Practical matters

If you haven't noticed from my last couple of posts, a couple of things are different. I've made some changes and I hope they'll remain different. Firstly, I've been posting regularly. This has only been for a couple of weeks, but I've heard that's the amount of time a person has to do something to form a new habit, so fingers crossed that I'll stick to it. It isn't just the blog, I've been getting organized in general and that has helped me to post consistently. But I'll get into that later. The second thing is that my writing style has changed somewhat. Before I was wavering between writing this blog as a narrative and doing a 'stream of consciousness' sort of journal. While I like to write narratives, I've decided to put those aside and actually write the narrative of my time in Chenzhou at a later time. For the remainder of my time here and for the foreseeable future in China, I'll be writing this as a journal, which I think friends and family will be more interested in hearing.

And since I'm discussing such things, I think this would be an appropriate time to mention that I'm not really advertising this blog anymore, in the sense of weekly reminders that I have published so that everyone can tune in. I've decided to save those reminders until I have an especially interesting post, ie: one with pictures, video or travel. I have downloaded an app onto my new phone which will allow me to post on the go, so hopefully my posts will get more interesting in the near future.

I realize that this creates a problem because I have been very irregular in posting since I've been here and only recently have things settled down such that I have been posting regularly. Hopefully that will remain the case for a while, though I'm sure there will be some disruption if I move to Shenzhen. In any case, for the friends and family that have been following, there will be much more for you to read when you log on if I only send reminders out every now and again. It looks like there will be at least another year and a half of  messages from China, so here is my pledge:

• I will try to be regular about posting.
• I won't worry if the week's topic is interesting, valid or worthy of publishing. (This is only a journal. Not every day will be filled with fun and excitement.)
• I will attempt to convey my experiences and not always make it a story.
• I will try to include those everyday experiences that have become commonplace to me, but were interesting when I first got here.

One more thing about the app I downloaded on my phone: hopefully, it will allow me to make blog posts when I'm not sitting in front of my computer, like when I went to Guangzhou to get my passport renewed. I posted a couple of times while I was there, but I posted to G+, so they didn't appear on this blog. While it won't be easy to write extensively and in-depth about what's going on, it would be a way to make a quick post where I find wi-fi while travelling. That will be great if I get to do a great trip like the one I took to SE Asia over spring festival. The ability to post on the go will allow me to detail the most exciting times in China without having to remember what had happened after I get back. These abbreviated 'mini-posts' would probably be dominated by pictures, which is probably a good thing.