Good on you, A.L. Kennedy

This week A.L. Kennedy won the Costa prize for her novel Day, which was good news for my word count. I used to keep a petty tally of my published work with an eye to accumulating the forty pages I’d need to be able to join the Quebec Writers’ Federation, in dignity, as a writing member. They have another, more inclusive category, with the same array of valuable benefits, but I wanted nothing to do with this wretched sounding general membership. If it took me years, I would get my 10,000 words, array of valuable benefits be damned!

In the end, it took me so long to accumulate the forty pages that I forgot why I was even doing it in the first place and stopped keeping track at all, that is, until this week, when I found out about the Costa, which is a UK phenomenon of interest to people everywhere, including Edmonton, where the books pages of one of the papers had yet to run a review of this year’s winning title. It seems that in situations like these, editors rely on one another to share. So the editor in Edmonton contacted the editor in Montreal, and they reached an agreement, whereby that paper could borrow a review of Day I wrote last year. When I heard about that, I suddenly remembered my word count. Another 700 words! Surely I was a writer by now. When was the last time I’d checked anyway?

So I got out my calculator and it turns out that I didn’t even need Kennedy to win that Costa, although I’m, of course, very happy that she did, in a “one writer to another” kind of way.

Pictured: Esme Distrobotoing.