Categories
writing life

The terror of the mass email

girl blowing leaves purple hue
I am sure this photo belongs to Pink Sherbet, the best photographer ever, and it perfectly captures how I felt putting out these two emails. Sending this out into the world…hope it goes okay…

So it turns out that sending a mass email, like announcing to all of your coworkers that you’ve started a side business selling Mary Kay or that you’ve just been talked into a questionable Time Share, is terrifying.

What if people are inconvenienced? What if they think you’re an idiot? Or annoying, and delusional, and a complete poser?

But despite all this, and Mass Email #1 locking up my computer for 2+ hours, and Hotmail requiring me to reset my password because it thought I had been hacked, I sent a second mass email.

I really did not want to send it. I wrote it and it sat on my hard drive for an extra week while I got up the mental courage. I’ve always been one of those people strongly dissuaded by negative feedback, even if it’s just a shaken head and a frown. In this case, even the electronic shaken head was enough to give me stomach pains. It’s a wonder I’ve ever been published!

But it turns out my sense of responsibility is stronger than my desire to be a good girl. Which means that I will always be a law-abiding citizen unless I make an ill-advised promise. And since I promised I was going to send a second mass email…

This second mass email locked up my computer for another 2 hours and Hotmail required me to change my password AGAIN. And just when I’d remembered the new one, too.

Congratulations!

This is the last mass email I will ever send impersonally to all my contacts. First, because I have to learn how to use mail merge and hand-select the addresses – three times—and it is brain-numbing, finger-cramping, tedious work that has to be done in absolute silence so I don’t screw up and accidentally email one of my ex-boyfriends. (Yes, I keep those, and no, I don’t particularly want them to get an email from me. Legal reasons.) Second, because I would rather spend my time publishing stories, crafting the newsletter that so many of you have already subscribed to, and reconnecting on Facebook. (Which is so awesome! I was scared to send out that first email. I’ve been down the rabbit hole for several years, plugging away at the keyboard in social-life silence, and what if, in the meantime, you decided you didn’t want to know me anymore? I am so grateful to get back in touch!)

I just wanted to tell you that the first newsletter has already gone out.

If you haven’t signed up due to newsletter fatigue, I completely understand. I recently unsubscribed from several productivity blogs because – ha! – stressing about when I would have time to read them made me less productive.

(I can be confident this time because I’ve already deleted the 122 expired emails plus the one guy I don’t even know who asked to be ‘unsubscribed’. There is no subscription here. How did you get in my personal contacts??? You are so deleted.)

Anyway, I am publishing 4 stories in a row + an extra in the print anthology – and that’s all I know about so far. There will be future promotions, comment-and-win bonuses, and buy-one-get-one-frees. You are not one of the people who has to wait for me to hold a raffle to get a free book. You get whatever I have, whenever I have it, just for reading this email. And you get it free.

That’s it!

If you forgot to subscribe at my website before, I’ll still send you the first newsletter until mid-end July, when the second one will go out. And then the one after that. And after that again. You get how that goes.

<Mass email #2: Done! Mail merge and I are done forever. FOREVER.>

See you on the Internet!

Wendy Lynn Clark

…find yourself in a good story…

wendylynnclark.com

P.S. Here is the first mass email in case you didn’t get it. I seriously had to select the addresses 3 times. I have no idea who got lost in the Microsoft tsunami.