I’ve been sending you a lot of mail about summits recently, so today I wanted to remind you of why you’re here: because you know there’s something in this storytelling-for-sales lark, if you could just figure out how to do it.

So here’s a technique that you can try this week, that doesn’t include a specific story, but achieves the some of the same things. (Stay tuned, after the example, for my challenge to you).

The Non-Story Storytelling Email

This week my friend and fellow author, Fallon Brown, sent out an amazing email.

And before I share it, I want you to know that Fallon is, by their own admission, the biggest introvert on the planet. So I was kind of stunned when I received sent this perfect little email, that invited us in to the world of the product (the novels), but also into the heart of the author behind them.

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TEXT READS: Saying Yes

Fallon Brown: There are a few things I always say yes to when it comes to writing my books.

And today, I wanted to share them with you to see if we have anything in common!

Writing stories that feature trans and nonbinary characters

Letting those characters solve mysteries, fall in love, and be able to thrive

Get emotionally attached to my own fictional characters

Start playing with a new idea before I’ve actually finished one

Because at the end of the day…

I’m not just writing to send a message or to help cis-het people learn that those of us who don’t fit in that box actually deserve the same rights as them. I want to write about my queer characters being able to go on the same journey their straight counterparts are able to without ever being questioned about it.

And that nothing about them needs to be fixed.

That’s exactly what I kept in mind while creating Triple Play….

Breaking The Rules

This email seems to go against all the copywriting advice to write about ‘them not you’, and to take all the ‘I’s out of your emails.

But if you read more carefully you’ll notice that this is partly about Fallon but it’s also about the reader: “Let’s see if we have anything in common…”

And it’s a courageous email because it invites people to say, “No, we do not have these things in common”. (Remember, getting rid of the wrong audience is an energy-preserving strategy in the long term!

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Where’s the Story?

I call this a storytelling email because it’s borrowing the techniques of storytelling. It uses our ‘character’ (Fallon)’s motivation and desire to stir emotions in us, the reader, and makes us curious to know if they will achieve their goals:

• ‘Fallon Brown’ is no longer just a name on the page–an author with a book to sell–but rather, a character with a desire to influence people’s hearts, in meaningful ways.
• The characters in Fallon’s books are no longer just characters, they are, “queer characters…able to go on the same journey their straight counterparts are able to without ever being questioned about it.”

Now, when I see Triple Play in a bookstore, I know the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ behind it. And I’m invited to join the good fight of championing equality by doing something I enjoy anyway: reading a good book!

Triple Play is no longer just another one of the 4.2 million books that will be published this year.

It’s the work of a real human I feel connected to.

It’s a purchase I can feel good about.

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Your Assignment

Your assignment this week is to write a list of the reasons you do what you do, and then send it to the people on your list.

• You can call it ‘things I love about what I do’, or ‘The upside of being a [what it is you do]. Try to include something that feels a bit vulnerable.
• It doesn’t have to be a story (look back at Fallon’s bullet points), but it does have to show you as a real, three-dimensional character with hopes—and possibly fears.
• It should contain a line like “how about you?” or “let’s see what we have in common”, or “hit reply and let me know YOUR favorite thing”…

Hit “reply” and tell me what you wrote about—or ask for advice, if you’re stuck.

(See what I did there?)

Let’s begin,

Julie

P. S. If you want to read Fallon’s books, you can find out more, here.

It also doesn’t take away my gob-smacked-ness that it actually happened.

It’s wonderful. It’s thrilling. And it’s has, rather annoyingly, made it impossible for me to wallow in all the excuses writers use NOT to write (“I’m not good enough”, “Nobody wants my stories”) because someone did want my story and that someone is the editor of one of the grandaddies of Sci-Fi magazines.

Things that will surprise non-writers:

• The payment, though rated as ‘professional’, would in no way would allow me to support myself by publishing short stories even if I could get one published every week.
• There is no guarantee that anyone will ever want another story from me (though if I keep writing and sending them out, I have as fair a chance as anyone).
• No-one is breaking down my door asking to publish a novel, a screenplay or anything else from me.
• The story is in a journal that is locked behind a paywall so may be read by fewer people that would read it if it was in a less prestigious journal.

