The Newtown Bee loves receiving your letters, and election season is one of the busiest times for those of the year, and often the most interesting for seeing what people think about how things are going and want to see in the future, and who they think is best to achieve that. The discourse between the candidates and the parties is fascinating, exciting, and peak Newtown striving to be its best.

However, after processing 14 letters received over Tuesday night, we have a simple request: can you please get them in a bit earlier? The volume of letters is going to continue going up as we get closer to Election Day on November 4, and those 14 could easily become 20 or 30 in October.

Yes, the deadline IS still noon Wednesday. Yes, Tuesday night does seem well ahead of that noon the next day deadline. But as far as work flow goes, it still might as well be the last minute when all those letters have to get channeled through a single employee on Wednesday morning who also has a lot of other work to get done to get a finished, printed product out to you all.

Can maybe some of those letters come in Monday night? Or better yet, Wednesday or Thursday night, for the following week? Obviously, if Tuesday night or Wednesday morning is all you have, fire away. We absolutely want your letter. But it would be greatly appreciated if anyone who can manage it tries to get those letters in a bit earlier. It might help the editor keep more of his hair, what little he still has.

Another request: please add a title to your letter submissions. Every letter needs one, but easily over half of the letters we receive do not have one and as hard as it is to title your own work, it is often even harder to title someone else’s work, to find the words to perfectly encapsulate the central point of the submission. That’s why a lot of letters end up with headlines as simple as, “Endorses Candidate X,” as coming up with interesting headlines for a dozen or more letters is something the staff simply does not have time for.

On another letter related note, technical difficulties with our e-mail caused a large amount of letters and other e-mails to get stuck in a spam filter for several weeks. If you did not see your letter to the editor make it to print and onto our website, it was very likely not refused, but never seen. We encourage any letter writer who has not seen their letter printed to reach out and make sure we have it. It will go in immediately for the next print cycle.

As said earlier, The Newtown Bee does want to print all the letters we receive, as many as we can, and make sure Newtown’s voices are heard.