Preparing for a Month of Letters

Letters sent last year during the Month of Letters

In February I'll be participating in the Month of Letters challenge again by sending one letter or postcard in the mail every day the mail runs.

I love writing letters and receiving them. I write about things I wouldn't in emails. Not secrets, but moments instead of summaries. Better details, and sentiments that would sound corny in electronic form. 

Three ways I'm preparing for this year's Month of Letters:

1) Hoarding Vintage Postcards

I suppose fifteen or so postcards isn't really a hoard, but that's how it felt when I bought them from my local second-hand store. I love these postcards. A few were written on and mailed by the original owner, but most of them are blank.

I've started a Pinterest page, and I'm going to scan and pin the postcards as I mail them. I want to keep a copy of the images for myself for inspiration, but these postcards are too cool to stay in my card box.

2) Hand-Coloring Participant Stickers

The Month of Letters website has a template of participant stickers. I don't have a color printer at home, but I love the idea of having a special stamp for letters sent during certain times of the year. So I printed out a sheet of the stickers on regular paper, cut them out, and am hand coloring them with colored pencils. I love the vintage feel this gives the stamps. 

3) Freshening Up My Stamp Collection 

One of my favorite steps in the letter writing process is decorating the envelope. I will take any excuse to use an ink stamp, and envelopes are the perfect opportunity. I'm kind of a stamp minimalist, though. One to two stamps per envelope is just right.

I've got two lovely new stamp pads - one with black ink and one with a fetching light blue.

February's almost here, and I'm ready to write some letters. Would you like one? Leave me a note and I'll send you a postcard or letter this coming month.

Southern Writers Symposium Emerging Writers Contest

I found out yesterday that my short story "Libration" placed 3rd in the Southern Writers Symposium Emerging Writers Contest. Hooray!

The symposium takes place the first weekend in March, and I am going to try to attend. The schedule looks lovely, with many great writers presenting and holding workshops.

Yay!

Unchained Storytelling

We believe that the art of the raconteur - the telling of unscripted, personal, porch-style stories - is one of the great arts, and that nights of storytelling are vital to any vibrant and healthy community. 

                                     ~ Program for Unchained Deep South Tour, 2013

Last Saturday the Unchained storytellers made a stop in Huntsville on their Deep South Tour. I found out at the last minute, but was still able to snag a seat to the show.

The Unchained bus in Huntsville, AL

The performance was at our local arts mecca, a place called Lowe Mill. It's an old factory that has been reclaimed as an arts collective. There's a printing press, artist studios, a puppet company, and a cigar box guitar maker. They hold workshops for burlesque, hooping, shoe making, and painting. And in a small trailer out front is the only all-vegetarian restaurant in town. In short, if you visit Huntsville on a Saturday then one of your best bets for meeting cool people is to go to Lowe Mill and wander through their artist's market.

When I found out that Unchained was going to happen in Huntsville, I was excited. I'd read about the tour on Neil Gaiman's blog, where he traveled with them for a short time. One of my favorite things in the world is to hear stories told aloud. Hearing stories changes the way I experience them. I feel closer to the action, the characters, the core of what is being said.

Scene on the side of the bus

The evening started off with a song, "Flawless Executioner," by Christopher Paul Stelling. And it was amazing. You could feel the crowd open up, get ready to experience the exceptional.

Peter Aguero told the first story, ending on a cliffhanger to welcome the audience to a night of storytelling. Micaela Blei told a story about third graders playing war, Tim Manley took us to his childhood illness with energy, and Annie Duke revealed behind the scenes scheming. 

The group also made sure that local stories were told, and asked for volunteers to enter their names for the chance to tell their story. Three people were called to the stage and given one minute each. 

It was a night of masterful storytelling. No cellphones went off, no one held up their cameras to take photographs during the show. It was stressed at the beginning - we were all going to sit together and tell stories for a few hours, and everything else could wait. 

It was an amazing experience. 

New Stamp: Bookplate Edition

It has been harder and harder to find lovely bookplates lately. My local independent bookstores don't carry bookplates, and Barnes & Noble has two bland designs that look like the adhesive would peel away after a year. 

