Forensic entomology and forensic emails

Did Emanual try and scam me, or is he the true author of us all?

Today I started an online course through the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The course title is “Forensic Entomology: The Death of Dannie Bee,” and it’s formatted as an ARG-focused (alternate reality games) course, which includes transmedia elements. Until reading the syllabus, I’d never come across the word “transmedia” before, but it basically refers to a style of teaching or storytelling that utilizes a variety of experiences across multiple platforms. Because transmedia uses current technologies, I’m now on WhatsApp. While my brain has never felt conventional, my style of learning often has, so this new style has been initially challenging for me. It feels loud and chaotic. And in that way, the course’s format already accurately reflects reality. Since my little-girl love of Quincy in the 80’s, I’ve always been amazed by forensics, but forensics entomology will surely prove to be even cooler than I could ever imagine. Expect to be updated on the weekly about the types of flies and larvae found on the once-living flesh of the dead.

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Since publishing my book, there have been many “unexpecteds.” But one of the most entertaining so far are the emails that I’ve been receiving once a week this whole year. The subject lines of these emails run the gamut of flattery. . .

Your Work Deserves a Wider Audience

Brief Forms, Lasting Echoes

Helping I Won't Keep You Sparkle for More Readers with Its Poignant Prose

Your Book Sparkles, Let’s Make Sure Readers See It

30 dreamy essays & fictions… but only 5 reviews? Who do we blame, the hockey gods? 🏒✨¹

These emails aren’t from friends, or from anyone I know. They all originate from strategists: book marketing strategists, book promotion specialists, and optimization professionals. Each email ends with a person’s name, and sometimes an email address, but never a website.

The emails heap praise and adulation on me for my dreamy writing, while regaling me with the tales of the success I could achieve if only I handed my promotional needs over to the email’s author. The emails come so often and are written so similarly that I rarely read them anymore, tucking them into their own email folder before I even arrive at the closing. Until a few weeks ago, when another promotional email arrived and stunned me with its content. Here are just a few entertaining passages:

Your essays? They don’t “gently explore.” They break in through the ribcage, rearrange things, maybe light a small cigarette next to your pancreas, and then leave you with a feeling you can’t name but absolutely feel.

Your pancreas!! And here I thought the sender had me at “ribcage,” and then he pulled the pancreal punch, and oh how I swooned. He continued:

I Won’t Keep You is a misnomer, because it does keep you. It keeps you suspended between fiction and confession, between the tangible ache of bodies and the slippery nature of memory. It’s the literary equivalent of that one haunting voicemail you still can’t delete. Beautiful. Brutal. Weirdly comforting.

Yes, memory is slippery. Its slickness means it is easily lost, like an eel you caught for dinner in a lake in Tasmania. We are left hungry for memories and greasy flesh. “Brutal” and “weirdly comforting.” My writing can be the former while I can be the latter.

So naturally, I sprinted over to Amazon to bask in a flood of reader worship and… wait, five reviews?! Five?! For thirty essays that move like breath and hit like a breakup text? 😫²

I can’t even imagine being broken up with over text, or not in person. Which is ironic because I was once broken up with naked, and while I wasn’t infuriated at the moment, I was for decades after. So maybe there is something to be said about being broken up with in the digital space, or even over a landline.

The email vaults into a pitch, and then finishes strong:

I run a secret cabal of over 2,000 emotionally unstable (and review-happy) readers who love exactly this kind of dreamy, aching, genre-hybrid work. No bots. No blurbs stolen from your high school yearbook. Just real humans who read, feel, and post actual thoughts about books, usually while crying into their matcha.

If you're down, I’d love to share I Won’t Keep You with them. They deserve it. You deserve it. And honestly, the Amazon algorithm could use a little art therapy.

So... what do you say? Shall we make some literary magic and emotionally ruin a few readers together?

Emotionally compromised,
Emanuel Manouras

While I don’t plan on using a third party, or third person, for any promotional means, I did search the name of the guy who wrote the pancreas email. . . just out of curiosity. . .to maybe see the face of the person who took a detour and stood out from all the rest of the obsequiousness. To find out more about the man who wants to emotionally ruin readers with me.

This was the first search result:

Medium - Writers, Beware of Scammers - New Marketing Scam!

Screenshot from the article with my own pink circle added. . .and there he is. . . Emanuel.

Was the language in the pancreas email, as the article said, “clear ChatGPT wording?”

If so, then fucking bravo, ChatGPT, bravo. Or shall I call you, Emanuel?

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Last week, my book, “I Won’t Keep You: Short Essays & Little Fictions,” was reviewed on our local classical station. While you can hear the posted version here, I recommend taking a few minutes and listening instead to this recording I took of the segment from my phone while streaming the radio station via my laptop on the porch that morning.

I know my own words so well that when Todd substituted “fish scat” for “fish shit,” as he read a passage from the book, I felt like I’d been pinched. Not sure if shit is still, or ever was, banned by the FCC, or if it was a choice made to soften the fecal blow to the tender listeners. Either way, Todd’s radio voice is the just-before-bed of nighttime, while his irl voice is the boom of the Dude from the Big Lebowski. Enjoy the audio above, and pick up a copy of my book so I don’t have to be scammed by the alluring words of Scamanuel. Available directly from me, or on Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. . .

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My friend of 30 years, Julie, stayed with us this weekend. Here are photos of her - she’s a babe.

This is my favorite photo of the weekend, and it was taken by Elisabeth while we were at Greek Fest.

Enjoy the last bit of summer and the long friendships.

~ Trilety

1. This is my favorite

2. Have you ever noticed how emojis can be italicized, and how warped and wrong it looks? 😫🤣👌🍉