I'm trying to decide whether I should write to another inmate or wait until I hear from the first one I wrote to and I wanted to see if I could get an idea of the time commitment involved.

How much time do you spend writing to your penpal each week/month/whatever? How often do you write? Do you have just one letter in the mail at a time or do either of you write more often than that?

Any other info about frequency of letters and time spent writing would be helpful in my decision.

i usually get a letter or two a week from R. that depends on the speed (or lack thereof) of the polunsky mailroom. sometimes they take forever, and other times they act like they're on meth. we've got 4 or 5 letters in circulation right now, so that helps matters.

the time i spend on replying depends on what day i get the letter. if i get it during the week, i'll reply the same night. if i get it on a friday, i'll take the whole weekend to respond (which results in some pretty epic letters). typically i'll take an hour or so during the week to reply, depending on how much i've got to say.

This is very hard to answer because I think everyone has a really unique situation. There's no right an wrong and it depends on your personal situation.

Mine is that I have five people that I write to, everything from one to two letters a week to one letter every 5 or 6 weeks. Sometimes they are one page long, sometimes 10 pages, depends on the person and what they wrote to me. If they write intensively, I write intensively, if they don't, I usually don't. My one friend that I am closest to, I don't worry about that and just write whenever and whatever I want which could be 3 days in a row, then nothing for 3 days- no set pattern, really.

What helps me is that I can type lightning fast, so it's actually very easy for me to write a letter in a very short amount of time. I usually do it late at night when the day is done and/or I am too tired to keep trying to do anything else. Some people knit... I write letters.

Bottom line is that if they are just you're friends, you don't "have" to do anything than what suits you really. Even if you get some real chatty pp that write long and often, you still only have to do what you can and want. You're not bound to answer word to word in length or anything. I'm just glad I can type fast! I can type as fast as I think and that helps tremendously to write a quality letter in a short amount of time, just like talking, really, a conversation.

I don't really have a set pattern. I average three letters per week and only have one penpal. Some are only two pages long, some are four or five. What is irritating is he tends to get all my letters at once, and I get his all at once as he is on mail monitoring and at a pretty secure facility.

I have two pen pals. One writes to me about 3 times a week, sometimes 4 times. I respond to each letter. The other one writes about once every 2-3 weeks but we also e-mail just about every day, sometimes a couple of times a day. The first one's letters will take awhile to respond to and I'll write some every day to him, sometimes just a paragraph or two and other times several pages. The second one's letters aren't that long. His letters and e-mails don't take long to respond to.

I tend to receive letters from my penpal probably once every two or three weeks, we don't really write as often anymore as we communicate several times a day via corrlink

I have 4 pals and we write once each every 4-6 weeks. I write to my husband usually 6 days a week. As gooddog says, it's whatever your life and their allows.

It varies. One week I will barely write, the next I could write my butt off. With most of my guys I've 3/4 letters in circulation, at any given time. But like now, I haven't had any mail in over a week.. so I have barely written. Okay, Sunday night I wrote 7 letters and made cards but I wasn't really responding to any letters (lack of mail).. it was just me rambling on about stuff. I have 21 pp's, you'd think I'd have a butt load of mail.. ugh. But I digress.

I agree with Gooddog though, everything she said

It varies. One week I will barely write, the next I could write my butt off. With most of my guys I've 3/4 letters in circulation, at any given time. But like now, I haven't had any mail in over a week.. so I have barely written. Okay, Sunday night I wrote 7 letters and made cards but I wasn't really responding to any letters (lack of mail).. it was just me rambling on about stuff. I have 21 pp's, you'd think I'd have a butt load of mail.. ugh. But I digress.

I agree with Gooddog though, everything she said

I send a Jpay every day to mine and sometimes I will write to him and send pics that depends really but every day and I write in the morning when my son goes to school it usually takes a couple of hours.