Picking Up the Pen Once Again: Soft Reboot
I've been away from this for a while because life is… actually, do you need to know anything more than that? Life is the answer. Life kept me busy for a while but it was life that brought me back to the pen. Trying to navigate that fine line of juggling my personal responsibilities and building a business is hard graft. I put myself under huge amounts of pressure and I really don’t know why.
But I’m working on it.
Rather than come back with some grand plan, I'm taking it slow. Just like when writing a letter. I’m going to make a simple plan that can be expanded or edited along the way. Just like when we relearn how to write a letter. But most importantly, I’m going to be truly authentic and not try to be anyone else just to appear professional.
Because sometimes I’m not. None of us are. And we shouldn’t try to be.
The first major thing that went was the old website. It was amazing. So clever. So profound. My writing style was a genius mixture of descriptive, humorous and informative. Everything you needed to know about A Letter Is Better CIC and all the workshops was right there for you to read at your leisure. Your delight!
Five webpages filled with information and as I began editing it one day, I thought, who gives a shit? Who reads this amount of copy anymore? Even this is going on with itself so, long-story short, old-look-at-my-fancy-writing-website bad. New-to-the-point website good.
I’m picking up the pen once again and you’ll hear more about that soon via the socials. But for now, it’s back to basics.
Totnes Community Workshop
Relearning how to write a letter to a living person
Your handwriting is fine. Your spelling is fine. Nobody has ever opened an envelope and grabbed a red biro so they could highlight all your errors. If they do, it’s because someone hurt them emotionally as children and it’s not a reflection on you.
What the average person will think is this, oh my, an amazing human being has sat down and wrote this for me. I haven’t read it all yet and I don’t know who wrote it, and even if there’s a bit of bad news, I still fucking love it!
That's why the 10,000 Letter Challenge exists and that’s why I created the How To Write Letter Guide which is free and explains the lot. The guide provides all the information you’ll need and the Living Person bit means family, friends, celebrities, any person alive, as far as you know.
Doesn’t mean they’ll write back though but that’s okay.
Digital Detox - I am not anti-tech in the slightest.
I'm not anti-tech. You're reading this on a screen and not on a handwritten letter delivered by a pigeon. I get it. Tech is amazing but there’s something fundamentally different between writing an email and writing a letter.
If tech and handwritten letters had a fight no one would win because their unique fighting styles would cancel each other out.
I am waffling.
Both can coexist and that’s absolutely fine. Do I use my car more than a bike? Of course I do, it's not 1947! But an hour on the bike is a completely different experience to an hour in a car. Both have value and both require different skills.
Digital Detox is about trying to bring a small amount of balance back into our lives. I have created workshops especially for this wonderful and interesting issue! If you want to know more, email me and I’ll break it all down for you.
Workshop Flyer
The Tale of Two Letters - Workshops online or face-to-face
I have delivered the A Tale Of Two Letters workshop in person and it, if I don’t say so myself, was a success. It’s always a good sign when you get people crying. I really feel like my job has been done just right when there’s snotty noses and smeared eyeliner in the room. I clap my hands together really slowly and nod my head at my own creation. A job well done.
The poster is attached to this so check it out and you’ll get an idea of what it’s all about. I’m happy to run workshops like this face-to-face or online. But, the benefits of using the Unsent Letter as a therapeutic tool is what this is all about so I’d happily give you all the workshop information for free. So just email me and I’ll send it to you. It won’t be the same as a physical workshop because some of it is created in the moment in response to the participants but you’ll get the gist of it.
