How My Lifelong Affair with Stamps influenced my Writing

The Philatelist 

Many readers have asked me if and how events, interests, and people in my life have influenced my writing. Since my stories all take place in the Los Angeles garment center, my career as a sales exec in the ladies’ apparel industry has certainly had a significant influence on my writing. Customers, colleagues, bosses, family, and friends have all played a part. But the question deserved a further look beneath the surface to the collateral events, interests, and people that came into and out of my life but played a much bigger role in defining who I am and how I write than one would ever think.  

I have been an avid philatelist since I was twelve years old. What, you may ask, is a philatelist? It’s a fancy word for a stamp collector. My introduction to stamp collecting was with a birthday gift of an album filled with stamps from one of my mother’s cousins. The pictures, colors, and shapes of the stamps in the album fascinated me, but, other than licking one and attaching it to an envelope to mail, I didn’t know much else about stamps.

There was a coin and stamp store next to the take-out pizza place my mother frequented a few miles from our house.  I took the album to that shop to see if the proprietor could teach me what stamp collecting was all about. The first time I walked into that store, a magical world opened up for me that impacted my life in more ways than I could ever have imagined.

 I credit my lifelong love affair with stamps and the influence it has had on how I write to Mr. Milton Albin. Generous, knowledgeable, and patient, Mr. Albin was a bespectacled, wiry, balding, charming middle-aged man who was the proprietor of that stamp and coin shop. Every Friday after school, I went home to collect my weekly allowance and my stamp album and then rode my bicycle to Mr. Albin’s store. 

Always wearing a jeweler’s loupe and a magnifying glass on a lanyard around his neck, Mr. Albin was so willing to answer all my questions, teach me everything I wanted to learn, and exuded so much enthusiasm about his chosen field, that even the most skeptical customer couldn’t help but become a fan. He was a wonderful teacher who taught me how to properly handle and evaluate the quality of stamps. Mr. Albin suggested that for a novice collector like me, the best way to start learning about stamps was to buy the canceled ones, rather than those costlier ones in unused mint condition. Good thing too; canceled stamps were all a pre-teen’s allowance could afford. That said, my visits to Mr. Albin’s store always began at the huge wall on the right behind the entry that had envelopes containing canceled stamps clipped onto it. 

After making my selections, I’d bring my envelopes to Mr. Albin to ring up. He would open the envelopes, and carefully take the stamps out with a pair of tongs, and that’s when the magic began. He had a story for every stamp, and his vivid descriptions made the stamps come alive. With one commemorating the casualties of our Civil War, his eyes filled as he whispered, as though praying in a Chapel. With another commemorative that celebrated the end of slavery, his eyes lit and he spoke with the fervor of a preacher.  No matter what the stamp’s story, he told it like a novel with a beginning, a middle, an ending, and a point of view. He told each story his special way; taking his time, slowly building up to the cliffhanger and would dramatically pause right before the climax until I begged him to go on. Talk about pacing and how to build tension to the finale. Mr. Albin had it down pat. He was my tour director on weekly adventures around the world and through every era of history with stamps in every color and shape imaginable serving as the tickets for the ride.   

How I look at the world and the people in it play a major role in the writing style that I learned with help from a diminutive, unassuming marvelous man every Friday afternoon who led me by the hand on the continuing adventure of a lifetime through stamps. Mr. Albin is long-gone to that great celestial collectors’ corner up above, but if I piqued your interest in stamp collecting, check out the website of the American Philatelic Society to learn more about this fascinating hobby that can take you everywhere and anywhere, while never leaving your living room. 

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Named Best US Author of the Year by N. N. Lights Book Heaven, award-winning cozy mystery author Susie Black was born in the Big Apple but now calls sunny Southern California home. Like the protagonist in her Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series, Susie is a successful apparel sales executive. Susie began telling stories as soon as she learned to talk. Now she’s telling all the stories from her garment industry experiences in humorous mysteries.

She reads, writes, and speaks Spanish, albeit with an accent that sounds like Mildred from Michigan went on a Mexican vacation and is trying to fit in with the locals. Since life without pizza and ice cream as her core food groups wouldn’t be worth living, she’s a dedicated walker to keep her girlish figure. A voracious reader, she’s also an avid stamp collector. Susie lives with a highly intelligent man and has one incredibly brainy but smart-aleck adult son who inexplicably blames his sarcasm on an inherited genetic defect.

Find out more about her on her website https://authorsusieblack.com/

Social Media https://linktr.ee/susieblack.com

DEATH BY SURFBOARD

No one is more stunned than Mermaid Swimwear sales exec Holly Schlivnik when a fisherman hooks her unscrupulous colleague’s battered corpse attached to a surfboard and hauls it onto the Washington Street Pier. The coroner ruled that while Jack Tyne drowned, he “had help dying,” and Holly’s boss is wrongly arrested for the crime.

To save the big cheese from a life behind bars, the wise-cracking, irreverent amateur detective dons her sleuthing hat to find Jack’s real killer. But the trail has more twists and turns than a pretzel, and nothing turns out the way Holly thinks it will as she tangles with a clever killer hellbent for revenge.

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Category: On Writing