I have read a few posts both past and present and those posts sparked this thread.

It is about your first letter to your pp.

It always seems that the first response takes close to forever and a day to come back to us...

When you wrote your pp that first introductory letter how long did it take you to write? Did you glance at his/her ad and know immediately that this is the person that you should write? Did that first letter happen in one shot or did you have rewrite or retype it?

Do you think your pal responded immediately? or Do you think he/she were as nervous as you may have been when writing that first letter?

What has been your overall most rewarding thing to come out of writing ppp's?

the very first time i looked at my PP's add i knew he is the one i would like to write, and believe me I looked at almost every add on WAP...
and it took about three weeks for the first response to come back...like you said the first letter takes forever, at first i thought he wasnt interested in writing back but then one friday there was his letter...and man was I happy....
the first letter took me about half an hour to write...
it probably took him a few days to write back and think of what he wants to write and to make sure that he wouldnt scare me away...
the most rewarding thing for me is that i can tell that he is happy receiving my letters..

My first journey to even write the letter began when I was 17. It was just before we were out of school for the summer in Alabama.

Our principal wanted to scare us all good because there were a lot of problems beginning in our school.

They had motivational speakers, detectives and videos and even brought along a male inmate and a female inmate.

They were both serviing some lengthy sentences. They both told similar stories. They had no privacy, they were sent to prison to be *rehabilitated* yet they were a place where rehabilitation was just a word on a form. Life in prison was definitly not a vacation and certainly not club med.

I was moved by what the woman before us had to say. They just told us she was in a minimum security women's prison. That and her name was all I had to go on. I did my research and found her just a few months after that. However when I called the prison to find out how to address the letter, they ended by saying I had to be of legal age to write her. I waited just a few more month and then wrote her.

From the day I mailed that letter it seemed like it took a lifetime to get a reply back. We wrote until her release and still keep in touch.

With each *first letter* I mail... it seems like the postal service is working at two speeds... slow and stop. After that first letter I can always sense when I will have mail.

I just wrote 3 new people in addition to the 3 I already had... so now I wait paitently for the mail to arrive.

My first letter took me about an hour maybe. I wasn't going to write to anyone on here, but one ad reached out and grabbed me. I went to bed that night and couldn't sleep, thinking about that ad and the guy in prison who needed a friend. The overall tone of his ad seemed so positive and real and I can't exactly explain it, but I felt compelled to write. So I woke up in the morning and jotted out the letter off the top of my head - didn't revise a thing, although I did type it up and save it on my computer so I would remember what I wrote.

The response DID take forever....6 weeks to the day. He said in his letter that he wrote back the day he got it and that the mailroom misplaces mail sometimes. According to the date on that letter, I got it a week after he wrote it. I can't detect any nervousness in the letter; he did say that nearly all the responses he's gotten are from older women (he's 25) and he was thrilled to have someone closer to his age to talk to. The letter was surprisingly upbeat, in fact, and I'm looking forward to more!

If you've read some of my other posts, you'll know that I JUST received that first letter from him...but it's already been rewarding. I just had a nice conversation tonight with the guy I'm dating about having a positive outlook and learning from other people - writing helps BOTH of these things. I feel like I'm making a difference just by being a friend (which I happen to be good at ) and appreciating where I'm at in life. But I'm learning from my pp's outlook as well - he's keeping his head up in circumstances that are probably beyond anything I'll ever face.

That's what I have to say so far....

My first letter to my pal (now my man) didnt take me long to write. I kept it short and sweet and when he wrote me back he said that i left him wanting to know more (which is what i intended to do..hehe) and it just went from there. I never thought i would fall in love with this man in a million years but it happened and it's something i dont regret at all. It took us a while before we both knew it was what we wanted to get into. It's funny b/c we were just talking about this the other day in one of our letters!!