“cup of tea”

That was it. That was all the text said.

Three words. No punctuation, no context.

I stared at it as if it were an ancient prophecy unearthed from the ruins of my inbox.

Oh no, I think my editor’s losing it. She meant to text her spouse and accidentally sent me their shopping list.

Or … Could it have been literal? Maybe she just wanted tea. Perhaps it was a friendly gesture, a pause from edits and deadlines.

Wait, am I supposed to make it for her? Or am I the tea-fetching intern again?

But no—this was my editor. She didn’t drink tea; she weaponized it. She sipped it calmly while informing me that my protagonist had “the emotional depth of a lukewarm scone.”

“Cup of tea.” Maybe it was a metaphor. Are we all cups of tea in life’s vast teapot?

Does she think I have cup of tea syndrome? Should I Google that?

Maybe my prose needed to steep longer. Was she suggesting my future novels should be… less fiery chaos, more Downton Abbey? Had I rushed the flavor? Were my scenes too bitter? Too tannic? Should I cut chapter seven?

No—I should be cut. She was politely suggesting I retire from writing and open a café instead.

Or—wait—it could have been a compliment. “You’re my cup of tea.” Yes. Yes! She adored the manuscript. She was enchanted. She was probably sipping from a delicate china cup right then, whispering, “Genius.”

Unless… oh gods. Cup of tea is the activation phrase. And I’ve been a sleeper agent this entire time.

Ah, it’s a summoning incantation! I knew my editor was secretly a wizard. So this is how it ends… Not with a rejection letter, but with a potion recipe.

Cup of Tea… sounds harmless, but that’s what they said about the One Ring, too.

What if it was code? “Cup of tea” could have been some secret editorial phrase, like “kill your darlings” but more caffeinated. Maybe it meant a total rewrite. Or perhaps it was the initiation phrase into the League of Editors—those shadowy figures who controlled all publication schedules from their obsidian tower.

I should have replied. But what would I have said? “Milk or sugar?” Too forward. “Steeping as we speak”? Too desperate. “Do you mean my soul?” Too honest.

So I didn’t. I hesitated. Let the meaning steep. Like tea. Or madness.

And at the peak of my neurotic spiral, Sir First-Person burst into the chamber, his cape swirling dramatically.

He planted his feet and declared, “I feel the weight of this quest upon my shoulders. The Editor’s three words—‘Cup of tea’—echo in my soul like a personal summons from fate. I must embark alone, for only I can truly experience the agony of this journey for clarity.”

Before I could haul him out of the room by the end of his cape, Duchess Second-Person waltzed in like she owned the plot.

“You will draft a response thusly,” she commanded, pointing at us like we were her personal serfs. “You must address the Editor with deference, you shall specify the temperature to 85 degrees Celsius, and you absolutely must not spill a drop, or you will face narrative exile.”

I nodded, but inside, I was thinking, who appointed you queen of the quill?

Lord Third-Person leaned against the wall, arms crossed. He observed Sir First-Person’s flushed face and Duchess Second-Person’s imperious gesture, noting how the room’s tension thickened like fog over a moor.

He narrated the scene detachedly: “Michael Martin sighed, watching the chaos unfold as if it were a poorly scripted farce. The others bickered, unaware of their impending doom.”

​

Impending what?!

​

The Omniscient Oracle hovered somewhere in nebulous white space, her voice a whisper from every corner of the room. “You all think this is about tea? No. The true peril lies not in the tea, but in the hearts of those who seek it—hearts riddled with doubt and delusion. What the Editor really desires is not the tea itself, but the validation of her struggle. She wants to be seen not as a woman with a thirst, but as a hero on a quest.”

Reverend Rhetoric cleared his throat, stepping forward with a flourish. He raised his arms and said, “My esteemed compatriots,” his voice trembling with manufactured emotion. “Is this not a time for bold action? Let us not descend into discord! Nay, let us compose a missive of such eloquence that the very parchment trembles with our resolve. For is not a cup of tea the elixir of eloquence, the brew of brilliance, the balm of beleaguered souls? Let us orate upon its virtues with vim and vigor, pausing… dramatically… for effect!”

“You’re not supposed to say the last part,” Duchess Second-Person said.

