Mary Robinette Kowal challenges you to write a letter a day in February

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "I have a challenge for you. When was the last time you got a letter in the mail? December sees a lot of mail and you remember that sense of delight when the first card arrives. You can have that more often. That's what sparked The Month of Letters Challenge The rules are simple. 1. In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch. 2. Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items. If you are in the US all you are committing to is to mail 24 items. Why 24? There are four Sundays and one US holiday. In fact, you might send more than 24 items. You might develop a correspondence that extends beyond the month. You might enjoy going to the mail box again. Feeling intimidated? It’s fewer words than NaNoWriMo and I know how many of you do that. Can you mail a letter a day?"

The Month of Letters Challenge (Thanks, Mary!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/ J. Brad Hicks

Let me get this straight. You want me to go out into the snow in February, every day, to get your email to me. And you want me to spend 50 cents a day replying to your emails. Um, no.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

I love this idea. I’m tempted to go out and buy twenty-four postcards and just mail them to random people all over the country. Maybe I’d even get some replies that I could add to my postcard collection.
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

I’ve been playing chess by mail for a couple of years now with a friend of mine who lives in the Caribbean.
- Jonathan Badger
  
  Why? While I do think physical mail has its charms (I particularly like physical thank you notes), surely chess is better played over the internet? I first played chess by e-mail in 1988 and haven’t used chess postcards since.
http://twitter.com/CupcakeAndTea CupcakeAndTea

A good way to do this is through PostCrossing! I haven’t participated in a while so I might get back to doing this :)
nox

Nice try, USPS.

We have little sympathy when the entertainment industry fails to evolve and adapt to modern times, so why this reaction to USPS? Technology, from the printing press to the radio, has wiped out entire professions. Mail is a dying industry. Parcels, on the other hand . . .

The evolution of modern delivery services is a very interesting and challenging problem, dealing with changes to economies of scale, universal access, and fundamental changes to what needs to be delivered. Clinging to the past won’t solve it.
Daemonworks

Physical mail still exists? How quaint.
http://twitter.com/loquaciousmusic Ben Gott

I have started sending letters through the mail more often, but out of necessity rather than out of choice. Several years ago, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and an as-yet-undefined form of dementia. As his condition has worsened, he has become increasingly unable to write or to speak, and it has become nearly impossible to carry on a conversation with him.

However, as is the case with many dementia sufferers, he loves to sort things. When I saw him at Christmastime, I noticed that he spent hours “sorting” the Christmas cards that he had received. It seemed to me as if there was no method to his sorting, but there obviously was to him. He would tear certain cards in half; he would leave others untouched. Although it seemed like unusual behavior to me at first, it became clear that this was a good way for him to keep his mind active — especially because he has, for all intents and purposes, lost the ability to speak in a clear and cogent way.

So now, I’ve decided to send him a card each week instead of talking to him on the telephone. I bought several boxes of brightly colored cards, including some amazing landscapes by the brilliant Eyvind Earle. Inside, I write a few paragraphs about my day or my week, which I know that his nurses will read to him. It’s a wonderful way for me to feel connected to him, and I’m actually surprised about how helpful the whole process has been for me as I deal with my grief and sadness about his condition.

Last week, my mom told me that she had gone over to see him (my parents are divorced) and that, in a moment of lucidity, my dad had held up one of my cards and said, “He turned into a good man.”

That’s all the proof I need that this experiment in written communication has been a resounding success.
- Fang Xianfu
  
  However great mail might be for communicating with certain niche groups of people, it’s nevertheless useless for everyday purposes. The postal mail will be gone quite soon, and I sincerely hope that you manage to keep communicating with your dad once that happens. Encouraging people to find ways to communicate with their friends and relatives when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to is a hugely noble endeavour that I have a great amount of respect for. I would love if there was a place for people to share these experiences so they can help other people to tackle such a huge communications hurdle in an age where forms of communication come and go so quickly.
  
  I tried to write this with as much respect as possible to your situation. Please don’t take my comment as trivialising or diminishing the value of your story, which is very touching, or as criticising you for sharing it. I wish you every continuing success.
  - http://celesteagnes.blogspot.com/ Sekino
    
    As long as people need to send products, there will be postal mail. And if you can send a package, you can also send a letter or card. It will probably be relatively expensive to do so but I simply cannot see how postal services could disappear altogether.
  - http://twitter.com/loquaciousmusic Ben Gott
    
    Fang, I agree completely with you, and I took no offense. I do the majority of my communication electronically these days as, I’m sure, do most of us. I was just surprised to find this use for the USPS as I had, by this point, given up hope on them!
mtdna

She’s obviously in the pocket of Big Post.
Phil Fot

“Mary” is part of a USPS marketing campaign experimenting with viral marketing.

