A Month of Letters

The official Month of Letters is over, which makes me a little sad. What relieves that is knowing there are still letters in the mail. All of those packages, postcards,and things you send on February 28th are still in motion, still creating ripples in the world. Today, someone will get a letter from one of you and their day will be a tiny bit nicer because of it.

Just because it’s March, you don’t have to stop writing letters even if there aren’t shiny badges to earn.

No badges? I’m afraid it’s true. It’s fairly time consuming to manage the badges and achievements and, as you noticed, we had some bobbles this year. It’s hard to test something like this in real conditions, which involve thousands of you. So we’ve closed the report page and achievements until 2014. Here are things I’m thinking about for next year.

• A counter to show your overall achievement score, the number of letters, and the number of days.
• Badges for art cards, zines, thank yous, and sending mail to children.
• Self-directed goals — In addition to the main challenge, you can add your own goal to try to achieve.

What else would you like to see for 2014?

How did you do? The goal was to send something in the mail each day the post ran for a total of twenty-three items. Did you succeed? Congratulations!

And if you didn’t… Did you send more mail than if you hadn’t taken the Challenge? Did you enjoy mailing things? Then you succeeded. Well done!

It was exciting to see so many people involved and the growing community. Yes, we had some website bobbles at the beginning, but you were all amazingly gracious about it. I’ve seen a lot of you say that you will continue sending mail, but perhaps at slower pace. I think that’s appropriate. The challenge is about learning to slow down and take a little bit of time each day to connect with someone.  You may not have received a reply in the mail, but I can guarantee that you still touched the person you wrote to.

For me, what I love best about mail is that it is a way of making the moment tangible. Keep finding those moments. Keep writing.

I’ll see you at the post office.

We’re one day away from the last day of mail in February and thus one day away from the end of the Month of Letters. Before we tally the final letters and achievement scores, I’m interested in hearing about your Bests and Favorites from the month.

For instance, which of the letters you received delighted you most? Is there a particular letter you’re most happy or proud to have sent? During the challenge did you discover a new favorite writing tool, stationery store, or method of mailing? What part of the challenge surprised you most?

I’m also curious as to what you all plan to accomplish in these last two days. I’m still answering the aforementioned mountain of letters, though there are a few other people I intend to write to before Friday. How about you?

I travel quite frequently and this month was no exception. I spent most of the first two weeks of February on the road. Under normal circumstances, this would mean coming home to a small pile of mail. During the Month of Letters it meant coming home to a mountain. I only realized this would be the case around the middle of December as my travel plans solidified. This is in no way a complaint, though, because coming home to a mountain of letters did fill me with a certain joy.

Dealing with mail while on long trips can be an issue, especially when you don’t have a housemate or family member at home to open things and take care of urgent business.Yesterday, I read about a service called Outbox. They recently expanded from serving Austin, TX to San Francisco, CA. Outbox turns your paper mail into digital mail by gathering your letters, scanning them, then uploading the files to a digital mail box that you can access via a browser or an iPad app.

Outbox will come collect your mail every three days and holds on to the paper for up to 60 days. Customers may request re-delivery of their paper mail if they want to keep it. Outbox also sorts mail by type — bills, junk, flyers, personal correspondence. Just as with email, you can flag a letter as Junk and the Outbox team will stop scanning mail from that source and just toss it.

Some of you may be recoiling in horror at the idea of taking paper mail and making it digital. After all, we send handwritten letters this month instead of email or Tweets or status updates for a reason. And though the Outbox website says that they screen their employees better than the Postal Service does, I’m sure plenty of people would be uncomfortable with a stranger looking at their mail. Especially personal letters.

I can see this being a great service for people who are often away from home. Putting a hold on mail is useful, but only if you’re sure you don’t need to see any of it before you get back home. With Outbox you can keep up with bills or letters and still get the physical copies when you’re back. Plus, you can sort and search our snail mail almost as easily as your email.

Still, strangers looking at my mail…

Does Outbox‘s service tempt you even a little?

Many, many years ago when I was just a wee Tempest in grade school, I read an essay by a writer who stated that every writer needed to keep a journal and write in that journal with a fountain pen because fountain pens are the best. Being young and impressionable, I bugged my mother until she took me somewhere I could buy a fountain pen (probably Staples) and proceeded to write in my journal with it like a real writer and everything. The story ended in tears, though, when the fountain pen leaked all over everything and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it stop or change the ink.

Since then I have avoided fountain pens even though I did like the smoothness and ease of writing with one. Eventually I found that gel pens of a certain size gave the same satisfaction of gliding across the page without effort and I’ve been happy with them since. However, I find myself super tempted by fountain pens once more thanks to Mary.

Those of you who hang out in the forums may remember a post from earlier this month about a small tragedy Mary suffered. She lost all of her favorite fountain pens while traveling and right as A Month of Letters was in full swing. I (sneakily) got her to tell me which pens she lost by pretending that I intended to get into fountain pens, then I asked her friends to donate toward replacing them or send one as a gift. I’m happy to report that Mary now has a replacement for all of the pens, including the vintage one we couldn’t find, at first. That’s partly due to some of the folks here (thank you, by the way!).

As I was pretending to be interested in fountain pens, I found myself actually getting interested in fountain pens again. Mary has this affect on me. I also had a brief moment of madness where I wanted a typewriter after visiting her apartment, which is filled with beautiful antique typewriters.

