Things I learned this week

Things I learned this past week:

1. People have more sex during a recession. I'm fully stumped on this one.

2. Four wiry mixed-breeds are strong enough to pull my ass (and the rest of me, too) across 10 kilometres of snow and ice. Last Saturday I suited up in my husband's parka and my friend's boots (and her mitts and snowpants too), and joined eleven other people for an afternoon of dogsledding in Whistler's Soo Valley. I took my voice recorder with me. (I was on assignment, of course: do you really think I've got $169 to drop on an experience that lasted only 40 minutes from start to finish and scared the shit out of me pretty much the entire time? No. Fortunately for me, Outdoor Adventures Whistler comped my trip. And let me give a shout-out to their excellent guides while I'm on the subject, because they were fabulous.)

I bravely/foolishly agreed to drive a sled all by myself. Fell straight off it at the turnaround point, which almost NO ONE does. And which resulted in a runaway dogsled, lots of walkie-talkie shouting between the guides, four tangled dogs in harness and a stalled line of sleds as everyone waited for me to get it together.

I got it together (and stood on the brake the entire way back).

3. I want to write for CBC radio. In fact, I want to write, produce and voice programs for CBC radio. I learned this about myself while reading Mary Lou Finlay's The As It Happens Files, which (oddly enough) is a book about the long-running CBC Radio One show As It Happens. AIH airs every weeknight at 6:30 p.m. (PST) and I adore it. I started listening years ago, when Barbara Budd shared the airwaves with Michael Enright, and I still listen when I get the chance. I love how every now and then, an interviewer on AIH comes out with something that stops me in my tracks and makes me go, "I can't believe she just said that!" (Other people say that about me all the time. Why not join the team?)

4. Too many adverbs kill good writing.

Part A. Technically, I was aware before this week of the good-writing-killingness of adverbs, but I was reminded of it when I recently spotted an article I published several months ago. I hardly recognize it anymore. Somewhere in the intervening weeks between submission and publication, someone stuck a bellows full of meaningless descriptors up the article's ass and jumped on it. For example, changing "beautiful" to "extraordinarily beautiful" just seems... extraordinarily unnecessary. And since we're already in the ring with descriptors, superfluous is one that springs to mind to describe the above act of literary bludgeoning. Beautiful is pretty much as pretty as it gets, no?

Please don't think I'm a conceited arse who can't handle other people's critiquing of my work. I'm totally in support of others changing my words to make them stronger, or to convey my message in a more effective manner – I know several editors who do this as a matter of course. Good editing enhances any message. Competent tinkering makes me happy. Prying apart tight verbiage to insert wads of cotton fluff pisses me off.

And – although it's not an adverb – I'm really mad about the word "noggin" suddenly making an appearance in said article: "As important as our noggins are, facial features can't carry the day on their own." In fact, this entire sloppy sentence was taped and glued and stapled atop an existing paragraph, effectively punching a hole in a previously airtight section. Bummer.

(And who the fark uses "noggin" anyway? I mean, come on.)

B. I welcome the addition of WestShore to Victoria's already crowded magazine scene. I just wish they'd hire an editor who's not afraid to nuke flowery writing. Get a load of this sentence, which describes a new urban park being designed in the municipality of Langford:

"By the summer of 2010 the vision will be a reality as people share a quiet moment on a bench near the wetland pond as children cavort amid gales of laughter in the water park a short walk away."

It's long, yes, but that's not a problem in and of itself. Grammatically, it's stable. It's structurally weak, but holding.

But. If a gale is the same thing to you as it is to me, then we can both see that gales of laughter don't fly in this setting. Peals, maybe. Peals are nice, like bells ringing. Kids could do peals. Peals are light. They drift on the breeze. Gales don't. Gales are forceful and uncontrolled, on the thin edge of decency. Gales come from smoke-hoarsened drunkards slapping their thighs over jokes in the pub.

Similarly, the quiet moment being shared by the "people" on the bench is shattered by all the cavorting amid those gales of laughter happening in the nearby waterpark. Does the writer not see this? (And what's with the people? I mean, are there eight of them? Why not a couple, or friends? People makes me think of milling groups, not mellow dyads with their heads together.)

Semantics, sure. But it's all about getting the image right.

And whether we like it or not, image is everything.