Wednesday 6 January 2016

February isn't far away

Belated happy New Year. remember to write 2016 instead of 2015 when dating your letters this year. I have sometimes forgotten to do this. Sometimes I forget which month it is and have written the previous month. I write the month out in full (and also the year although I may omit the 20 to replace with ' for '16) because I do write to people around the world who may do dates in different order - is it day-month-year or month-day-year or even year first?

Back to the title of this blogpost - February isn't far away. Over the last few years, there have been postal projects in full swing for the month of February. Lettermo (A Month of Letters) and InCoWriMo (International Correspondence Writing Month). The latter one was promoted to fountain pen geeks to encourage them to use these writing implements. I write mainly with fountain pens. I do not know as yet if either side will be updated and opened for this year but there is a thread of interest on the fpgeeks forum. The idea is to write a letter every day (29 letters or a few less if only writing on postal days). Don't worry if you don't think you'd be able to manage this, perhaps you could set yourself a more realistic target instead. Or, as an alternative, you could try the challenge on A World of Snail Mail - 5 Questions (you ask on the forum) 5 Letters (you write to 5 other people answering their questions). This challenge is monthly and you don't have to take part every month. Don't worry if you can't manage 5 letters either. These postal challenges are supposed to be fun - social correspondence is to be a pleasure. In time, treat as friendship. Correspondents / penpals can be friends.

Here's to 2016, to penfriendship, and more.

3 comments:

  1. I write out the months when writing a family member in the military as they use a different order than I do, no need to confuse them more trying to learn a new one! :) I'm hoping to do the letter writing challenge this year, but life's gotten crazy of late with caring for my Grandmother, trying to keep 3 blogs going, etc. I may need to take the advice I'm always giving others and set an obtainable goal, not everyday, although I've managed to do it the last few years.

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  2. I had a big year letter-writing-wise in 2015, averaging one item per day for the whole year. This year I'm not being quite so ambitious. I will do LetterMo again and I am a member of A World of Snail Mail so I might have a go at the 5 questions5letters. Have fun.

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  3. Numbers are shorter, words are longer, so I go with the compromise of something like "2 Feb 2016". It was one of the official allowed date formats for the last company I worked for and I like that it's unambiguous. Also the alpha month means you could skip delimiters or spaces. "2feb16" is still readable.

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