Change all bookmarks to http://goingpostalpenpals.net/ please!

Big changes:

1. Move to the new domain – for real! This is going to be much cleaner, and my new server doesn’t have bandwidth requirements. This means…
2. Blogs! I will finally be able to enable blogs so that you can create a blog and post to it to share your letters, writing, pens, and so on. You will be able to use your blog for whatever you want!
3. Requesting a penpal will no longer be a feature! I no longer have the time to keep up with the sheer amount of penpal requests I get. If you have penpals pending, you will still be paired up. But I will no longer be accepting new requests. However! …
4. We will have penpal advertisements! You will be able to post up an “ad” for a penpal! You will also be able to search through ads and respond to them if you’d like a new penpal. These will be absolutely 100% free. They will not pester you in any way. They will not advertise products. They will be for penpals and swaps ONLY.
5. And speaking of that, as a reminder Going Postal is free to use and explore. Thanks to all of you for being a member!

Stay tuned!

Anyway, I’m classifying this under Mail Art with the excuse that you could TOTALLY use this for your mail art purposes! Who doesn’t want a library themed letter? Raise your hand if you do NOT want one!

No one is raising their hand? THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT I MEAN I AM JUST SAYING.

By the way, when I was a little kid, I totally ran a library out of my room. I figured I had so many books, who wouldn’t want to come to my library? I didn’t have this nifty set so I wrote who check out my books in pencil on the inside cover. Also, my mom was the only one who came to check out a book. Kind of sad now that I’m thinking about it.

(Disclaimer: I still make no money off Going Postal, including this link. I just did a search for “library kit” and posted the Amazon link because it’s pretty ubiquitous. I also don’t own this (YET) so I can’t speak for the quality or anything.)

P.S. I will not say no if you want to send me one for trial purposes, Knock Knock Marketing Team. Also you can feel free to send me pretty much anything on your site. Thanks in advance!

We’re now approaching 150 members, and I’m sad to say I haven’t made a single penpal pairing in a month. It’s amazing how difficult it is, especially with the sheer amount of penpal requests I receive every week! I apologize profusely for this. I need to come up with a better system so as not to get overwhelmed. In the meantime, we have new members joining every day. Please feel free to scout out some new penpals!

ps: This is my post office! Yes, I understand that you’re jealous!

This means you can worry less about your profile. Random people from nowhere can’t view your user profile now – only registered and logged in users can view your personal info, including your avatar, age, location, and interests. I considered putting an Address field in the profile, but I’m not sure. What does everyone else think about this?

This will also come in handy for organizing swaps or exchanges, as you can exchange addresses within the forums if you wish.

I am extremely excited about this, and have been waiting since Going Postal’s creation for the time and support to make the community private. Privacy is extremely important to me, especially since I work as a web developer. I want this community to be fun, simple to use, and safe, and I sincerely hope that this newest feature will help make this community better.

So! Interview time! If you are new to Going Postal, interviews are very simple – each week, I try (and often fail) to post up an interview with one of our members. This is the perfect opportunity for you to find new penpals to write to, or get to know people around the site. I always ask if the person is open to new penpals, and most of them are at least open to the idea of new penpals! You can always feel free to message any of our members using the handy message button on the user’s profile to ask people to be a penpal! You can then exchange addresses and start writing. Many of my members have said that their most reliable and favorite penpals have come from messaging other members, so feel free to try it out.

This week, we have JulieB! JulieB has an insane amount of penpals, exchanges, and swap partners! She also has a great blog about letters, pens, and ink, and has over 80 fountain pens! So without further ado, here is JulieB!

1. Introduce yourself! What do you do outside of letters and what do you like?

Hi, I’m Julie aka Okami. I am a CPA in real life and outside of letter writing I love to read, fiction mainly but most any genre. I am also a collector of fountain pens and very amateur photographer. I also love to play with art supplies. I’m not much of an artist, but I love to sketch, doodle and generally make a mess. If something turns out well and recognizable as what it was originally that’s great, a happy accident.

2. How long have you been writing letters?

I wrote a lot of letters as a kid, but that faded away. My interest was rekindled when I began to seriously get into fountain pens about 2 years ago. It started as a way to use my pens, but turned into more of a passion. I love learning about other people, where they live, there lives. Many are not just penpals but friends. It is a wonderful way to maintain a connection with real people.

3. What’s your favorite thing to get in the mail?

My favorite thing to get in the mail, is a long chatty letter. It doesn’t need to be about anything specific, I love hearing about life in general. I have a penpal in England who has a real way with words and receiving a letter from her is always a joy. She generally has me laughing out loud with her wit.

4. What is your favorite type of candy?

My favorite candy is dark chocolate. I guess I should say anything made with dark chocolate. Hmmm….chocolate covered cherries. Ok – I’m not allowed any candy.

