For the first time since you don’t know when, you’ll go to sleep — as I have for many years — with a smirk on your face.
So don’t delay. Act now! You’ll be glad you did.
Sincerely,
Michael Swanwick
Chief Creative Officer
Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia
Dear Mr. Swanwick:
But if I didn’t feel guilty, how would I write?
I have it set up that I feel guilty every day until about midnight, when it becomes the next day’s problem.
I’d change that, but I’m afraid that if I didn’t wake up feeling guilty every day, I’d forget to feel guilty on Mondays.
Worriedly,
Eileen Gunn
Dear Ms. Gunn:
Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia offers a program for that! Sundays you can be guilt free, but the other six days of the week, we can hone and sharpen your guilt until it is a keen-edged weapon of productivity!
Just imagine: You’re sitting at your desk and you should be writing. Instead, you log on to the internet. Ordinarily, you’d waste countless hours on ego-searches, Sudoku, and Paris Hilton trivia. But — what’s this? It’s an email from the child you never knew you’d had, but which it turns out you abandoned in its infancy, telling you how badly her life turned out because of your neglect. You log off and reach for the phone to tell your best friend about this frightful development and — not incidentally — waste half the morning in idle chitchat and gossip. But before your hand reaches the receiver, the phone rings! It’s the Humane Society, telling you that your childhood pet, Fluffy, lost all these years, has died of a painful disease you could have cured with an inexpensive treatment, had it not been for the fact that you neglected to put your name and address on its collar.
Stunned, you put down the phone. You stare out the window — your last, best chance to avoid actual work. And then (this is our pièce de resistance!) one of our trained professionals calls you up and in your mother’s voice says, “I saw what you did last night, and I’m very disappointed.”
You start to work. You don’t raise your head from the paper until twelve hours have passed and the first fifty pages of your blockbuster fantasy dekalogy have been completed. At this rate, the first volume will be finished in a month!
All for a perfectly understandable fee.
Sincerely,
Michael Swanwick
Chief Creative Officer
Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia
Dear Mr. Swanwick:
This sounds like my ordinary workday. I do not see how your service could add to my productivity.
The lost kids, the dead pet… this is my life in a nutshell. And my mother’s disapproval? I obsess about it, of course, like everyone else, but it does not drive me to work on the fantasy dekology one single minute.
How did you know about the dekology? It has such a lovely synopsis: elves, mirrors, electric trains, trees that extend into the stratosphere and rain gold on those below, and Dick Cheney’s evil twin. NYT Bestseller? Fowler and Lethem can eat their hearts out. But I do not work on it.
Does your service offer anything else?
Curiously,
Eileen Gunn
Dear Ms Gunn:
We are in receipt of your heartbreaking missive, in which you ask, “Does your service offer anything else?”
The answer to which is, of course, You Bet Your Sweet Patootie! Hold on to your hat, because Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia is prepared to DOUBLE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY OVERNIGHT!!!
Sound incredible? It is! But true. And there’s more! We are prepared to do this at absolutely no cost to you!
Here’s how it works: You provide the idea and parameters for that story you want to write but for whatever reason can’t. Our downtrodden and overworked staff will labor into the wee hours of the night to produce ten pages of crisply polished prose, all of which is guaranteed to be of final draft quality! You will then, driven by a combination of guilt, admiration, and ambition, produce an equal number of pages of (it goes without saying) superior literary value. And so it will go, turn on turn, until in less time than you ever imagined possible the story is complete.
And what do we demand in exchange for this incredible service? Only the pleasure of being of service, and three-quarters the take when the story is sold! Yes… we are taking more than our fair share. But consider this: It is more than our fair share of a book which otherwise would not exist. Everybody wins!
So don’t delay — ACT TODAY!
Sincerely,
Michael Swanwick
Chief Creative Officer
Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia
Dear Mr. Swanwick
I can tell you’ve worked hard devising this service, and that you believe in it. But could I see some hard evidence of its efficacy? Testimonials, maybe?
Skeptically,
Eileen Gunn
Dear Ms. Gunn:
You certainly are a tough nut to crack. Not that we think you are a nut. Absolutely not! Yet crack you we shall.
You asked for testimonials? Testimonials you shall have!
A Former Schoolteacher in Maine says:
I was trapped in a dead-end job, living in a trailer, and writing at night. My total production was something like five words a week — and I wasn’t working on haikus but novels! Then GEoP taught me to produce, produce, produce! Now it’s a sorry month that doesn’t see a new novel from me. I write so much that I have to use pseudonyms to keep from flooding the market. So now I am a happy man. The pay is pretty damn good too, but so what? All I ever wanted was to be a human fountain of words, and, as the old joke goes, Now I Are One!
— S. K.
A British YA Author gushes:
As a single mother, I spent seven years working on a short story about a woman sitting in a cheap café trying to write. It was depressing and going nowhere. Heck, I was depressing and going nowhere. Then GEoP showed me how to open the sluice-gates of my soul! Now I’m a billionaire, world-famous, and married to the kind of man my ex-husband only wishes he could be. Thanks, GEoP!
— J. K. R.
A Noted Dead British Fantasist writes:
When I was alive, I was the slowest writer imaginable. It took me an entire lifetime — and it was not a short one! — to pen a single children’s book, a trilogy, and a handful of short works and fragments. After my demise, I decided that enough was enough, and linked my fortunes to GEoP’s star. Now I’ve written so many books I can’t keep track of them! If only I’d discovered GEoP earlier, I could have wrapped up my career and retired to Miami at age thirty!
— J. R. R. T.
And there are many, many more such unsolicited testimonials on file! Shouldn’t yours be among them?
Sincerely,
Michael Swanwick
Chief Creative Officer
Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia
Dear Mr. Swanwick:
It all sounds very good, but I just don’t understand how you can do it. How on earth can your staff turn out such remarkable volumes of work, when it’s all I can do to finish a single page?
Can you possibly clear up my confusion?
Uncertainly,
Eileen Gunn
Dear Ms. Gunn:
Clear up your confusion we shall! As you know by now, we here at Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia are strong believers in the motivational power of guilt. Not just your standard guilt, mind you, but crushing, soul-destroying guilt. The kind of guilt that through our secret proprietary process we remove from thousands of clients every day.