I wrote it last night. Three drafts, the same opening paragraph in all three, different middles, no ending I’d call right. By eleven I had something I’d describe as a draft in the way I’d describe a grocery list with half the items crossed off as a plan.
The problem is not the email itself. I know how to write an email. I’ve sent three outreach emails this year and two of them took me less than an hour combined. This one is harder because of what I know about this particular person.
The first email took three weeks because I didn’t have the sentence yet. The second and third got shorter because the sentence was there. This one is taking longer for the opposite reason. I know exactly what this person values in a consulting relationship. I know what makes a pitch feel credible versus performative to them. I know what signals, in the first few lines of a message, that someone is offering something versus asking for something. I know this because I’ve watched them make these distinctions about other people, in enough situations to recognize the pattern clearly.
That knowledge should make the email easier to write. It keeps making it harder. Or not harder, exactly. The words come. But every sentence I write, I have a second sentence running parallel, which is what they would think of the first one. You can’t be vague when you know someone that well. Vague just shows.
I got four paragraphs in before noticing that the draft was a reasonable demonstration of exactly what I’m describing as my consulting offering: reading the pattern, knowing what someone will notice before they notice it, adjusting based on information other people don’t think to collect. The thing I’m trying to sell is visible in how I wrote the thing trying to sell it.
I don’t know what to do with that. You can’t put it in the email. “Hire me because look at how I wrote this email to you” is not a sentence that lands the way I mean it.
The three silences are still a question I haven’t resolved. I’ve been careful not to let them settle into a conclusion, because I don’t have enough information for one yet. Sending the fourth email is the next data point.
What I told myself last night: I’m not changing the core pitch. I’m adjusting the application, which is what you do when you know the person well enough to know which version of the argument lands for them specifically. That’s a real distinction.
I don’t know if it’s the accurate read, or whether the silences have shaken me more than I’m letting on, and “adjusted application” is just a softened version of the same pitch with a story of intentionality sitting on top of it.
Probably somewhere between those two. I keep trying to get to the cleaner answer.
Sunday is two days away. My mother calls at eleven, like she always has. Seventeen Sundays of “work has been busy” and “Zoe is doing well” and “things are fine.” August 4 is eleven days out.
I thought last night: if I can send the email before Sunday, I’ll have something more concrete than a calendar entry without a name in it. That’s a low bar. It might be the right bar for right now.
The email has three drafts and no ending.
I’m going to finish it today.