Would You Like To Know What Happened To Marla's Letters?

Yes. Those letters.

Ok, first things first - this post contains major spoilers for I Want You To Write A Letter. If you have not already read it then please do so now by clicking the link above, it’s free and it’s brilliant! To move any spoilers further down the page, here’s a brief interlude with me detailing my secret indie author shame…

Ok, I think we’re safe from the uninitiated.

So, what I wanted to ask you is…at the end of I Want You To Write A Letter did you ever wonder what it would have been like for all of those poor patients and the recipients when those letters started to drop onto the doormats in the days following Marla’s death and the well-meaning, but utterly catastrophic, intervention of her landlord?

Well, I’ll tell you - I bloody have wondered.

Since the story came out I’ve been fortunate that some TV people have asked me to do some more thinking about it. As a result, I’ve developed the idea significantly. In the TV programme of IWYTWAL, each episode would begin with a letter innocently hitting the doormat and the recipient curiously opening their letter. The rest of the episode would then follow through on showing precisely how the shit has “worked its way deep into the mechanisms of the fan”.

Consequently, I pretty much know what happens when the letters are sent out, perhaps not all 400 of them that Marla had worked with, but a good number. I know what’s in the letter that the client wrote and I know what happened after it arrived, and I’d really love to share those stories with you.

Then the other day I was browsing Facebook, looking for some Boomer opinions about immigration when I saw this - Scaremail - essentially, a horror story told through letters that arrive in the post. Huh, I thought, that’s a neat idea. Then it struck me. That’s a really neat idea for I Want You To Write A Letter.

Imagine…

Every month through your letterbox, drops:

• An unexpurgated letter from Marla’s client, laying it all on the line about precisely why this person has driven them to therapy.

• A short story which outlines the chaos that follows it.

I don’t know, I think this might be a really fun thing to do. But what I think matters less than what you think, after all - you would be the one buying it. So, let me ask you - if you’ve read the story, would you consider subscribing to the I Want You To Write A Letter Stories Through Your Letterbox Thing*? Let me know in the poll…

*Yes I need a better name.