5. What’s the best letter you’ve ever sent?

The best letter I ever wrote was to my penpal in England. Attempting to match her wit, I wrote a long letter detailing how we were hit by lightning and all the ensuing problems. Unfortunately, she never received it. The USPS or Royal Mail, not sure which, lost it.

6. How many pen pals do you have, and are you looking for new ones?

I currently have 20 regular penpals and 12 that are not always so regular, more sporadic. I am always happy to add penpals to my list, they just may have to be patient about receiving a letter. Oh I also participate in postcard exchange and have nine people that I swap with.

I have a blog which includes fountain pens, journals, stationery and letters. It is called Whatever at http://okami-whatever.blogspot.com

Things have been really busy here at the Going Postal Cottage! We’ve been planning to move to a brand new, shiny domain (instead of a subdomain on lunsh). We’ve also been tweaking the site to be more user friendly for both us and you!

I want to remind everyone that we have awesome forums with hardly any activity lately. Please take the time to visit the forums (the link is above) and find some topics you love and post to them! You can do all sorts of cool things in the forums – interact with other members, talk about paper, pens, and notebooks, organize swaps (swaps are SO FUN) and discuss the future of letter writing! It’s very awesome and addicting to be able to chat letters with everyone. We recently organized an origami swap that was amazing! I received the best origami EVER, and I took the time to also make some amazing origami as well. Take a look!

I also have some Very Important, Potentially Bad news. I know, I know. I saved it for the end so I could give you all the good news first. The good news is that I’m getting very swamped with penpal requests! This is awesome. I’m so, so, so happy people are using the Request feature to obtain plenty of amazing penpals, catered mostly to your needs and requirements. However, people are consistently requesting 5-6 penpals, which is a lot, and it’s getting a little stressful on my end. So for the time being, I’m going to ask that you guys request at most TWO penpals at a time. Once you get your two penpals, feel free to make another request! But for now, let’s just try with two at a time. If it works out really well, we can try moving the quota up later.

If you’ve already requested more than two and you haven’t received all your penpals yet, rest assured your request still stands. I’ll continue pairing until you’ve received all your penpals, and then in the future if you want more, you can go ahead and request two more. Also if you accidentally request more using the form starting now, I’ll just limit it to two automatically.

I do hate to do this, as I know you guys love lots of penpals and filling out the form every time gets kind of old. But I definitely want to continue our penpal pairing service, and it’s all human powered by me, so it does get to be quite a bit of work! By limiting it to two, I’m hoping the compromise will be good for you and for me so that I can provide excellent service and try to fulfill all your requirements, instead of rushing and stressing and doing a sloppy job.

Thanks for understanding! I hope you guys are enjoying the site. As always, let me know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or you want to write a guest article!

Remember: I am collecting workspace photos! Where do you write your letters? What does the space look like? Send me a picture to goingpostalteam at gmail dot com and I will happily post it up and marvel at you guys’ beautiful spaces!

Matt’s workspace is one of the University of Washington’s amazing reading rooms in one of the libraries. It’s not hard to get inspired seeing a place like that! Whenever I see an amazing reading room like that, it always reminds me of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for some reason, when they go to the library to look up Paul’s book. I love workspaces like this because it reminds us that you can write anywhere!

Due to some age issues we had on here recently, I want to direct everyone to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. It’s so weird to think that Going Postal is big enough now to necessitate a Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, but that’s the way it has to be, unfortunately.

The gist of it is that basically you have to be 13 years old to be a member at minimum. I thought long and hard about a minimum age and decided on 13 because I know we have some awesome teenagers on the site. Don’t let this censor yourself, of course. I won’t moderate anyone unless it really is inflammatory or illegal. You know the drill.

Also we at Going Postal don’t sell lists of email addresses to spammers. And stuff.

Anyway, please don’t hesitate to send me a message with suggestions or complaints. I want this to be an awesome community, and I really encourage diversity around here. If there’s some feature you want to see, or some awesome blog post idea you have, please let me know! I’d love to hear from you.

P.S. I also updated the About page to include our FAQ! Please take some time to read this over if you’re unsure how to use the site or have some questions about how it works.

Here it is! The red chair is no more. In the photo, you can see my cigar box, where I keep recent letters (older ones go into my letter shoe-box ). You can also see my bottles of ink (green and purple), my stamps, a ton of desk supplies, a red “love” sketchbook that I made myself, and a Ton O Junk. I didn’t clean at all, so you get to see the messiness of my desk in all its glory!

The desk itself was given to me by my late grandmother, and I love it to death. You can kind of see in the photo all the surface scratches on it – it really needs to be sanded and refinished, but I kind of like all the character it has now. In the second drawer on the right is where I keep all my stationery, envelopes, and stickers.

That’s it for me, for now! Send your workspace photos!