Confessions of an unredeemed drug addict.

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I have a suitcase full of folders of fourteen-year-old paperwork (profoundly suitable for shredding). Some of those folders are letters.

Back in the early 1990s, when I had a fanzine and no Internet, I wrote ten-page typed letters all the time. First draft, post. Got me through quite a bit of my million words of shit.

1993 was spent sitting on the front porch reading all the papers, drinking coffee and smoking Lucky Strikes with my burnt-out ex-Communist housemate while he pretended to do his Ph. D and I just tried to recover from life. I also wrote epic letters about nothing to my not-yet-girlfriend and fellow fanzine writer Louise.

To talk to a correspondent, you needed to spend serious money or someone else's serious money. When Louise's housemate moved out leaving them with $2000 in bills, they put the Optus account in her name in return (you can't do this trick any more, oddly enough) and we spent a few hours a day on the phone to each other. Unsurprisingly, we fell in love and she moved in when she came to visit at the end of the year.

Ten page first-draft letters come naturally when you don't yet have Web 2.0 forms to type the same amount of text into. When zines were the most efficient medium for subcultural meme propagation.

So who here used to casually write ten-page letters?