InCoWriMo Pen Pal Match-Up

Happy New Year! It's already January 2017 - hard to believe, but we're embracing it here. And, before we've even got our teeth into January, we're looking ahead to February! February is International Correspondence Writing Month, InCoWriMo for short, where the goal is to write and send a letter everyday - and hopefully get to receive a few letters, as well! February is a great month for this because it's a short month, and it's also when, as Canadians, we've really begun to get cabin fever with all the snow and cold weather. It's a nice way to connect or re-connect with people, and to give your favourite fountain pens some fresh ink. For some inspiration, here's a blog post I wrote in 2015 on a few tips for making it through InCoWriMo. The one I most highly recommend is taking an hour or two at the end of January and getting set up with a calendar and all of the addresses written out. There's nothing that takes the buzz out of letter writing like having to suffer through a fruitless search for an address after having written your beautiful poetry on a page. You can write to the same person, family members, pen pals, politicians, long-lost friends or lovers, your local shops and businesses, authors - anyone you can think of! Sometimes, though, it can be hard to find someone to write to. I did a blog post a while back on how to find a pen pal, but I thought with this special month, and the difficulty with finding enough people to write to (especially if they may not be able to get back to you for you to respond again within the month!) we would host a pen pal match up. How it works is that you'll fill out the Google form, we'll collect everyone's information and then sort it all out. You will receive (via email) one person's mailing address, and someone else will receive yours. You should have one person to write to, and someone else should be writing to you, hopefully all to be some time in February. If the person who is writing to you writes early enough, you may even have time to write them back during InCoWriMo. None of the information you submit on the form, other than your name and mailing address, will be given to your prospective match. All of the questions are just so we can try to match everyone up as best we can. You may notice on the form that that you can check whether or not you are interested in a long term correspondence (as opposed to just writing once during InCoWriMo). We are hoping to pair everyone up according to interests as best we can, and also if they are open to having a long-term correspondence, but there are no guarantees. In fact, we cannot even guarantee that someone will write to you, although we really hope it all works out. You are also more than welcome to just sign up for a one-time correspondence, if you know you might not have time to commit long-term, but want to sign up for the fun. In order to participate, you need to get the form filled out to us by January 20th. This is so we have time to match everyone up and get mailing addresses out by the end of January. If you would like to submit after this, you can still go ahead, and if there are other people who are late, we might be able to accommodate, but you might also get no one at all. In that case, you can always write to us here at the shop! And speaking of writing to us at the shop, we would love it if you did! Our address is: Wonder Pens 250 Carlaw Avenue, Unit 105 Toronto, Ontario M4M 3L1 Canada Please feel free to share this with anyone else you think might be interested - whether or not they are customers at the shop, live outside of Canada, or are even fountain pen users. In fact, this sort of pen pal match up may be good fun for people living outside of Canada, as they'll likely be matched with a Canadian, and it'll be exciting explaining how our igloos work.