Auntie Allegory, who had been quietly knitting in a corner, put down her needles. “This reminds me of my dog, Barnaby,” she said, her voice a slow, meandering river. “He once chased a squirrel up a tree, and it seemed like a simple task, but really, it was about the futility of chasing things you can never truly possess, and how the tree was a metaphor for…”

As her winding tale drew on, the Metaphor Magician waved his wand of words: “The teacup is like a fragile heart, brimming with scalding emotions, ready to shatter like glass under the weight of unsteeped desires.”

​

What the actual fuck does that mean?

​

Warden World-Builder, a character perpetually hunched over a desk of maps and scrolls, spoke up, his voice dry as parchment: “Our reply can’t be so bare-bones. First, we must detail the tea’s origins!"

He slammed a tome onto the table. "Behold: a comprehensive three-hundred-page historical document detailing the socio-economic history of the Camellia sinensis plant, along with a 75-page appendix on the proper brewing temperatures for various regional harvests. The Editor deserves a foundation so detailed that even I wouldn’t actually read it.”

As he handed out printed manuscripts to everyone, he informed us that, “A detailed account of the lineage of the kettle itself is on page 147. I’ve also drawn a map of fictional plantations and constructed a fantasy language for the ancient teacup artisans. It’s purely for the “immersion.”

“Allow me to explain.” Doctor Exposition shut off the lights and switched on the projector, unveiling his previously prepared PowerPoint presentation on the history of tea and its cultural significance.

The screen was filled with charts resembling abstract expressionist paintings and a bibliography no one had asked for.

“You see,” he said, “Tea, derived from Camellia sinensis, originated in ancient China around 2737 BCE, when Emperor Shen Nong—

I switched the lights back on. “The Editor’s office is right down the hall,” I said. “Let’s just go and ask her what she meant.”

Everyone gasped.

“What?” I said.

Across the room, Sergeant Show-Don’t-Tell remained silent. He kicked an empty cardboard box with his foot. It slid across the wooden floor with a loud scrape. His face contorted in exaggerated bliss. No words, just that gesture—expecting me to get it through osmosis. But his actions were so subtle that his meaning was invisible.

Foreman Functional Prose translated with a caveman grunt: “Tea. Send.” He crossed his arms, glaring at everyone as if daring anyone to add a metaphor or a flashback.

At least he got the point across.

Lord Pacing fidgeted, then bolted ahead. “Enough talk! We write now—fast!”

He scrawled a hasty draft of everyone’s ideas, words tumbling over each other in a rush. But halfway through, he slowed to a crawl, agonizing over a comma as if it held the universe’s secrets. Then he blurted out the rest in a frantic blur, leaving us with a letter that started like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, drew to a screeching halt in the middle, and ended like a meth-fueled sprint.

The Climax Kid bounced on her heels. “Screw all this buildup! Michael’s right. Just storm the Editor’s door and interrogate her! Boom—action! Revelations! End it now!”

“That’s definitely not what I meant,” I said.

Captain Conflict punched the table. “YES! This calls for war—against the teapot, the cup, the Editor herself! Fight me if you disagree!”

“Whoa!” I said. “It ain’t that serious! Relax!”

Count Cliffhanger smirked from the shadows. “Ah, I see. The real twist comes later. All to be revealed… in the sequel.”

All these strange characters gathered around Lord Pacing’s draft and combined their messages into several manuscript pages. But the effort produced something that looked less like a request for clarity and more like a ransom note written by a committee.

Words blurred into nonsense, metaphors clashed with mandates, and histories buried the request.

Auntie Allegory’s dog story was scribbled in the margins, with tiny paw prints drawn next to it.

Ambassador Adverb had filled the remaining spaces with extra words. “Please urgently send a clarification quickly,” one read. Another became, “Kindly and thoroughly clarify, sweetly.”

There was a footnote from Lord Third-Person detailing the subtext of the paper itself, and a powerful, underlined phrase from Reverend Rhetoric about the “very soul of this correspondence.”

Sir First-Person, not to be outdone by the manuscript itself, signed his name on every page, just in case anyone forgot who the real star of the show was. He also added a flourish and a little drawing of a teacup with his initials on it.

The message for The Editor was no longer a simple reply text requesting clarity; it was an exemplification of the collective, self-important absurdity of taking every rule of writing to its logical, self-important extreme. It was part epic poem, part scientific report, and a completely unreadable concoction of literary styles: a rambling epic of personal woes, imperious commands, detached observations, all-knowing asides, rhetorical flourishes, fabled morals, bizarre comparisons, erratic pacing, premature explosions, dangling teases, exhaustive backstories, info dumps, silent mimes, blunt grunts, gratuitous smut and needless action-packed set pieces.