It is, however, a publication that makes me eligible for several awards and memberships in organizations that I couldn’t have accessed otherwise.

It’s incredibly encouraging.

Analog published the Foundation stories by Isaac Asimov and I know my dad (a huge fan) would have been tickled pink by this convergence .

The icing on the cake would have been able to show it to him, but I know he’d probably have just shrugged and said, “of course!” (It’s a wonderful thing to have parents who have faith in you.)

I am absolutely delighted, and gratified that so many people are delighted for me.

Onward!

“Oh, I don’t think of YOU as an immigrant…”

“Don’t change your accent. It’s so charming.”

“People from your country always sound so intelligent.”

“Why would you leave there to live here?”

Things people have said to me that have left me speechless:

“Thank you for taking the time to learn English. So many people come here and don’t even bother…”

“Scotland? Is that near London/in England?”
(I have learned to be less snooty about this kind of comment as I’ve realized how many places there are in the world about which I know very little.)

“Isn’t it great that people can come here and live in a free country?” (Said by a plus-one at a gathering of mostly-lawyers. “Ever heard of habeas corpus?” one of them sniggered, sotto vocce, which made me want to punch him and hug the well-meaning plus-one.)

Things you might need to know about me for this post to make sense

I am Scottish (culturally), British (legally), and I significantly increase the albedo of any area I occupy.

While we Pennsylvanians are getting up at midnight in sub-zero temperatures to watch a rodent pulled out of a log, the French are celebrating Feb 2 by sitting down to crepes.

I thought pancakes were just for the ‘oh no, Lent is almost here, time to give something up’ energy of Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Day, but today I discovered that the French also make a point of celebrating Feb 2 with pancakes, because it is Candlemas.

A Memory

I remember being taken to church and given a drippy candle and never being quite sure why, once a year, as a child, but I loved it.

Turns out, Candlemas marks the official end of the Christmas season (yes, the Christmas season starts at Christmas and goes until now. Catholic churches, unlike retail temples, are quiet and undecorated through Advent, until the Christmas masses, then they are a riot of candles and greenery and fancy vestments, and “Happy Christmas” greetings all the way through January.)

It also marks the return of the light, hence the candle-based shenanigans.

I am reliably informed (by my friends who pay attention to the longer-lived, nature-based holidays that Christianity often co-opted and incorporated into its own calendars), that this is Imbolc, a holiday that celebrates the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

Another memory

Many half-awake mornings on the school bus for the 45 minute ride to school, through Ayrshire’s arable land; shocked, in the cold, dark of this time of year, to see tiny wee lambs pa-doinging around in the fields.

But apparently this is what Imbolc or Candlemas is also about: it’s a time for animals to give birth and to give milk.

February (usually a little later than this) and March were a big time for lambs, which only shocked me because I spent the first nine years of my life in the paved paradise of ex-urban London before being transplanted to the rolling fields of Ayrshire, famous for its production of potatoes and lamb. (And golf, but that’s not edible so I was less interested.)

An aside: This background is probably why I laughed so hard at Terry Pratchett’s Vimes character wondering why we teach city kids that animals say ‘moo’ and ‘bah’ when, in the city, what they mostly say is ‘sizzle’!

Back to the point: New life and new milk must have seemed like such a relief in the days before supermarkets and vacuum-packed-everything. I can see why you’d spare some of that milk to mix up a batch of pancakes.

We Are Part of Nature

I think it’s probably a good idea to pay attention to the rhythms of nature.

Yes it’s (way below) freezing outside, and has been for a couple of weeks, but even though I haven’t been out much, I do feel the light pulling at me. Pulling me–and my mood–upwards.

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania

Dammit, Phil!

I was always destined to be a reader. My parents read to me. My parents read around me. And as soon as I could read, it was what I wanted to do with most of my time.

So I developed a feel for language and an unusually sophisticated vocabulary for a child.

Which, you know, was something all the other kids admired and never made fun of me for.