Both fountain pens and typewriters activate the same section of my brain that tingles when I write a letter to send in the mail. Mailing letters, writing by hand, typing on a machine that doesn’t require a battery, these are all old school activities. They’re no longer necessary or the most advanced. This is part of the appeal. Feeling like you’re connected to some part of the past simply with the tools you use or the action you’re taking adds weight to the proceedings. It makes me feel connected to people who are no longer with me.

And who knows, someday I might be sitting in front of a computer trying to recapture my middle years while my grandchildren look at me funny from behind their Google Glasses. “You still use a KEYBOARD to TYPE, grandma? OMG.”

What do the tools you use to compose your letters make you think about or feel? Do they put you in a specific mindset when you sit down to write letters?

Yesterday we had our final day of rest (those of us who live in places with no Sunday mail service, that is) and now the final week of A Month of Letters is upon us. There are still three days left in this challenge and even if you’ve run out of people to mail, you probably have some letters left that need a reply.

Hopefully taking part in this challenge kindled a love for letter writing or got you further addicted to the joys of snail mail. If you’d like to keep up the letter writing throughout the year as well as surround yourself with other letter lovers, consider joining the Letter Writing Alliance.

The mission statement:

In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission.

As a member of the Letter Writers Alliance, you will carry on the glorious cultural tradition of letter writing. You will take advantage of every opportunity to send tangible correspondence. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters!

There are some nice benefits to membership, including access to a pen pal swap with the organization’s 3,700+ members, local meetups, and exclusive, printable cards.

The organization was started by the women behind the 16 Sparrows stationery shop, purveyor of sarcastic greeting cards and other fun, beautiful, and unique mailing supplies. I’m partial to the plastic carrier pigeon that you can pop right in a corner mailbox.

Between the shop and the LWA, you’ll be set for an entire year of letter writing in short order.

Yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered, host Audie Cornish took a look at one of the short documentaries up for an Oscar this year: Mondays At Racine. The film follows women who’ve recently been diagnosed with cancer starting when they come to a Long Island salon that offers free spa days for these patients.

In the NPR interview, director Cynthia Wade said, “Essentially, the heart of this movie isn’t just how people deal with the cancer, but how women who are dealing with their sense of beauty and self-worth.”

One of the women in the film said about the loss of her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes: “you feel like you’re being erased.”

Getting a cancer diagnosis can make a person feel alone and isolated, especially at first. That’s why the Girls Love Mail organization exists. It provides newly diagnosed breast cancer patients with a small lift in the form of hand written letters with words of encouragement.

This month we’ve all experienced how receiving a letter in the mail can have a transformative effect on your mood and outlook, whether the letter comes from someone you know or a stranger. You can now offer that same experience to someone facing a life changing battle.

I added a Girls Love Mail achievement for those of you who wish to participate. To do so, just go to the GLM homepage (where you’ll find more information, including how letters get delivered and suggestions on what your letter can say) and sign up on the right hand sidebar. Once you’ve sent your letter, head back here and report it to unlock the achievement.

Hello everyone, as Mary mentioned yesterday I’m doing a tiny bit of guest posting here in the last days of LetterMo. I actually spent the first part of the month in her wonderful company and was inspired to even greater letter writing heights by her example.

Jumping off the Day 20 post about time delays, I find myself fascinated by the variance in the time delay between when I send a letter and when the recipient receives it. Before I started Month of Letters, I had a vague idea that first class mail took three or four days, maybe a day or two longer if I sent it all the way to another coast. However, as I get in reports from people who get my letters, I realized that mail is taking longer than I assumed. Sometimes up to a week and maybe a few days more.

When I mentioned my surprise on Twitter, I learned that the difference in time depends on many factors, including where one mails their letters. Most of my letters from earlier in the month went to the mailbox for the postman to pick up on his normal route. That probably means that the letters didn’t get processed until the day after I mailed them, which delays their journey. This same issue can crop up even if you drop a letter in a public mailbox depending on the time of day. The way to assure that your letter is processed faster seems to be taking it to the post office directly, but even that is subject to variance unless you head to your city or town’s central post office.

None of this is particularly bad, mind you. That letters take a while to get to their destination is part of the fun. I just had to adjust my own expectations. Since I recently took a long trip and wrote to people back home, a few times I saw the person I wrote to before their letter came!

I now pay a great deal of attention to postmarks and dates to see how long it was between when the letter left the writer’s hand and it appeared at my doorstep.

How long are your letters taking to arrive? And how long are they taking to get to you?

With one week left until Month of Letters officially ends, I thought it would be a good time to bring a fresh voice to the journal for a couple of guests posts. Author K. Tempest Bradford is new to the challenge this year but not new to letter writing. Though she is woefully behind on recording her achievements and gathering badges (not that I’m spying on her), I’m sure you’ll all welcome her contributions here.

What prompted me to ask Tempest to blog is a conversation we had about Samuel R. Delany’s book 1984, a collection over 50 letters written by the author to friends and family over the course of that year. The book is out of print but still available. I won’t spoil the post she’ll write about it, but I’m sure you’ll all find it as interesting as our discussion. I’ve long been impressed with Tempest’s humor and writing. I think you will be too.