Nice try, “Mary.”

(Just kidding)
- Mary Robinette Kowal
  
  Heh. Yeah… they’ve been working on my cover story for a long time.
  - http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
    
    Darn. I could have sworn you were a real person, Mary. Oh well. Some of us would have liked to send you a thank-you postcard as part of participating in this project.
    - Mary Robinette Kowal
      
      Mwahaha! My mad puppetry skills worked.
  - Phil Fot
    
    I only use the USPS to mail my water bill. Once my town reaches the 1990′s and begins accepting online payments, I won’t even need to do that.
    - Mary Robinette Kowal
      
      Oh, lord, yes. I can’t understand why any payments have to go through the post anymore. Don’t let my challenge fool you into thinking that I’m not a 21st century girl. I’m a heavy social media user and live online.
      
      It’s just that during my vacation, I discovered that slow mail offers something different from the email. It’s akin, I think, to the way people discovered what painting uniquely good at when photography came along.
      - Phil Fot
        
        You vacationed some where without a fast net connection? I can’t imagine doing that. I’m old and set in my ways. If I can’t check email every couple hours and surf Boing Boing and Reddit for several hours a day, my eyes begin to drift of their own accord, I get twitchy, and begin to spontaneously tip over.
        
        I can appreciate a fine painting, but I have more opportunity to see that painting digitally than in person. I can also see it right now, as opposed to tracking it down to view in a museum.
        
        I abhor waiting for information to arrive. It stems from my spending so many years awaiting mail call in one fetid jungle or another. So you see, paper letters hold no appeal for me.
  - http://twitter.com/bigbadchang Chang Terhune
    
    All that time with those puppets. It makes total sense now.
    - Mary Robinette Kowal
      
      It’s so embarrassing to have been outed like this.
Melinda9

I stopped writing letters because people acted like I was burdening them – one said they didn’t want to get into a never-ending letter writing loop. But maybe hipsters will revive the practice.
- Mary Robinette Kowal
  
  That’s depressing. Weirdly, one of the things that I like about letters is that correspondence continues at a gentle pace. I kept meeting people that I really dug and we’d exchange a flurry of emails which would then die off as we ran out of things to say. With postal mail, that delay between responses means that there is always something new to talk about. At least for me.
  
  Mileage clearly varies.
  - Marcel Muskee
    
    Odd, I can manage to keep an email exchange going quite well. It’s gotten even easier on Facebook, where you can spout a conversation in responce to any random post, which I quite like.
    
    Of course, you could solve this quite simply by not responding within 30 minutes. Or better, by not feeling bad about mailing something once you have something to say again. There’s no law against sending two emails in a row.
    
    Also, the cynic in me wonders if it really is better to take a long time saying something by snailmail than it is to take less time to communicate the same information by email.
    - Mary Robinette Kowal
      
      I tried waiting to reply to emails, but then they would get buried in the stack of things that were pressing. Out of curiosity, how long do your email exchanges last?
      
      The only way to answer your cynical question is to try it, I suppose.
http://celesteagnes.blogspot.com/ Sekino

December sees a lot of mail and you remember that sense of delight when the first card arrives.

I hate to be a killjoy about this, but when the cards begin arriving, I think “great, more recycling…”. Most of them are the mass-produced kind from a pack of 20 in which the whole family sign their names under the printed message. They sit on the table for a couple of weeks, then they get tossed. After the 10th one, I start feeling a bit bad about the waste of paper and resources that went into sending what is essentially friendly spam.
However, if they’re personal, hand-made and/or include a heartfelt message, it’s another story of course.

I think the above idea is nice as long as people make sure that the letters sent have value beyond “Hai, I sent you a paper letter! Whee!!”. That would just be more clutter for the recipient. Make something creative or write a meaningful letter, don’t just generate more paper (and burning gas) for no good reason.
Soliloquy

You could write to an inmate. They can’t get email (most of them), and would probably love to write you back.
xkot

One of the coolest things I’ve ever been a part of was several years ago when a friend of a co-worker of my wife’s passed out dozens of different postcards to friends and strangers and asked them to write a note on them to some woman (whom I’d never met) for her birthday. I wrote a fond, quirky reminiscence about this woman (whom I’d never met) and our time as foreign exchange students in Prague and wished her well on her birthday. The woman got scores of postcards from all sorts of people and thoroughly enjoyed the stunt. Modesty prevents me from saying that I later heard that she thought mine was the cleverest.

Try doing that with this “internet” of which you are all so fond.
- Pedantic Douchebag
  
  Wow.
- warpinsf
  
  “Modesty prevents me from saying that I later heard that she thought mine was the cleverest.”
  
  Apparently not.