Mr. and Mrs. Writer were pleased to say they were commercially published, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved with anything questionable or pay-to-play, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.
Mr. Writer was the writer of a large tome, called Gruntings which was a fantasy. It was a big, beefy book with hardly any editing, although it did have a very large font. Mrs. Writer's book was thin and bland, and nearly twice as long as normal for her genre, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time adding purple prose to "flesh it out". Together, they had a small children's book called Dotty, and in their opinion, there was no finer book anywhere.
When Mr. and Mrs. Writer opened their e-mail on the dull, grey Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be popping into their inbox. Mr. Writer hummed as he prepared for work, and Mrs. Writer gossiped away happily as she fought the urge to scream at Dotty for not behaving the way a respectable manuscript should.
Neither of them noticed a small piece of Spam escape the filter, and soon it filled the open email window.
It was on the first line of this spam that Mr. Writer noticed the first line of something peculiar -- a mention of a prominent writer. For a second, Mr. Writer didn't realize what he had seen -- then he pressed the arrow key to scroll back and look again. There was the mention of the author who was both well known and loved, next to mention of his and Mrs. Writer's books. It must have been a trick of the light. Mr. Writer blinked and stared at the offer. It stared back. As he scrolled up to read the whole thing with its inferences and implications of a brush with famous and award-winning authors, he watched the offer closely. It was now speaking of gatherings in large cities and well established publishers. Mr. Writer gave himself a little shake but couldn't put the offer out of his mind. As he finished his emails, he thought of nothing except the possibility that it could be true, and if it was, what it could mean ...
