When Writing Means You Really Have to Write

I'm pretty proud of my handwriting. Unless I'm in a huge hurry, I usually write in all capital letters--a tendency I share with my father and brother, who use a neat and very cool-looking block text. But as a writer in the 21st century, unless you're extremely traditional or "old school," there's not much need to handwrite anything. I "write" my grocery list on my iPhone because it's easier to delete things once they're in my cart, rather than scratch them off with a pen. I send a lot of text messages and emails, my outlines and articles are all done on Word, and while I religiously write thank-you notes for my kids' birthday gifts, that only happens once a year for each kid. I write rent checks once a month and paychecks for our nanny once a week, but those involve few letters and little time.

It's a good thing that I don't write much by hand because MS is starting to take a toll on my right hand's ability to write. For example, I had to go to an urgent care clinic the other day for a horrid sinus infection (you can read all about it a few posts back), which involved filling out those dreaded patient information forms. For the first page and a half, I was doing fine. By the end of the second page, my hand started feeling like jello and I had to slow down and work hard to prevent my form from looking like my five year-old filled it out.

This brings me to the task at hand. I am extremely excited, to put it mildly, about my book release party for Border Insecurity on April 22nd. I've ordered fifty VIP invitations that have all been folded neatly and include the gorgeous postcard inserts created by my wonderful marketing manager at Palgrave Macmillan. They just need a return address label (easy), a stamp (easy), and a beautifully written mailing address (not so easy). Most normal people wouldn't blink twice at something as simple as writing an address on an envelope, and I can only liken it to sending out wedding invitations. Many people actually hire a calligrapher to handwrite gorgeous addresses on their invitations because they feel it's that important. I can't equate this event to a wedding--more like a birthday party, if anything--but these invites are going to elected congressional, state, and local officials, law enforcement commanders, well-known local business executives, etc. They gotta look good!

So for now, my solution is to take my time, perhaps doing no more than ten envelopes at a time until my hands have had time to relax and regain a normal level of dexterity. The invitations aren't going out for another month, so fortunately I have time to make them look like the White House sent them :).