[Introduction: Melanie Stormm continues her humorous series of posts about the misdirected emails she’s been getting. Stormm is a multiracial writer who writes fiction, poetry, and audio theatre. Her novella, Last Poet of Wyrld’s End is available through Candlemark & Gleam. She is currently the editor at the SPECk, a monthly publication on speculative poetry by the SFPA. Find her in her virtual home at coldwildeyes.com (temporarily closed for update). Wipe your feet before entering.]

THE SECRET TO WRITING

Hello All! Melanie here.

Last week, Writer X didn’t get much done by way of writing, but she did park her house on Mount Ararat. I’m not sure there are many people who could say they’d ever crossed that off their to-do list.

They say that success breeds more success. After a year of writing next to nothing, X has finally discovered the secret to generating pages.

Without further ado…

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Subject: Stakeout CANCELLED

Dear Gladys,

In case you didn’t know whose Ultra Halogenic High Performance Blind-You-And-Your-Mother Highbeam Headlights were angled into your living room all night, not to worry, it was just me!!!!

So that you knew who it was, I flashed you the SUPER SECRET signal and then I realized that us having a super secret signal was just something I remembered from a dream.

That being said, I know you SAW the super secret signal because when I hit that sweet strobe light action, your silhouette went crashing around in the dark, groping for your bookshelf only to catch hold of a Red Sox snowglobe, thusly tumbling into your television. Once you’ve fully recovered from your concussion, make sure you remember the flash pattern so that we can use it in the future and do some cool spy stuff!!!!

Did you know there’s a sale on televisions just like yours at the new appliance store on Seventh Hill? Just in time after all the damage you did to yours!!!! You can thank me later for that savings tip, Gladys!!!!

I know you probably would have wanted me to come in and say hello and possibly call the paramedic but I had an EMERGENCY and had to leave RIGHT AWAY. I know you understand.

Anyhoo, I’m sure you’re dying to know how my writing is going. I FOUND THE SECRET TO WRITING, GALDSY!!!!

You’d never believe how I stumbled on the secret. It all began with my faberge eggs.

As you know, since my boyfriend, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins, moved in with me, I’ve been in the MOOD to write more often, but the funny thing is that I still wasn’t getting  much writing done what with the flood, the baers, and the other activities that are mysteriously wiped from my memory BUT I’M SURE WERE IMPORTANT!!!!

Since we arrived back from Mount Ararat, our house is significantly normal sized. Ordinarily, this would be fine, but as you know Gladys, I have a lot of unusual needs and my boyfriend and I have been feeling kind of cramped this last week.

In fact, just the other morning my boyfriend left his car windows open and didn’t remember until it began to rain at about six a.m. He bolted out of bed to fix it before the interior was drenched. He tried to hop into his jeans but he had no place to put his other foot down thanks to all my faberge eggs. With one pant leg on and only enough room to bounced on one foot, he hopped around the bed, out the door, and onto the landing.

Then he fell down the stairs.

Anyhoo, after all that he said, “I feel like there are three people in this relationship. You, me, and those faberge eggs.”

That’s when I knew I had to do something about our living conditions!!!! We needed our old house back!!!! The question was HOW.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, Gladys. You’re thinking that a sensible person would call customer service at Mount Ararat and tell them to mail my house back on their dime, but there was a lot of water and pig damage so we needed to start fresh!!!!

I went straightaway to a housing contractor and told them what I needed and Gladys YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE the astronomical costs of a simple 3000 square feet of architecture these days!!!! As it turns out, I didn’t have that sort of change on me so I went down to Cradensburg Savings and Litigation and applied for a home equity loan of two to three million and DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAID GLADYS>????

They said that my credit is bad!!!!! How is my credit bad, Gladys?? I have my credit cards completely maxed so obviously I’m good at credit!!!! So I asked them how I’m supposed to get my writing wing rebuilt and they said they have a CREDIT COMEBACK SERVICE that they run every couple of months and their next runs starts in just a week so IF I took home their fifty page financial packet and brought it back filled with my current drivers license, the signature of a notary republic, and a sprinkle of moondust, then I might get it in just in time.

You know how bad I am at filling out financial packets, Gladys!!!! My inability to fill out packets has saved me more than once!!! How else would I have gotten out of that timeshare in Greenland????

But if I didn’t do something, my boyfriend would be stuck falling down the stairs from here to eternity so I did the responsible and loving thing. I called out of work, blocked off my schedule, gathered all my important documents, highlighters, prismatic unicorn stickers, and a few packets of those sprinkler candles to make the atmosphere more inviting, and sat down to finally make myself fill out a financial packet.

And that’s when it happened, Gladys, that’s when I finally came across the secret of writing.  

It was also about that time that I started to be locked out of my house.

Up to this point, I bet you were thinking that I was filling out the financial packet IN my house. Well, I would have been, but I happened to pass by the town green and I saw that the people from the Mysterious Complex had it all roped off because they were filming a movie. So I set myself up in the burnt down gazebo in the green to get the best view as they filmed.

At first the director tried to throw me out saying that I was trespassing and he had a permit and that my pink sombrero was “ruining” the shot and “how are they supposed to shoot a movie with a wizard magically appearing in a grassy vale when the audience will be looking at the lady in the giant pink sombrero???”

I informed him of the town charter set up after the third revolutionary war that stipulates that “none shall be hindered from free enjoyment of the town gazebo regardless if they are also donning a pink sombrero” blah blah blah and that director had to eat CROW!!!!

High on exhilaration after discovering the secret to writing, I took my new, freshly written story and returned home only to discover that I had been locked out my house.

