Work and Play

Last week, due to a last-minute illness of one of our regular writers, I blogged for work. It was an interesting experience. Not because it was new, but because in the four five years that I’ve been posting here, I’ve created a voice for this blog that I’m totally comfortable with—if I had to give it a name, I’d go with “geek snark” (or maybe gnark? sneek?). Even though I got the opportunity to write about a really amazing night of music, comedy, and dancing (2 of the 3 will seem quite familiar to regular readers of this blog), the assignment for work presented a challenge for me, because it didn’t feel like the blogging voice I’m used to would exactly cut it in the world of real reporting. (On the other hand, if you look at some of the other posts on Elevated Voices around the same time as mine, you’ll find several videos of a drag queen and a guy pretending to be French hunting “celebrities” around Denver, so “real reporting” is a term I use loosely.) I can’t say I’m 100% happy with the end result, and unlike this blog, I can’t go back and make unlimited edits, but I guess it turned out all right for a first effort. If there’s one thing I’ve figured out in the extremely limited writing I’ve done, it’s that I can at least do a decent job of mimicking other writing styles, so hopefully, I’ll get more chances to practice other voices beyond this one.

(And because I know she’s going to post a comment to this effect anyway, my friend Jenny has been telling me to try writing for other outlets for years now. It’s just taken me a while to figure out that she might actually be on to something.)