No, really, I totally did! And it came from her personal Gmail! Wow!

It came to my personal email, and referenced my genre fiction.

I’ve followed your work for some time now, and I’m glad for the chance to reach out. There’s a clarity to the way you examine the layers of human experience—subtle, deliberate, and unexpectedly resonant—that has stayed with me in ways I find difficult to forget. I would welcome the opportunity to talk with you about how you shape those narratives, and how you bring such depth to the page.

As for my own writing life, I’ve been fortunate: [title] and the books that followed allowed me to explore the questions that preoccupy me—identity, power, obligation, and the strange grace that can exist between people. Science fiction continues to offer me a way to examine those ideas from angles I might never have anticipated, and I’m always curious to learn how other writers navigate their own territories of story and meaning.

I replaced the actual book title with [title] because I don’t want to give this social engineer the satisfaction of seeing that someone interacted with their message. Because that’s what it is: social engineering and phishing, trying to get me to reveal some sort of personal information or give them some banking data.

But what annoys me the most is how cynical it makes me. What happens if, for example, Chuck Tingle really did read some of my books and really like them and want to reach out to me? An email from him (or his publisher) might look like that. And I would read it, chuckle, and then delete it. And there goes my chance of connecting with a well-known, successful writer.

Be careful out there. If someone famous messages you, it’s almost certainly a phishing message. I wish I knew how to tell if it wasn’t with some degree of confidence, but social engineers are getting too good at this, and I’m sure it’s caused more than one person to miss out on a dynamite networking opportunity.