Why I’m Not Letter Writing Challenge Month in 2021 is not exactly the type of blog post title you nor I expect to be reading here!

We are greeting the month of February at AnchoredScraps, where we celebrate letter writing year-round! My post today is a bit longer than usual, so pull up a favorite hot beverage or diet-coke, get situated and enjoy!

On February 26, 2015 I began AnchoredScraps and later this month will be celebrating my 6th Anniversary. Beginning in 2017 – yours truly each February has been sharing the various Letter Writing Challenge opportunities available. While this year, in 2021, I’m not personally pursuing any – further below I am including links to a few you may enjoy trying out yourself. Each of them I have personally participated with previously and include my ranking of them. 

First off, these days I have over 54 pen pals that I write and while I do not communicate with each as frequently as I am aspiring – still I strive to stay in touch with snail mail. In 2017, my first year participating in the #incowrimo, I sent 125 hand-written letters that month! That was a far cry from the 28 for the challenge of one a day. Through it I met some wonderful new pen pals who I still correspond with today – not as frequently as I want and try to send seasonal greetings with a Christmas card to them each year. 

Why I’m Not Letter Writing Challenge Month in 2021

There is the expression my Dad would share with me, along the lines of “there is nothing like the enthusiasm of a new convert to annoy the rest of us”!  What I gleam from this is, if you are new to letter writing you may be more gung-ho about taking on more people to send snail mail than someone who already has an ongoing list of pen pals striving to tread-water. I do love that the frequency of communicating can vary individually and I have found most letter writers are so happy when you do write, that the length between letters is not as important as the fact that YOU DO EVENTUALLY write back!  It makes more sense to me now when I see a pen pal profile and it says if the person is accepting new pen pals currently. 

It is great fun continuing with what I began this past August with adding to my site, the option when new email subscribers sign up with AnchoredScraps. I am continuing to have snail mail opt-in for my sending out occasional snail mail to them. I’m currently working on an upcoming batch in the works – suffice it to say “There is talk!”. Here’s a link to my post Happy You Are Here! snail mail sign up (Aug 7, 2020).

Lastly, I’m remembering that last year (even if it was alongside Covid) I fizzled out during February with getting all of my letters written – even though I had addressed them all in advance – I still have them in a pile of “meaning to write one day!” So perhaps this month in my NOT participating I can get them out.  I do know for this year, in 2021, my personal goal is to rotate through all of my pen pals on my list and write to each of them – at least once – in a meaningful way – on my own timeframe.