R2D2 mailbox from the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. Photographed in Boston by David Heiniluoma, Jr.

Despite the eternal frustration that is slow postal delivery to my neighborhood in Salem, I really love getting snail mail.  There’s something really exciting about opening up the box and seeing a postcard or a letter that a digital inbox just doesn’t convey.  Maybe that makes me a temporal leftover, but apparently there are a lot of people that feel the same way, one of whom is an author I admire, Mary Robinette Kowal, whose Glamourist Histories I read with great glee.

A few years ago, she started the Month of Letters challenge, wherein participants mail one piece of actual mail every day that the post office is open, for the entire month of February.  It corresponds (ha!) perfectly with a month in which one would potentially be sending valentines anyway, and is a nice manageable month if one isn’t running February school vacation week programming.  (Which I am, but oh well.)  This year, she upped the game by offering to write a character letter back to anyone who wrote to either of her two main characters from the Austen-era Glamourist Histories, and that’s what made me decide to go for it.  I probably won’t manage a letter/postcard/package a day, but there are a few people with whom I do keep up a written correspondence, and I’ve owed a few of them letters anyway (looking at you, Devlin!).  Because who can turn down the opportunity for a letter from Jane, Lady Vincent?  Not I.

(This is a brilliant idea, by the way, and crazy generous of her time and attention.  I’m impressed.)

So if you’d like a letter/note/postcard/light shippable curiosity from me, drop me a line here and let me know!  (If I don’t have your address already, you can leave it in the comments, which will be screened so it doesn’t go public.)