Looking back I can see that yes, people absolutely felt threatened by my use of ‘big words’ because they assumed it was performative: that I was doing it to show them up, or that I was judging them for not using big words. In fact, I was just talking the way my imaginary friends talked. It had nothing to do with anyone else.

Now

I like to handwrite. I find it soothing. And when I write, I like to write with a fountain pen.

People feel compelled to comment on this, and when they do I hear that faint echo of the playground: “ooo, look at you with your fancy words and your fancy pen. You think you’re so special. You think you’re better than everyone else.”

That’s my issue, not theirs.

I laugh it off by telling them I went to a very old-fashioned school (true) where you weren’t allowed to write with pen at all unless it was a fountain pen (also true) and that your pencil handwriting had to be approved by your teacher before you were allowed to ‘graduate’ to using a pen at all (also true). When you did, you had to care for your own pen and make sure you remembered to bring it to school and take it home again otherwise you’d suffer the indignity of a, having to use a scratchy, crappy school pen or b, (horrors!) going back to using a pencil, like a baby!

So yeah, maybe there is something deep-seated about my love of the fountain pen. It represented ‘being one of the big kids’, but not just because you had aged out of Infant-class activities, but because you’d worked to earn the right to use it, to be someone who could be trusted with a fancy and fragile pen.

But I don’t use a pen to impress anyone, and I don’t have a collection of fancy pens.

I have one pen I use every day. I refill it from a glass bottle of ink, quietly (except for this post) patting myself on the back for being as eco-conscious as I can be.

And when I occasionally want a change, I use one of the disposable plastic pens that find their way into my house…and my hand hurts.

See, this is why I really use a fountain pen: because you can hold a fountain pen loosely and let its nib glide lightly across the page in one fluid movement without suffering from hand cramps.

(I even had someone comment on the way I write, once, when we were 12. Apparently I move my whole hand/arm after every word. I wrote so much — at school and at home — that apparently I developed this easy handwriting style. All I wanted to do–when I wasn’t reading–was write, so I found a comfortable way to do it. I hadn’t even noticed I’d done it until Lorraine, aged 12, commented on my style.)

I don’t use big words to be performative. I don’t use a fountain pen to say ‘I’m better than you’.

Heck, I don’t even wear clothes with logos on them, because that’s how not-performative I am.

Now +1

But I did knit a Melt the ICE hat to send a message about who I stand with and where I’d like to put my money — MN immigration organizations, BTW. All proceeds from the pattern.

Because I think 4389 knitters (and counting) making the same hat, for the same ideological reason is the RIGHT kind of performance.

Dumping tea in Boston Harbor was performative.

Storming the Bastille was performative.

I will wear my tasselled, red hat in public and be judged as the performative, outraged white middle class lady I am.

And you will know that you are not alone.

(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life

Consider this:

Former news anchor Dan Rather is, as I write, 93. That means he has lived through almost 40% of the entire history of his nation, in its current political form.

That makes him, technically, a contemporary of Thomas Edison, who was still alive when Rather was born. Edison, if he had been in the right place at the right time could, conceivably have bumped into Alexander Hamilton’s widow Eliza, right up until he was 7 years old.

You could call Dan Rather up, and be talking to a man who could have been held as a baby by man who might have met Eliza Hamilton, widow of a founding father of his country.

Time After Time

Things that you think were a long time ago, really weren’t that long ago, even in terms of individual human lives.

And let’s not even talk about geological or astronomical time scales.

The moment you are living in right now is both an undetectable blip in the history of the universe AND a moment of immense consequence because it is the only moment you can influence.

And isn’t that kind of great?

But we are not so unique.

When humans get together, we follow the same patterns. We repeat the same mistakes. We discover the same joys as our ancestors did.

Isn’t She Lovely?

We are stunned when a baby takes their first breath…though they’ve been doing it for at least 300,000 years.

We are stopped in our tracks by a violet-orange autumn sunset.

We smile at the first flowers of spring.

We love and we shun.

We hope and we fear, and we don’t always act in our own best interests, because of that.

But I’m here. And you are here.

And I’m glad of that.

