I've been making a concerted attempt to blog more regularly of late. For a number of reasons. Which, if I think about it, are probably interconnected. For one thing, I'm trying to write more. And write faster. I'm a pretty slow writer. It dates back to the difficult relationship I developed with writing when doing my PhD thesis. Academic writing is very different to regular writing. It's very structured, you're using other people's ideas to contextualise, discuss and explore your own concepts, and it's a formal space for expressing yourself. It doesn't really allow a space for including yourself in your words - or at least, I couldn't figure out how to get there. Instead, I got into the habit of writing in a passive voice. It was an easy way to keep myself removed from the topic, which also had the bonus of being an easy way to boost my word count. Fiction and creative non-fiction became the antithesis (pun accidental but cel...