My Dear Cousin - My Novel

  

                                                          16^th May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

In my previous letters I covered the falling out between my family, and I and my refusal to attend my sister’s wedding. I believe the next point to be noted is an incident between Uncle Allen and I.

 

For all my life I wanted to be a writer and, well, the major obstacle in that department happens to be nerve damage I received, most likely, at the hands of (Pickle) and (Pony Girl). They had a game when we were children where they would pull me off the couch and make my head hit the floor.

 

This happened over and over and over again until I started having headaches and such. Well, mom couldn’t afford a sitter and it wasn’t like my old man wanted to look after his children. This left me with difficulty reading and interpreting letters.

 

Around two thousand and nine I wrote a novel about a society fighting off an alien invasion on a world neither of them belonged to. Allen volunteered to read it for me and help with editing but, well, for one his feedback was full of insults, and for another he had trouble understanding that I have nerve damage.

 

Part of me wants to believe that old Allen was a fool, part of me thinks that he was intentionally sabotaging my writing so that I would need to spend the rest of my life dealing with my mentally ill brother. Allen said he had just been joking, but I don’t know. Insults tend to be malicious.

 

I guess it doesn’t matter. I didn’t get help with my novel, and I was plenty angry at Uncle Allen, but that’s water under the bridge now. Family was never of any use to me before, and it was still rather useless.

 

Best,

 

Richard Leland Neal

 

Letters to Agents

23^rd August 2017

My Dear Friends at Management,

 I am a screenwriter, playwright, and novelist so I am pleased to find a company that would work with all three. I’ve been published in the ‘Pioneer Artistic Review’ twice. I have sold a script to Absurd TV and was then contracted and have completed rewriting a script purchased from another author for the same company.

I am currently looking to market a script called ‘Walker in the Trees’ which is something of a horror/thriller designed to be a lower budget theatrical release.  I have also written the novel to this film. ‘Walker in the Trees’ centers around Karl a man haunted by the ghost of his murdered sister.  In the film he has hunted down her killers and they become the primary victims of the story.  This film earned me an A+ in Screenwriting at Cal State University Fullerton.

I have two full length plays that have done well in cold reads, I am working on another novel, and have written another film in the romantic comedy range.  Writing is what I love and I’m not all that picky about what I’m writing.

Thank you for your time,

Richard Leland Neal

23^rd August 2017

Mr. (agent),

I am currently seeking to market a Novel and screenplay called ‘Walker in the Trees’. This is a thriller novel not unlike the work of Stephen King in its supernatural nature and would be marketed primarily to men between 18 and 35 but has elements of LGBT and stronger female characters.  The novels primary distinction is that through much of the second act it focuses on the villains as they are caught between their own illegal activities and an attacking force.  

As an author I have been published in the ‘Pioneer artistic Review’ and sold a script to Absurd TV. I was also contracted by Absurd TV to rewrite a short film written by another author. I wrote ‘Walker in the Trees’ because I was told as a film it would be easy to market by a college professor. I then rewrote it as a novel because copious sources have stated that a novel is far easier to market.

Thank you for your time,

Richard Leland Neal

Loss of Your Company

18^th January 2018

Dear (Book Geek),

My condolences on the loss of your company as it would appear it has gone under. This isn’t the first book publisher I’ve seen that fell to the bad economy, but with the world turning more and more to used books and books about politics coming more and more into the public eye you can hardly be surprised.

However, with nothing left to lose or gain I do have two questions to ask. The first is ‘may I publish the correspondence between myself and your company’, and the second being ‘what was the real truth behind what happened to my work’?

I publish almost every letter I write or receive of a page length or longer on my blog, and so I think it would be helpful to other writers to publish at least one of the letters you sent me. I will remove your name and the name of your company, not that it would make a difference, and I will never speak of who wrote them. I simply believe that the advice I was given may be of help to others.

As for my second question, there is no secret to the fact that I was feuding with another author and that it was him and his friends who gave my book bad reviews. You asked for harsh criticism, and I gave it to you, but everything I wrote was honest. This fellow took it personally and got his friends to gang up on me. Then you took both of our books down.

I know this to be a major outlier, because there were books that sat for more than a year with no reviews and still were left on the site, but the two of us got the ax without a definitive number of reviews. I also noted that I could still access my book on your page but that, unlike other books that had been taken down, moderation had been removed.

If I offended you I’m sorry, if I caused you trouble you have my apologies, but it still looks as if there is more to the story, and I would like to know. It may even do you well to tell.

Best,

Richard Leland Neal