email – Natalie J. Case

Some days it can be hard to find the motivation to get started. Some days I hit the ground running. Today is the latter. I woke up an hour before the alarm due to a nightmare and was awake enough that going back to sleep didn’t make sense, so I got up and started the coffee.

My first order of business after the bathroom and getting the coffee started, is always to hit the email accounts. I have several accounts because I like to compartmentalize my life to a degree. I generally ignore the stuff in my “junk” mail address, the one that I use when I have to sign up for something online, shopping stuff, etc, and just mark that as read. The others I skim through the inbox, look at the ones that look important, answer what I can and then I move on.

Generally, while I have my morning coffee, I peruse Facebook and other social media, play a couple rounds of some silly game, or write. During the week, it is usually the first two. On the weekends it’s writing.

By the time my coffee was ready, I had already emailed several people back, answered some work emails and reviewed a few work tickets. I was out to the work computer by 7am, taking my breakfast and second-coffee with me.

It’s a good start to a Friday. I hope all of you are having a good week (as much as any of us can anyway), and that your weekend is filled with love and kindness, Readers.

I got an email earlier this week from someone who advised me that as an author who wants to “make it big” in the world of books, particularly as a woman, I needed to take the politics out of my books and focus on writing better.

This gentleman told me he had read the Shades and Shadows series and thought it would have been improved by not making the politics so pointedly directed at the darker “underbelly” of the USA. He told me it was “unseemly” for a woman to display her anger so prominently in her work, and that I should “dial it back” and “focus on the actual plot” which he apparently thought had nothing to do with the politics.

He told me he didn’t mind the prominence of a homosexual relationship, though he thought that too should be “dialed back” and not so “in the face” of the Reader. He said I should remove all references to Muslims because it was too controversial to say that discrimination against them was wrong.

He closed the letter with what I suppose was meant to be encouragement for me, telling me that I was a “fairly good writer” who could do well as an author, provided I stopped showcasing the “politics of an angry female” and embraced the softer, more accepted kinds of stories written by women, you know, the kind with no politics and no bad words and filled with plots driven by men and the women who need men.

I haven’t responded to this email. In fact, I nearly deleted it out of hand. In this political climate here in the United States, how are women not angry? For centuries, we have been silent bystanders, watching the politics of old men regulate our rights, our bodies, our place in society and allowing ourselves to be marginalized out of jobs, out of careers. But the world has changed and we have found our voice, we’ve come out of hiding. We’ve shaken off the dust and stepped out onto the stage.

And yes, we’re angry. And yes, we’re political. It isn’t going to change anytime soon. So, if you’re reading this, Sir of the Email, sorry you aren’t happy with my politics. I probably wouldn’t be happy with yours either. Sorry, not sorry.

Happy Wednesday, Readers! I’m off to poke some more job sites in hope of finding a new job sooner, rather than later.

Photo by Gabriel Matula on Unsplash

Tag: email

hit the ground running

the politics of an angry female