Dear Me (2013)

Author's Note: The following is a customer complaint submitted to the Myself & I Consulting Firm in response to their direct mail solicitation on January 1, 2012. To see the original letter, please check out: "Dear Me (2012)" .


January 1, 2013

Myself & I Consulting Firm
987 Broadway
New York, NY 10000

To Whom It May Concern:

         Pursuant to your letter of January 1, 2012, I subsequently purchased your "custom-designed and universally applicable" Hard Work system in an effort to better meet my writing goals for the 2012 calendar year. It is with great disappointment that I write and report that the results promised by your product were underwhelming at best.

         After using the product over the course of the past year, I was disappointed to learn that the promised results are vastly less impressive if the Talent and Persistence modules (sold separately) were not purchased and used in conjunction with your Hard Work module. Your Hard Work module laid out a simple and concise plan to set deadlines for myself and capitalize on existing opportunities, but neglected to mention that those deadlines would whizz by if those other modules weren't in place. Imagine my surprise when the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship deadline came and went with nary a page written because I didn't have the Talent module to provide me with inspiration! And imagine my further surprise when I only finished half of my NaNoWriMo novel last year because I hadn't also purchased the Persistence module!

         I suppose I could demand my money back, or file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau about your unscrupulous sales team and their efforts to bait customers like myself with one product, only to let them discover through their own failures that they didn't have the true and complete recipe for success. Well, I'm writing this to inform you that I have a better idea. Instead of licking my wounds and complaining about what you're doing wrong, I've developed my own system of motivational tools which will directly compete with your product! I will not rest until I've run you shysters out of business!

         The Total Inspiration Package Supreme (patent pending) is a revolutionary system that combines the best of your multilayered program into a single user-friendly product. Gone are your silly deadlines and recommendations of reading a certain amount of material by the end of the year! Gone are your selfish mandates to spend less time interacting with other writers!

         The T.I.P.S. program has just one very simple rule: read & write consistently.

         That's it.

         There are no confusing schedules or deadlines, and none of that sense of failure that comes with not meeting the many deadlines of a rigorous schedule. The only thing writers who use my program need to understand is that they should always be working on something. They should consistently read new things and write new things and that's the single most important thing that will lead to writing success. Why confuse the issue with arbitrary deadlines for contests and challenges that they really don't care about? And the beauty of my system is that if a particular contest or activity is of interest to the client, they can set their own deadlines without our program forcing them to do it!

         More importantly, my program doesn't have any of that crushing guilt or negativity that comes with your Hard Work module, especially for those who see their deadlines racing by and can't figure out that they were supposed to purchase Talent and Persistence as well! I wrote one screenplay and several short stories last year and why should I feel like a failure when I can celebrate the things I did accomplish? T.I.P.S. isn't about churning out material and trying to meet a rigorous schedule; it's about letting writers develop their work organically and celebrating the deadlines they do meet without criticism for the ones they miss.

         How will I prove my system is the superior product? Well, I'm not only the President of the T.I.P.S. Company... I'm also a client.

         That's right; I'm leading by example and subjecting myself to the T.I.P.S. program for the full 2013 calendar year to prove that it's superior to your Hard Work system. By the time 2014 rolls around, I guarantee that I'll have accomplished more for my writing than I did during the equivalent amount of time spent using your product. It's that simple. This is the Coke vs. Pepsi Challenge of writing programs and I intend to be the Coke (or the Pepsi, I can never remember who actually won... but the one that won... that will be me)!

         The next time you try and swindle hardworking writers by letting them believe that Hard Work alone will lead to success without Persistence and Talent, just remember that there might just be someone out there who decides that there's a better way to do things. So I will see all of you on January 1, 2014 and we'll see once and for all who has the better program for inspiring writers to be productive.

Sincerely yours,


Me


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