I was a member of Audible back in their pre-Amazon days when you could only listen to their stuff on a pre-iPod mp3-player and when they had different compression rates

(Level 1 sounded terrible but downloaded quickly and didn’t take up much space on your device. It was also barely intelligible, but that ‘barely’ was better than paying $45 to own the cassettes or CDs, and then having to lug around the large, battery-hungry device that played them.)

I loved Amazon and Audible with a passion.

When Amazon bought Audible them I had vague concerns about monopolization but I also deeply loved the ‘whisper sync’ feature that meant that I could be reading an ebook on my Kindle and then switch to the audiobook on Audible which would pick up at the same point

Holy heavenly reader joy!

However, now that Amazon has gone full Robber Baron, I no longer buy my ebooks from Amazon and have stopped paying Audible the $15 a month I’ve happily paid for about 20 years.

How I Get My Books Now

(tl;dr: Resource Section at the end of this article)

Physical Books

I’m lucky enough to live in a town with an indie bookstore, so my first port of call when I want a book is Reads & Company.

(If I’m honest, my first port of call is usually Bookshop.org which claims to share profits with the indie bookstore of your choice (my designated bookstore is my local indie. N.B. I’m keeping an eye on this in the ‘this seems too good to be true’ category. That’s why I try to make an effort to walk down to the shop or call them and have them order things for me if they don’t have it in stock.)

Also I have a library within walking distance that is connected to a large county-wide system and which also offers ebooks and audio books, though the wait times are often comically long.

The upsides – I interact with real, flesh and blood book lovers; I get some exercise, if I walk there; I get to browse and stumble on titles I might never otherwise see; my money helps employ local folks, support a local business and funnel tax revenue–from sales and the employees’ income–into my town’s coffers, which make it a better place to live (taxes are good, m’kay?).
The downsides – I’ve had to learn to be patient again. I can’t one-click buy a book on a whim, while listening to an NPR interview with an author (which will then sit on my Kindle, forgotten about in the terrible, terrible interface for browsing and cataloging your books that Amazon never bothered to improve–wait, it that actually an upside?); I might not get the big discounts; they might not have it in stock and I might have to wait. (Again with the patience. Aargh. Again, this might be an upside)

eBooks

Bookshop.org now offers ebooks. Not always, and sometimes imperfectly (I bought a book that was listed as DRM-free – so that I could download it and read it on any device, but the publisher had not done the settings properly so, turns out, it wasn’t DRM-free), but it’s a young service and I have hopes it will.

I also try to order directly from authors.

This can be a little tricky as I have to apply some thought to the process: how do I get this onto my devices, again? Every author uses a different system (some use Bookfunnel, some use SendOwl, some have you download them directly from their website…). This may put off people less comfortable with tech (and trial and error) than I am, but since I can tackle these minor obstacles, I do.

(Most authors and indie publishers provide a handy step stool to help you clamber over the gate, by means of step by step instructions on the download page.)

RESOURCES

How I Read Ebooks

I do love my Kindle with its e-ink screen and handy form factor, so often I will email my downloaded books to my Amazon digital library.

(Go here and scroll down to “personal document settings” to set up your ‘send to’ email and your approved ‘send from’ email addresses. Then it’s as simple as sending the ‘epub’ file to that send to address and it’ll appear on your Kindle.)

Yes, I know this keeps me tethered to Amazon’s platform and prevents me from deleting my account.

Second option: connect my e-reader to my computer via a USB cable and drag the documents across. (This still works for now, though I will not be surprised if Amazon turns off this ability, at which point my Kindle will become a very expensive ornament.)

