Balancing Accounts: How to Avenge Email Snubs

Here is something i sent out last week that may amuse those of you who have ever been snubbed or ignored in your efforts to communictae in this very volatile world of email.

To whom it may concern,

Please read this in its entirety if you have any interest in improving your business sense.

If you are receiving this message, here’s why: In the last 12 months or so you have, deliberately or otherwise, ignored emails sent you regarding my wares (books, scripts, articles, etc, all suffused with that unique, sadly underappreciated Horsley genius).

I am sure you have your reasons for this. Everybody always has reasons. But unless such reasons entail a debilitating sickness, an unforeseen accident, a lawsuit, abduction by aliens or something equally earth-shattering, I am not really interested. I am concerned only with the effects which your discourtesy had on me at the time. It may have been months back; perhaps you weren’t even aware of snubbing anyone at the time, much less now. But I do remember.

Writers have longer memories than elephants. Those like myself, touched or cursed by momentary genius, we are petty, obsessive, vengeful beasts. (All decent writers write at least partly for revenge.) Some day, when the success and recognition I shamelessly covet is finally mine, all your snubs will mean nothing. They are, I freely acknowledge, part of the necessary tempering of the artist, and I shall not kick against these pricks. But allow me at least to point them out.

It is in the interests of cleansing my psyche of you once and for all that I am sending this email, collectively, to let you know that, witting or otherwise, you have offended this “hot-headed fantasist” (quoting Pauline Kael, get it??)

Perhaps you think you (or your time) are too important to observe what my mother calls “good manners” and common courtesy? Perhaps you consider these ideas old-fashioned in the age of stem cells and Internet? Whatever business you are in—in most cases a publishing house or agency—I guarantee this is not so, and that your own advancement is suffering from such an attitude. Snubbing potential clients isn’t just sloppy and rude—it’s bad business.

I wanted to keep this short. Only those with sufficiently morbid curiosity (and any of you who still have consciences) will still be reading anyway. What is this maniac trying to accomplish here? I will tell you.

This email serves as a collective Curse upon all of you who had the temerity and arrogance to ignore one of the visionary talents of our age. It is a Curse in the old, Egyptian sense, not the modern, angry expletive sense (though I am tempted). Do not expect plagues of locusts or for blood to come through your bathroom faucet. Any of you who happen to lose a limb or contract brain cancer in the next few months, please don’t blame me. The curse should fit the crime, so this is a very mild curse, intended to cause just the amount of rancor, frustration, stress, righteous wrath and indignation that you have all (wittingly or not) inflicted upon my own sensitive psyche. A particularly obscene traffic jam, perhaps, an underserved parking ticket, an unaccountably rude bank teller, painful humiliation at the hands of a beautiful woman (or star client), and suchlike—expect any or all of these in the following months.

This Curse will become effective as of next Tuesday, 31^st of October, being the day of All Hallow’s Eve, also called Sam Hain, popularly know as Halloween. Any of you who feel undeserving of this cybernetic hex, contact me with humble apology and/or convincing explanation within the next seven days, you will hereby be exempted from it. The rest of you? The next time some stupid unthinking SOB snubs, disses, or ignores you FOR NO GOOD REASON, you will think of me.

That’s all. Now go about your flagging business.

Yours karmically,

The genius-whose-daddy-didn’t love him enough,

Jake Horsley

Divine Virus Productions

And the solitary response (two hours after i sent the email, a week ago, from a US publisher):

Jake,

Your email notice certainly did the trick in making me feel a “member” of the cursed.

With that said, I do apologize for not getting back to you over the last 12 months and I am truly sorry that I haven’t been able to connect with you in a way that ended up in our making a deal for one of your projects.

Please forgive me and don’t stop sending projects to me for review in the future.

Best wishes,