Years ago I had bookplates with dragons, a cat and a girl curled up together in front of a fire, a tree whose roots grew into a book. 

I got a gift card for Christmas, and I decided to use part of it to buy a personalized bookplate stamp. After searching through Etsy, I landed on Asspocket Productions. There were so many designs I liked, girls sitting beneath trees reading, gorgeous flowers draping over elegant fonts. I had three designs I was trying to choose from, but I kept looking. And that's when I found the perfect stamp. 

New stamp!!

The stamp arrived in the mail a week or so ago, but I've been in a crazy job transition period. I unwrapped the stamp and put it in my desk drawer to keep it safe from my cats, who have a penchant for gnawing on pretty much anything that will fit between their jaws. It wasn't until tonight that I was finally able to pull it out and start conditioning the stamp. 

A new stamp like this isn't ready to go - you have to rub the surface with an eraser first to get off any debris left over from the stamp cutting process. Then you have to get used to the stamp - how much pressure to place, how to press down to make the lines clean on the paper. 

Learning the feel of my new stamp.
I started in the bottom right corner and ended with the top left stamp. 

The seller's guidelines suggest stamping the bookplate onto archival paper, trimming the paper, and then pasting the slip into the book. Truthfully, I hadn't thought out how I would go about stamping books. Stamping is a tricky process, and even after getting used to a stamp each imprint does not necessarily turn out as well as you would hope. And then there's the thickness of ink, the transparency of paper. In short, many details that could make a stamp as a bookplate a bad experience if you stamp directly into the inside flap or dust pages.

So tomorrow I'm going to the craft store for my archival paper. And I think it will add a layer of pleasure to the stamping of my books to go through these extra steps. Less stressful, since I know in advance that the only stamps that will make it into the books will be those that turn out well. More time consuming? Yes.

My new bookplate stamp. Hooray!

But oh so wonderfully worth it.

Goals for 2013: Looking Back and Moving Forward

I recently looked at the goals that I set for myself for 2012, and I'm really pleased at how many of them I've met.

Here were my goals for 2012 and my assessment of whether I met them: 

• Finish my MFA thesis - Check! My MFA thesis is completed, turned in, defended, I graduated!, and I now have the bound copy on my bookshelf. 
• Submit these stories until they are published or I run out of suitable markets - Check! While I haven't found a home for all of my thesis stories yet, they're all on a healthy regimen of submission and revision. This is going to be an ongoing project, but I'm actively pursuing it so I'm calling it a goal met. 

• Learn more about writing novels 
• Begin writing a novel - Check! I particpated in NaNoWriMo this year, and while I didn't complete a novel I did begin one. Actually, I started several. 
• Workshop the first 5,000 words of a novel and the novel outline at DeepSouthCon - Check! Had a great workshop, got my butt kicked into gear, and met many lovely people. 

• Attend at least one big convention (AWP & World Fantasy Convention are my top choices) - Check! I attended AWP and it was excellent. 

• Continue to workshop stories with my Clarion West classmates - Check! 

• Read more & seek out new authors - Check! I've been reading many more novels this year, especially YA, to get myself back into the groove of how a novel feels. I've started following YA review blogs, so that I have a better sense of which books will speak to me before I seek them out. 

• Be more involved with my local geek community: writing, sci-fi, gaming - Check! I joined my local chapter of StarFleet and have attended events with my group, attended Con*Stellation, and participated in the Science Fiction Writers and Cake Appreciation Society reading this year at Con*Stellation.  

Shadow taking a rest after going for a walk

So what are my goals for 2013? 

• Complete the first draft of one novel. 
• Attend a residential novel writing workshop.
• Keep my current stories in the submission/ revision queue until they sell or I run out of suitable markets. 
• Write 3 new stories and submit them. 
• Experiment with storytelling in different genres (like visual narratives and non-fiction)

My main goal for 2013 is to complete a novel. I still want to write a few new short stories and keep my finished stories out on submission, but I think that writing a novel is the next big step I need to take as a writer. Even if this one is a learning novel, it will help me get to the next novel, and the next. 

2013 is my year of the novel, and I'm going to tailor my goals to that end as I go along. What are your goals for the new year?