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I found a letter I wrote when I participated in a Laura Ingalls Round Robin. There were eight or nine of us who met on an LIW internet bulletin board on Prodigy in the early 1990s. When Prodigy went to "pay by the hour" we decided to keep in touch the old-fashioned way, by snail mail. We started something similar to the "circular letters" that the Quiner siblings and their spouses wrote in the 1800s.

On a predetermined date, we all wrote a letter and mailed it to the next person on the list of participants. When you received a letter, you added one to the bottom of the stack and mailed it on to the next person. Once the packet had made a round, you removed your earlier letter, added another letter, and the round robin kept making the rounds.

It was really fun. But as time went by, the packets got farther and farther apart, and people got tired of it. At some point, the letters stopped coming. But I kept all the ones I had written (and got back) in a folder. I'm throwing them away today (gasp!), but I noticed something I had written about the blank back of the last page of one of my letters.

I wrote: "Something to think about--- What a waste of a whole side of perfectly good paper! Perhaps in thirty years I will write a short story or poem here and decades later, people will wonder if I wrote it this year or if I was like Laura Ingalls Wilder and saved my scrap paper to use at a later date?"

There's been a debate over the years about when Wilder's First Three Years and a Year of Grace manuscript was written. After These Happy Golden Years? While working on an earlier book?

Some people think she wrote it after These Happy Golden Years, but lost interest in revising it after Almanzo died. Since LIW wrote that she was working on an "adult book" while working on the "Little House" series, some people think that FFY is that book. Since some of the FFY pages are written on the back of pages that come from Farmer Boy, some people think Laura wrote it then. Some people think she just saved her scrap paper and used it years and years later. And some people think there's no way of telling.
- posted by pioneergirl at 5:44 PM