The First Fan Who Will Try Not to Die

A few months ago I received a very nice email from a young girl about to enter 7th grade. Her mom, who has incredible taste in literature and writes great reviews, had been encouraging her to read over summer but had trouble finding anything Meghan would enjoy. After much consideration, her mom allowed her to read my Repackaged Presents, a small horror and suspense short story collection.

Meghan wrote to me after reading the first two stories of RP. She really liked them and was interested in reading more of my work. Turns out her mom isn’t nearly as cool as we hoped and wouldn’t let her read Brightside or 25 Perfect Days. She did however tell her we were coming out with a YA horror novel that might be appropriate.

I appreciate every message I receive from people telling me they enjoyed my writing, but it meant even more coming from someone so young that was gaining an interest in reading. I was also impressed that Meghan took the initiative to write and I wanted to reward that.

After I cleared Try Not to Die: At Grandma’s House with her mom (which earns her back some cool points,) I told Meghan she could be the very first person to try not to die. She gets the book for one entire day before anyone else in the world gets to. But there was one catch: she’d have to rub it in to her mom’s face.

Meghan took the bribe and went on to perform the first ever book report of Repackaged Presents, earning a great grade in the process. These photos absolutely made my day and I was thrilled that she chose doing a book report on my writing instead of Harry Potter.

Now I wait and see how she responds to Try Not to Die. I’m not a mean guy, but part of me is secretly hoping to hear she was afraid to go to bed, that she had to leave the light on, maybe had a few nightmares.

I hope to send the eBook out to advance readers tomorrow and it will be up for sale by Halloween.

For those of you who’d like to check out Repackaged Presents, you can download it for free from here, iTunes and all sites other than Amazon.