Writing Style

I've finally settled into my basement room properly. Thanks to Mary and Bryce, I now have a bed! And I cleared the junk off the little desk I bought, and have properly set up my laptop. And got a chair.

One of the things with moving is that you discover some gems that you've had in storage for ages. Now and then I get these writing fits, where I decide I want to write a travel book, or a book of short stories, or a great novel, based loosely on a bunch of the adventures I've been on. Then I start going through my old writing, invariably starting with the Leatherback Turtle story from Ghana, and then get pulled into reading all those adventures again, and no writing happens at all (I found some of my Ghana stuff, that's where this all started today).

For those of you who didn't know me back in undergrad and before, I sent out a roughly weekly e-mail from my time in Ghana. Those e-mails are great. Michelle printed them all off and gave them to me as a booklet when I got back, which was fantastic since I sent all those e-mails from my old uni account which is now long gone. Anyways, reading through them again I noticed my writing style was quite different back then - much more colourful, more entertaining and humourous than most of the stuff I've written since. Maybe the PhD strangled all the fun out of my writing, or maybe California impaired my sense of humour. At any rate, those old e-mails are waaaaay better than anything that's turned up on this blog in the past year. It was also a tough year, though, so maybe that had something to do with it too.

Anywho. I think I'll be doing mass e-mails from Fake Mars again. Two reasons: e-mail is slightly more personal and less public than Facebook or blogging. So if I have a rant about a living situation, I can vent without (hopefully) hurting anyone's feelings on Fake Mars. Second reason: I think I just have a better writing style when I'm writing to a person than to a blog or journal. Not sure why. I think the blog tends more towards my journal writings, which on re-read are like bad fan fiction, and the mass e-mails read more like Bridget Jones' Diary.

Oh, by the way, I am short-listed to be a fake astronaut, living in a habitat on Hawaii for 8 months! I'm pretty pumped about this. I'm doing an outdoor leadership school thing in Wyoming in September as a prep, so will start e-mailing after that. Stay posted!