Accidentally Blocked!
Photo by Carms Onoya
Recently, a dear author friend and I had a total miscommunication breakdown.
Here’s what happened. In late March, unbeknownst to me, my friend stopped receiving any emails from me: no submissions of my work for our critique group (she solicited my chapters from other group members), no thank you notes for her feedback on my work, no written feedback about her work, and no RSVPs for events for the other writing group she coordinates. I’d always been a reliable communicator. Something was clearly amiss with me. Was I having some sort of breakdown?
Meantime, my friend sent an email to me expressing doubts that she wanted to go ahead with self-publishing her beautiful novel after two potential formatters didn’t pan out. I emailed her back, begging her to reconsider holding off on publishing her wonderful work. I felt strongly it deserved to be shared.
No response. However, being the pushy friend I am, I located three potential formatters and emailed the information on to her.
Crickets! Oh no, I thought. I have crossed the line of our friendship. She is furious at me for pursuing this after she said she wasn’t ready to move forward on publishing her novel. In fact, she’s so upset with me that she’s ghosted me!
I felt truly awful about losing a friendship that was precious to me. Meantime, my friend was talking with the other members of our critique group about what might be “going on with Lynn.”
Alas, we finally figured out that she wasn’t getting my emails at all. Thanks to the Geek Squad, my friend discovered that she’d accidentally blocked me!
Mystery solved. Now we are happily emailing back and forth about this and that. But the experience did remind me of a couple of things. First, I really need to get over my aversion to talking to people on the phone and relying solely on email to communicate. Second, we fiction writers are very good at making up stories to explain what seems odd or upsetting to us. In reality, the explanations are often a lot simpler than the ones we concoct!