Once again I have foisted my oleaginous attentions on an admired writer. If you write fiction and I have a special fondness for your work you better hope I don't snare your email address. Superlatives ooze from every orifice and I take on the simultaneously fawning and demanding qualities that distinguish the contemporary psychosis of true fandom. I need to work on this. They're just people and would rather be treated like people, not like monuments or celebrities or embodiments of perfect genius. I don't think any novelist I deeply admire would respond well to being the subject of awe. I must remember that. I always start out okay then it goes haywire, and before I know it I'm offering to do their laundry or forgetting that I shouldn't mention the shrine I've made to them in the linen closet, with its creepy suggestion of a disordered mind and very slight resemblance to a Santeria altar. Fortunately there aren't too many living writers I admire with sufficient fervor to trigger such quasi-pathologies. Of course I could always desecrate the grave of Samuel Beckett in some orgiastic ritual of spiritual ecstasy. Luckily I'm afraid to fly.