A Letter From The Author

A Letter From The Author

Hi! if you are reading this, that means you have purchased my first best selling book! Hurray! I’m so happy to share my words with you! First let me tell you a little about myself and this journey here. You may be asking yourself, “Who is this Annaleise Entler? What’s her deal?” or “How do I find out more about this author? What is her history with writing? What makes her tick?” Well, you are actually in luck because this is my Letter From The Author and it starts like this…

Most of my life I’ve wanted to be a writer. Well, most of my life meaning since I was about 16. Before that I essentially just wanted to be Shel Silverstein. I would take full, normal sized spiral notebooks and fill them with crude drawings and even cruder words. Most of the poems were badly formed sentence fragments about rodents or candy. Oftentimes it was both. One of the kids in my class once accused me of having someone ghostwrite them for me. “HA!” I thought, “I would hope if I was having someone else write them that they wouldn’t be this embarrassing!” My teacher praised me, I guess she saw some potential. I would disgrace notebook after notebook. Some were journals, some were the bones of stories. A large majority were unrequited love poems meant to read like a Dashboard Confessional song, but written by the human teenage embodiment of a Tom Green-esque blink-182 fart joke muppet. I never forgot my third grade classmate critic, which made me shy away from publicly sharing my work. I did however meet a group of kids online who were all aspiring writers. We were spread pretty far apart, but made it a point to check in after school and swap whatever garbage we had written. We’d share things that inspired us throughout the day, our fears, just anything that came to mind. I told them all about the kid calling me a fraud in third grade, which is clearly the worst thing you can call a child at that age besides a “poo-poo head.” I spoke about my dreams of being a distinguished writer and how much I wanted my words to be valuable in the world. One of the members of our collective, a jokey little punk kid named Petey, would always try to cheer us up. He mostly submitted short stories to our crew, usually involving some kind of twist. Most of the time the twist was offbeat and completely random or it involved some entirely new character which made absolutely no sense. They were entertaining and gave us all a great laugh.That was Petey.

As I got older, I started experiencing fun new things like self doubt and fears of mediocrity. I had gotten a few works published, but I wanted to reach even further and keep trying. I wanted my words to really be worth something, something great. I submitted a lot to magazines, a bit to newspapers. I had a job for a bit writing little quirky things for a celebrity website where I tried to get away with saying, “What a silly dilly!” as many times as I could each time a celebrity got into a minor snafu. Sometimes I would just make up sayings like, “You know what they say, the last horse gets the slime!” or “You can build a dog house, but you can’t lick a stamp into yesterday!” just to see if anyone was paying attention. During this time a lot of our online writer clique became more distant. We would send an occasional email here and there. We were older now, so we would share our accomplishments— like an article we wrote getting featured on a website, or the cool new sound our bones made when we moved a certain way. I kept in contact closest with Petey. He ended up working with music, but still involved with writing. We would just chat about mundane life stuff and every few days he’d tell me of some ridiculous snafu he got into and I would say, “What a silly dilly!” One night during a particularly long heart to heart, I told Petey how defeated I felt. Sure, I had gotten a bit of writing out here and there, but I didn’t feel like it meant that much. My goal had always been to put something out into the world that was great, something where my words had value and meaning. He told me he understood and comforted me a bit. Before we hung up, he told me that he had a special gift for me and asked for my current address. A few days later I was working on something and received a package at my door. It was from Petey, as he had promised. I opened the box to find a small black notebook. Feelings flooded back to me of being in school, scribbling out lyrics and journal entries. I felt tears form in my old sentimental eyes. I opened it up and there was a note:

“Hey Annaleise! I know you’ve been having a hard time writing lately, so I thought this might cheer you up! Here’s a notebook for you to write in, each page is made up of money, equaling $20,000. Now every single word you write will be valuable! All your words are worth something! Keep on writing, you poo-poo head!

Hearts & Farts,

Petey

Sure enough, as I opened the notebook, each page was made of bills, which totaled to $20,000. Only Petey would do something as ridiculous as this, I had to laugh. I wondered if I could take the notebook into the bank and deposit it into my account. I sat back on my sofa, looked out the window, and picked up a pen. This is where I got the idea for this very book you are now holding in your hands, Someone Gave Me A Small Black Notebook Made Out Of $20,000.

Annaleise Entler

2021