I recently got a partial request via email {all my queries have been via email} to snail-mail my partial to the agency. That involved a ridiculous amount of formatting, cover-letter crafting, and printing, but in the end, I took a beautiful manila envelope to the post office and sent it.
And all my annoyance at the whole snail-mail thing just vanished.
I felt like Louisa May Alcott. Or Jane Austen. Jo March and Anne Shirley. Just the...the romance of it, of writing a book, of printing it out {which they could not do, I know}, of sealing up my story and sending it off into the unknown. Of knowing it would be held in real hands and read with real eyes...
As convenient as email is, I do not think anything can equal the beauty of the real mail. Even if this agency does not end up offering me representation, I'm so very glad they requested a partial. Because just for a moment, I got to live the life of the writer in my imagination, the one who writes in secluded closets with a typewriter, wreathed by cigarette smoke, surrounded by half-full cups of days-old coffee, who stacks the paper with a grim smile, ties it with a ribbon, and sends it away...I got to live that life.
3 comments:
I love this! There's something so satisfying about getting actual mail instead of an email.
And I love your writer fantasy with a type writer. ;)
-Meredith
This... this is beautiful. I'm so glad you've gotten to experience that life, if only just a taste! Now I just need to wait until it's my turn to experience it too.
There IS something about snail mail that takes you back to that yesteryear.
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