The upsides – I’m not supporting a corporation that is trying to take over our whole lives and grind smaller businesses in every realm (including pharmacies, medical records and grocery stores?!) under their boot heel.
The downsides – these are considerable–to me–but they are all related to my convenience and I don’t think that’s too high a price to pay for the irritating luxury of having principles. Namely: It’s not a one-click process to load my ebooks onto every device I own through one handy app anymore. I have to pause and read the instructions. I am responsible for remembering what I bought and where I put it (the horror!). After years of being groomed to use the frictionless Amazon eco-system, it’s taking me a minute to get used to reintroducing al little inconvenience into my life, but I’m actually starting to dig it. (Is it wrong to feel heroic for doing something as simple as NOT-buying-from-an-evil-corporation-because-they-made-it-easy-to-do-so? Perhaps…)

How I listen to Audio Books

I have swapped my Audible membership for one with Libro.fm, which is an employee-owned, social purpose corporation, B-Corporation (which means they pursue social and financial goals in the for-profit sphere, and which gives them more latitude to pursue social goals over financial goals, than other corporate structures allow) and their profits support indie bookstores.

And sometimes I buy directly from the author, as I did with Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification, which explains how the promise of the internet was hijacked and “enshittified” by a few big corporations and what we can do about it, which was directly responsible for me creating this article.

However, then I had to apply brain power to figuring out how I was going to listen to it.

Fortunately I’ve been online for a looooooong time, and remembered a little app I used to use for putting audio from courses into a useable format on my phone. It’s called Bound and it still exists. I saved Doctorow’s book files to Dropbox and then used Bound to

(Fun fact: writing this gave me the opportunity to instruct my word processor to learn the spelling of “enshittification”…)

The Upsides Titles from Libro.fm and direct-from-author can be downloaded and saved on my local hard drive or in a cloud storage of my choice, backed up and moved around, and will be mine forever. (One of my pet peeves with Audible is that sometimes a publisher will lose the license for an audiobook and a new publisher makes a new edition with a different narrator and all I want is the original audio…if Audible takes that version off their site I may not be able to access it again—this used to not be true because you used to be able download audible files but they changed that rule this year. And yes, I did spend an afternoon downloading 20+ years of Audible files to my local drive before that policy kicked in, thanks for asking.)
Libro.fm is a socially-conscious, employee-owned company and I feel good about that.
If I buy directly from the author, NOT via an app, the author gets to keep more money, hopefully freeing them up to write more stuff I might enjoy.
Additional note: if you can buy directly from the vendor, on a website, you save them the ruinous fees charged by app stores, sending more of the money to the people who are providing the services you value (the authors, the vendors, not the third-parties-who-act-as-slum-landlord-storefronts.
The Downsides Again: a lack of convenience, for me, and a little more use of my brain. Sometimes I have to (gasp) stop and think “how can I listen to this?” or “Which app do I listen to this one in?”. My ebooks no longer sync with my audio copy, if I haven’t bought both from Amazon. And sometimes they cost more. But not always.

Have you noticed how my downsides lists all involve me having to use my brain and be a little bit inconvenienced and how that sometimes ends up flipping back into an upside? Hmm….

In case you want to ditch the ‘zon, too:

A By-No-Means-Exhaustive List of Resources

(…but containing some of my favorite tools and services)

Physical Book Resources:

Bookshop.org Buy books online, support indie bookstores.
Indybound Find an indie bookstore
Borrow from your local library.

e-Book Resources

Bookshop.org/ebooks Buy online, support indie bokstores.
libbyapp.com Access your public library’s collection. Requires a library card.
Epub reader (ebook reader – I haven’t tried this but it has a 4.5 star rating from 9k+ reviewers in the Apple App Store alone)
Hoopla (Access your public library. Requires an account)

Audiobook Resources:

Libro.fm Audible-like audiobook store and optional subscription service, with a social conscience.
(And here’s my referral link, which gets me a free audiobook credit if you happen to use it to create a new membership)
Libby & Hoopla (see above) also allow you to borrow audiobooks from your library.
Bound (use it for all kinds of audio that you might want to listen to: course replays, audio books, study notes…)

Move Closer

We’re in a moment of churn, of turmoil, and the noise is only getting louder.
This might be a time where less really is more. When craft is rare. Where soul matters.
I’m going to write, here, when I have something to say.
I’m going to write slowly. I’m probably going to write a lot. There will be complex sentences with tangents and diversions and too many clauses.
And I will try to help you remember that there was a time before this. There will be a time after this.
But this is our moment, and, to paraphrase Ira Gershwin, they can’t take that away from us.