Confessions of an unredeemed drug addict.

[reddragdiva]

• Sometimes, a photo captures personality perfectly.

• NotN: I'm A Cabinet Member: this year’s best jungle action. Photo: maslow's hierarchy of needs.

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?

Comments

[rufus.livejournal.com]

I think I did -- casually write 10 page letters, that is. By hand, no less. (I wrote "in longhand" at first, but for some reason that looked weird.)

I have piles and piles of letters in boxes in storage.

[liz-lowlife.livejournal.com]

I miss writing letters actually.
I wrote a few for the first time in many years, quite recently, when a friend of mine was in hospital and wanted some to keep her mind off things. I found it very difficult to think without a keyboard in front of me!
I used to have such lovely hand writing but now it is crap because I never have to write any more.
I had a lot of foreign penpals as a kid and I remember spending ages trying to get my French Grammar in order so I could write reams and reams and have it make sense!

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Only ten pages? Amateur. This time twenty years ago, anything less than five pages for me was a Post-it Note, and I had to start buying big envelopes to hold my regular letters because I couldn't fold them to fit into a standard envelope. I didn't even have a zine: I started writing for one in 1989, but this was just correspondence for me.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Hell yes. I had PENPALS. Remember the days?

[greylock.livejournal.com]

That photo disturbs me.

I wrote a 60 page letter once.
It was an anomaly.

[richgoth.livejournal.com]

So who here used to casually write ten-page letters?
Guilty M'lud!
10 pages in fountain pen on parchment paper, several times a week
Wish I could get my hands on what I wrote again
At one stage I was wriiting to 18 people!
I am kinda ashamed of my hand writing these days

[mysterbey.livejournal.com]

Thanks for making Party Fears available. This, along with David Nichols' various zines, were my introduction to the Australian fanzine underground.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Ten pages and more - I had lots of penpals as a teen and still remember how much fun it was sitting on the bus going to college and reading through what my (equally longwinded) Chinese penpal had written to me..

I miss penpals and letters, I used to write really long emails but I don't have the concentration now, just lots and lots of short messages and comments. Not the same thing

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

Hell, yes!

10 pages was a short note for me. Most of my letters were sent in four parts because I couldn't afford big envelopes. I had a list of about 15 people that I wrote such letters to every week.

God, I had so much free time before the internet!

My LJ is NOTHING compared to the volumes I wrote in paper journals. I miss paper and pen sometimes. It was easier to keep my thoughts organized for long periods of time without having them run together or roll into the usual ruts.

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

New Year's Resolution #1: (highest priority)
Fall in love with paper and pen again.

[rosefox]

I never wrote long letters by hand; I get horrible writer's cramp. I wrote daily to my second boyfriend--we would exchange letters every day when we saw each other in school--but none of those were longer than a few sheets of notepaper. We liked folding them up in funny ways.

When I discovered the internet, however, I quickly learned to love sending long, long, long emails.

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

I used to write huge letters all the time. Initially to friends I didn't see that often, then in the later years of high school, to friends that I'd see every day. When I got a boyfriend, we actually had an exercise book that we used to write letters to each other in, and give them to each other the next day.

Things haven't changed much though. Except it's now called IM.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I wrote very long letters to a few penfriends, usually when I'd finished my work in class. I think shevek still has a 67-page one that he never got around to reading in its entirety.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I still do write letters - not always ten page ones, but real letters with pen and paper (not even typed ;)

My parents have written to me once a week since I left home for university (now - ouch - 14 years ago) and last year I decided I really ought to be returning the favour so I send them a couple of sides of A4 once a week. I write to elderly relatives and friends who don't do email, and I write to friends who seem to like getting letters.

I use email too, of course, but getting a letter is so much more exciting than getting an email.

[strang-er.livejournal.com]

I used to hand-write 10-20 page letters in my late teens. I don't know how, given that all i thought about in those days was music and sex.

[tenshikurai9.livejournal.com]

Not me. Hand-written is too physically tiring and I didn't really sit behind a typewriter much.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

...wait: WHAT? (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/UK_ISPs_erect_%27Great_Firewall_of_Britain%27_to_censor_Wikimedia_sites)

[reddragdiva]

Guess what I've been on the email and phone about all last night and this morning/afternoon!