What was even more interesting was that, in spite of my boyfriend’s car in the driveway and Tryxy’s music playing in the house, nobody was coming to let me in. Also, Tryxy has to start school again at Miskatonic Online University in a couple weeks and he told me he was trying to soak up as much summer as he had left. Last year we spent all summer stuck in my closet and this summer has been mostly rain. I thought he and #bestkitten would have gone down to Not A Beach with some of their other young friends. Maybe he left his stereo on, I thought.

I figured I would let a few hours pass, and so to kill time, I went looking for you to show you the AMBSOLUTELY PERFECT story I had written while at the burnt down gazebo thwarting the desires of that obnoxious film director. That’s when I went on the first stakeout outside of your house and scared away your mail carrier when she fell across my legs sticking out of the bushes.

I was resting in the shade, Galdsy!!!!

Anyhoo, while I was waiting for you to return so that I could read you my story and let you bask in its glory, I started to read over the pages I had just written and that’s when SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS HAPPENED. And this comes to the crux of the help I am asking you for!!!!

Somehow, instead of PERFECT writing with gilded prose and a gripping, riveting plot, I was reading THE WORST WRITING IN THE WORLD!!!!! I know what you’re thinking, Gladys, you’re thinking that someone must have stolen my perfect draft and REPLACED IT WITH GARBAGE!!!!

This is still a viable explanation for what’s happened and I haven’t yet ruled out the director trying to act out his revenge for me making his movie more interesting, but I think what’s happening is far stranger and—dare I say—MORE PARANORMAL!!!!

Needless to say, I was horrified to discover that my beautiful story had been replaced with the sludge you find at the bottom of the vegetable hydrator when you and your best friend finally get out of being locked in your closet all summer. I was disgruntled. I was devastated. I was a disaster area. I cried so hard as I drove back home, I couldn’t see anything through my tears so I’m sorry about what happened to your mailbox.

Fortunately when I got home, the door was ajar so I went up to my room, tip toed over the faberge eggs, collapsed in total despair, and locked in a solid eight hours of sleep so was set to do it all again the next day!!!!

The next day it wasn’t lost on me that I still had to fill out the financial packet and was running out of time so I donned my sombrero, packed my financial packet, called out of work, went down to the burnt down gazebo where a bunch of actors in goblin costumes carrying spears were lined up in ranks, and argued with the director who had made peace with my pink sombrero but this time disagreed with the giant tub of cheese puffs “clogging up his battle scene”, and promptly got to work on my financial packet

WHICH RESULTED IN ME WRITING ANOTHER ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT STORY!!!!!!

This story was exquisite, Gladys. It has everything: romance, magic, betrayal, uptown funk, EVERYTHING. I’m pretty sure it’s going to earn me an award after I find it again because, once again, I returned home to refill my cheese puffs only to discover my boyfriend’s car in the driveway, Tryxy’s music blaring, but my door locked and barred.

So I went to your house to stakeout and startled your mail carrier after she fell over my sombrero and into a can of paint. Once that was resolved, I pulled out my draft and re-read the new story ONLY TO DISCOVER THAT IT TOO HAD MYSTERIOUSLY TURNED TO UNINTELLIGIBLE NONSENSE!!!!

The character’s names were the same. And the betrayal happened in the same place, but somehow someone had changed all of the words so that they were cruddy and half the time I didn’t even know what the characters were thinking!!!!! NOT TO MENTION TEH TYPOS!@!!!!

Today, it happened again. Only this time I got to your house much later on account of the director writing me into the script as Lady in the Pink Sombrero and changing the movie from epic fantasy to a psychological thriller about a man who imagines that he’s in a battle with wizards and goblins but he’s really pining over the disappearance of his beautiful wife, Lady in the Pink Sombrero, and sees her haunting all of his delulus.

Still, I sat down to fill out the financial packet and ONCE AGAIN, wrote a story MORE incredible than the last two!!!!! This PROVED to me that I have finally discovered the secret to becoming the most productive writer in the WORLD.

This is the secret gladys, are you ready????

The best time to write is when you are IN THE MIDDLE OF AVOIDING SOMETHING ELSE.

But now that I’ve discovered the secret, I have ANOTHER problem.

I no longer have a legitimate reason to fill out the financial packet. You see, tonight, when I returned home, the door was ajar and Tryxy and my boyfriend, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins, were standing just inside the door still covered in drywall dust and paint shouting “surprise!!!!!”

It turns out the reason I had been locked out of my house was because they were busy installing a recessed shelf to hold my faberge eggs in one of our walls!!!!! It was beautiful and I was touched by all the work they had put into creating it but I also knew my writing run was over. With the faberge eggs having a home and my boyfriend no longer in danger of falling down the stairs, there was no need for me to fill out the financial packet and I still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of what’s been happening to my story drafts!!!

This is where you come in, Galdsy. I’ve got my eye on your mail carrier. She’s the missing link in all of this!!!! It’s entirely possible that she’s the one who’s been running off with my good stories and replacing them with these mediocre or even bad stories!!!!! Tomorrow night, I’m having a faberge egg party to celebrate my new shelf, but the NEXT night I’m free to SPY ON YOUR MAIL CARRIER. I’ll pop by your house after dark and shine my lights in your window and GIVE YOU THE SUPER SECRET SIGNAL.

It also could be aliens.

Pages next week Gladys!!!!

xox,

X

I WENT

TO NOT

A BEACH

WITH

#BESTKITTEN

TO GET

A TAN

AND SOAK

UP SOME

WAVES BUT

WE COULDN’T

GET

COMFORTABLE

IN ALL

THE ROCKS

AND ALGAE

AND THE

FISHERMEN

IN WADERS

KEPT BOMBING

OUR SELFIES.

WHOEVER

CALLED IT

A BEACH

WAS DEEP

IN DELULU.