What Planet was That?

August the Eleventh. This time last year I wrote Gægogæ Mægæ Medu, one of the What Planet is This? essays. In a sense, when I wrote Lichen and Air Quality on the 30th of October I had a feeling that my What Planet material was wearing thin or I was unable to write the same quality of essays that I had been doing, but on the other hand I was also thinking of continuing the project in another guise. That other guise hasn't arisen yet, and I'm really starting to miss the whole scope and idea and, I guess, world that What Planet is This? counjured.

For me, What Planet is This? was so much a bigger thing that just a series of essays on basically random subjects, or a glorified weblog. The initial idea was to just have a tabula rasa on which to write whatever, with the confidence that whatever I wrote would turn out to be valuable. As that developed in the first couple of days, I decided to write about whatever I was excited about at the time, in the hope that my enthusiasm would further the value; and I liked this idea so much that I thought about which posts I had liked best already, just a few days in, and realised that I liked the antiquarian bent. As time went on, the idea developed into discoveries: the main idea of What Planet was that I should discover things that people hadn't really found or thought of so much before, and that I should make these discoveries with the same constraints as the earlier parts of the weblog.

I suppose what people didn't see is what went on behind the scenes, with the hours and hours of research which I then gradually distilled into the material that I eventually published. I developed a style of writing that was extremely dense and fact filled. I tried to make sure that I didn't stray from the style of just banging out fact after fact, keeping it compelling by the sheer drive that was backing my research periods. People commented that it was very dense, and I really enjoyed that: when I read something, I want to learn a lot very quickly, and I want to be excited by I read at the same time. I hope that I fulfilled those criteria in the essays that I produced. At the very least, I came to think about the topics that I had written on for days and weeks after. They still form an often integral part of things that I think about. I still say "utchy" instead of "I" for example.

Cody Woodard tells me that I ought to make some more posts. I asked him what I should write them on. Actually, for What Planet I often didn't know what I'd post about one particular day, and just ended up finding something awesome by chance, with An Aphetic Etymology being the best example. One of the reasons I stopped writing was that [my draft on this topic seriously ended here, by happy accident, and I decided to publish it in its entirely since I haven't even written something on Strange Strands for nearly a month.]