We all took a step back from this rambling diary-letter-fable-oratory-metaphor-world-bible hybrid, illegible as a drunk’s tattoo.

We stared in mortified silence at the tangled, over-explained, and under-explained Frankenstein’s monster before us.

“You don’t have to take this to the Editor, Michael,” Dutches Second-Person said. “You should probably forget this whole thing ever happened.”

“Impossible,” Warden World-Builder said. “Amnesia is not in the lore.”

The Metaphor Magician waved a hand. “This manuscript is like a dandelion in a gale—fragile, scattered, yet capable of seeding new worlds if we but grasp its fleeting beauty.”

Aunt Allegory nodded sagely. “Once upon a time, a little teapot yearned for wholeness, but only through the storm of boiling waters did it learn to pour forth its essence. So too must we endure this trial to discover our moral fortitude.”

The Climax Kid, with all the patience of a firecracker, snatched the manuscript. “Let’s get it to the Editor!” She slapped the crumpled, overburdened manuscript across my chest.

And with a final, exasperated sigh, I carried it to The Editor’s door. It was a simple, elegant oak door with a single brass plaque that read: “Clarity.”

“Here we go.” I knocked.

The door swung open, and The Editor stood there, a woman of impeccable poise and quiet authority. She wore a single, knowing smile as if she had already read the nonsensical manuscript in my hand.

Without a word, I presented it to her.

She flipped through the mess, her gaze moving from one tangled word to the next. The smile on her face never wavered, but her brow furrowed in a way that spoke volumes. When she finished, she looked up, held the crumpled pieces of paper out to me, and said, in a voice as clear as a bell:

“I don’t understand. Are you asking me to approve a poem, a shopping list, or a psychotic manifesto?”

My cohorts immediately turned on each other.

“It was the adverbs!” Reverend Rhetoric said, his dramatic finger pointed accusingly at Ambassador Adverb. “My words were grand, a sermon on the gloriousness of tea! And you cluttered them with ‘very’ and ‘truly’ and ‘magnificently’! It was an assault on good taste!”

Ambassador Adverb bristled, his face contorting into a mask of righteous defense. “My dear Reverend, your prose was as dry as a desert! I added the flourish, the necessary sparkle! It was your pointless monologue that made the request for clarity sound like the Gettysburg Address!” He spun and pointed a finger at Auntie Allegory. “And your dog story! It added nothing! Absolutely nothing!”

Auntie Allegory took a deep breath. “The story of Barnaby was a vital allegorical framework! It was a metaphor for the futility of our very quest! If anyone is to blame, it is Doctor Exposition! His cold, clinical footnotes sucked the emotion out of my beautiful parable!”

“I merely documented the facts,” Doctor Exposition said, his voice flat. “My footnotes were a necessary commentary on your collective folly. The true culprit here is Michael!"

"Me?" I said.

"Yes, you," Sir Third Person said. "This whole ridiculous mess started because of your self-important, over-dramatized desire for an email that personifies the rules writing like we're some high-society tea party, turning literature into a goddamn circle-jerk of pretension! It’s like watching a bunch of English majors argue over who gets to sniff the cork at a wine tasting—everyone’s full of hot air, and nobody’s getting drunk.”

I threw my hands up. “Of course it’s my fault! I’m the author! I’m the central, driving force of this narrative! If you had all simply listened to me and simply replied to the Editor's text, none of this would have happened!”

And that’s when it clicked: without one authorial voice herding these egos, any story becomes an incomprehensible shitstorm.

Captain Conflict raised his fists partly in my defense, but mostly to raise the stakes.

Reverend Rhetoric took a deep, theatrical breath, ready to deliver the moral of the story.

But I cut him off with a stern look.

The rest pointed fingers at each other, voices rising in a cacophony of blame.

I rubbed my temples amid the din.

And just as the argument reached its fever pitch, a high-pitched, persistent, and utterly mundane whistle pierced the air, slicing through the commotion like a pin through a balloon.

It was the Editor’s kettle.

Captain Conflict’s fists sagged. His face, a mask of righteous fury a moment before, crumpled into bewilderment.

Everyone's mouth snapped shut.

Silence. Beautiful, exquisite, paralyzing silence as the entire group stared at the humming kettle.

A single tear of existential horror rolled down Sir First-Person’s cheek.

