I have a bone to pick with you. Of course, when I say I “have a bone to pick with you”, I don’t mean that I had chicken for dinner and am looking for you to share the last measly morsels of tasty meat with me, but rather, that you have caused me a problem or issue that I’d like for us to discuss. I realize open letters are typically considered a poor means of starting, let alone conducting, any real sort of discussion, but as this is the only means at my disposal I suppose it will have to do.

Over the past few months, off and on, I’ve been reading your Series of Unfortunate Events, and I’m greatly enjoying them — at least, as much as one could possibly enjoy stories revolving around orphans who lose their parents in a tragic fire and then undergo a multitude of difficulties perpetrated by an evil man determined to abscond with their inheritance. “Abscond” is a word which here means “figure out some way to get rid of the Baudelaire children and take all the money their parents left for them”.

As I have read your books, I have noticed they have a rather startling effect on me. I only ever evaluate books based on their effect on me, because when I am reading a book, I only really think about me. It’s a bit like the time when I was cave-diving in Iceland. Although I was exploring with others, we were unable to communicate with each other, being under water. As such, I was the only one that mattered, even though others were all about. And if I felt endangered I’d not think twice of leaving the others in an icy Icelandic cave at the bottom of the sea. When I read your books, I feel as though I’m the only person reading them, even though I know millions of people all over the world have read them — and I’d like to think that the books think I’m the only person reading them, too, despite the fact my books are used and have been read by others and will doubtless be read by others still.

Your books, or more accurately, your words, and the way you weave them together — the word “weave” meaning, here, “place them one after the other to form an image”, rather than that you’re somehow taking the words and weaving them together into a blanket, which would be absurd — have somehow found the way to take over my own writing style, and mold it in a way which fits your writing more than it fits mine. I have tried to fight them off but it seems my defenses are weak and unable to resist them anymore, so I have no other option than to ask for your help.

You seem to have connections, a word which here means “the ability to make something happen for me that I cannot make happen on my own”. This is why I’m writing you, although I’m not writing you, really, any more than someone who puts a letter in a bottle and throws it into the sea can expect it to reach its intended destination. But you have introduced me, it seems, to both a problem and a solution to that problem, and in doing so have made yourself the only person capable of solving the problem. Don’t ask me how that works out, it just does.

Your words have unfairly overtaken my own. As I am a writer also, I’d greatly appreciate having my own words back. The only way to make this happen is to somehow transport me back in time, to the place and time where I was approximately 7 years old, and have me read your books then, rather than now. When I was seven, you see, I wasn’t seriously writing — so although your words would have had some effect on how I processed language in the future, they would not have seriously infiltrated my own writing style. “Infiltrated” is a word which here means “completely taken over, as if by hypnosis, as Klaus was in Book, the Fourth, and unable to construct sentences on my own in any meaningful way that doesn’t sound like you wrote them, which given that I love your sentences, is not an entirely bad thing, but still”.

I believe that Klaus can research theoretical physics, and that Violet can invent a time machine to transport me back to the year in which I was seven years old, and that Sunny can bite a hole through the time-space continuum, which is a phrase that here means “make it possible for me to read your books when I’m seven, rather than now”. That is something I would appreciate very much, and since I am a reader, and you are a writer, I’d like to think you’re willing to grant me this small favor.

In the meantime, as I’ve not yet finished reading the series, I’ll continue reading, and I’ll endeavor to make them last as long as possible until I hear from you in relation to the possibilities I’ve described above.

At least until then,
Yours truly,

Jen.