lines like “I’m afraid there’s only one way to get this girl a working heart, and it’s got three legs, a terrible temper, and a laudanum addiction.” (Unless you like it?) I’m just wondering if you think I’m headed in the right direction, or if I should give up on pursuing a literary career and open up a bran muffin micro-bakery instead.
It’s been sixty hours, twelve minutes, and thirty-four seconds since I asked you for notes. You obviously think I’m such a hack that even acknowledging this document as a work of fiction would be giving me too much encouragement. I’m beginning to suspect you’re copy-pasting excerpts of my draft to your other writer friends so you guys can laugh together in your group chat about my story (which, by the way, is based on an actual experience I had one summer at equestrian camp).
I haven’t stepped away from the screen since I sent you the link FIVE WHOPPING DAYS AGO because I wanted to experience the thrill of you giving me edits in real time. Thanks to your silent cruelty, my skin is breaking out, I’m down to my last packet of ramen, and I’ve missed my sister’s wedding. Like the horse at the end of the story (sorry for the spoiler), you have bucked my heart into the dirt and are trampling it while the country folk laugh, the doctor curses a god he no longer believes in, and the girl slowly passes away.
Oh! You emailed me. At long last, I’ll get to hear your thoughts, although I don’t know why you’d choose an email over leaving me comments in the —ah, I see. That’s totally my bad. Sit tight for just one more second, and I’ll grant you editing access.