Sergeant Show-Don’t-Tell—still refusing to speak—slowly, deliberately, pointed a dramatic finger at the kettle, then to the Editor, and then back at the kettle, his face a complex roadmap of smugness.

Doctor Exposition immediately whirled on him. “He means you should make the tea, of course.”

“No," Auntie Allegory said, pausing her knitting. "He’s showing us that the kettle is the true protagonist.”

Lord Third-Person cleared his throat: “The unspoken subtext of the kettle’s metallic sheen is clearly a commentary on…”

The Editor, still holding the rambling, illegible mess of a manuscript, spoke up finally: “What’s all this business about a cup of tea? According to your manuscript, you need me to clear something up. But I don’t know what exactly.”

“Your text,” I said.

“What text?”

“From earlier,” I said. “You sent ’cup of tea’.”

The Editor whipped out her phone and checked her last message to me. “Oh, that was a typo. The text was supposed to say, MY cup of tea. Referring to your most recent work. I adored that manuscript. It enchanted me. I was sipping from a delicate china cup, whispering, ’Genius.’”

The Editor’s eyes narrowed with the cold, calculating glee of a marketer seeing an untapped funnel.

“Forget the tea. Michael," she said. "Do you know what you've done?"

I backed away from her. "There's that terrifying glint in your eye again."

"You didn’t just have a psychotic break," she said. "You generated organic, high-converting content.”

“How dare you?” I said. “My work is not ‘content.’ I’m building a saga! A colossal, world-building edifice that took years of my finite lifespan! How dare you sully the craft of literature with such an ignoble, mass-produced vulgarity! You are referring to a spiritual breakdown—the very fissure of my authorial soul—as if it were merely ‘filler text’ for an email blast. Have some respect for—”

“You’ll thank me when the money starts rolling in,” she said, typing the subject line to this very email.

I leaned over her shoulder, dollar signs in my eyes. “Tell me more.”

The Editor’s eyes shone with predatory salesmanship. “People don’t want a polished essay on theme. They want relatability. Authenticity. The raw, uncut neurosis of the ’Writer’s Struggle’. And your entire spiral of creative terror is gold. It proves your stories are so intense that they even break your brain! This goes out to your subscribers today!”

I couldn’t argue with that kind of financial genius. She wasn’t wrong. My self-imposed misery is designed to be your next exhilarating adventure. I’m not just publishing books. I’m the supplier of a lifetime fantasy addiction.

And your continued reading proves your tolerance for my bizarre flavor of existential chaos is off-kilter enough to be a personality trait.

That’s proof right there that you’re one of us—the ones who get it.

But before we get all emotionally invested, let’s make sure you actually like the novels, too.

Because I don’t write these wacky emails for a living. They’re just the ridiculous thoughts that don’t make it into my books. And as much as I enjoy blasting them out to you … let’s be clear:

​

I’m also (and primarily) the author of the fantasy series, the Vaudeverse saga.

​

I spend the vast majority of my writing time and finite creative energy focusing on those novels.

And I want you to experience their true, astounding flavor, which is why I created the Vaudeverse ACTI: Starter Pack.

It’s a ridiculous bargain for two complete novels—Burn in Hades and Plot Device—two full-access read-alongs, and lorebooks, all designed to introduce you to the glorious, unhinged heart of the Vaudeverse saga.

It’s a phenomenal starting point for Reader, who finished this email and said, “Yeah, I want more of that slightly off-kilter energy.”

And honestly, it’s just the easiest way to give my captivating world a test run. The perfect way to see if this adventure is your next obsession.

So, if you want to move past the email and into the astounding literary chaos I actually create, you know what to do.

Click below if you’re ready to confirm your curiosity:

​https://vaudeverse.com/vaudeverse-starter-pack/​

Captain Conflict, still emotionally compromised, stepped forward. “I have no idea what a ‘sales funnel’ is, but I feel… compelled. I feel a strong, irresistible urge to… click that link and buy something!”

“You know,” Facilitator Flashback said, a faraway look in her eyes, “this reminds me of that one time…”

And on that unresolved thought, the fourth wall shatters.

Because the Vaudeverse saga is less about having all the answers and more about getting delightfully obsessed with the questions.

If you feel a kinship with that particular brand of chaos and find yourself craving depth over noise, then you already understand what I’m building here.

I’m not building the Vaudeverse for mass appeal; I’m building it for you—the reader who’s ready to hunt for the next unhinged clue.

​https://vaudeverse.com/vaudeverse-starter-pack/​

Michael Martin