LOVE LETTERS IN THE NET

by Robert Lopresti

One of the gazillion ways that the Internet has changed my life is fan mail. You no longer need a stamp, an address, and a half hour of time to tell somebody you like their stuff.

A few years ago I decided that whenever I read a short story I really admired I would send the author a note. Sure, people named Westlake and Grafton probably have to shovel love letters off the table before they can eat breakfast, but for us grunts, the cannon fodder of the genre, word from the home front is sparse and welcome.

And the web makes it easy to find authors. If the object of your affection is one of the three people left in America who doesn’t own a website you can always send your email to the editors and ask them to pass it on. You might be surprised how many authors will write back. (Hey, writing is what we do.)

A Brief Bout of Nostalgia

My first encounter with fan mail, of a kind, was on a website called Mysterynet. In its glory days Mysterynet featured a new short story every day – and paid a good fee for them, too. The site encouraged people to leave comments on what they liked or didn’t like about the stories and I received more feedback on the four stories of mine that appeared there then on all the stories I had published in magazines before that.

The overwhelming response? A whole lot of people didn’t understand ‘em. And it wasn’t just me. A significant number of the commenters couldn’t figure out what happened in the stories, whoever wrote them. Sometimes even the ones who liked the stories misunderstood them. I don’t know whether this said more about our stories or our readers (I think those commenting tended to be younger than average), but it was a lesson for me.

Mysterynet is a shell of its former self now, by the way, endlessly rerunning the same old stories (which they purchased the right to do). Too bad. It was a great market.

Today I Am A Textbook

My friend Jim Portillo teaches newly blind adults to use computers. He needs texts for them to read, so I send him each of my newly published stories in electronic form and he sometimes assigns his students to read them. Then they have to write to me with their thoughts. It’s great fun, for me at least.

These comments seemed more sophisticated than the Mysterynet crowd (adults vs teens?) My all-time favorite was one who noticed that one of my murderers, an elderly man, showed signs of senility. The reader wondered if this was my way to excuse him from the guilt for his crimes.

I was able to assure her that no, the killer was fully culpable and if there is a hell, he’s going there. Ah, the power of the author.

Another thread from the web.

Just in case this page has not satisfied all of your blogging needs (hard to imagine, I know) I want to point out Technorati.com which searches through all the world’s blogs so you don’t have to.

For example, searching for “Edgar Allan Poe” pulled up 13,000 blog entries. By comparison, “Criminal Brief” pulled up 32 (these are blog entries about Criminal Brief, not necessarily the entries in it… confused yet?).

I was pleased to see that some of the entries were about my blog entries. They discussed my brilliant and insightful theories on genre literature. Nah, who am I kidding? Most of them were about a conversation I had with a ten-year-old on a plane to D.C. Still, it’s nice to be noticed.