How I saved my postcards from becoming a novel
Postcard 07th July ‘24: Things got a bit out of hand
Last week’s postcard was a wee bit extensive in content and length. Imagine the postal owl service trying to deliver “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” without looking like a rock falling from the sky.
I got the loveliest feedback, showing me how much you love the different aspects of my writing. You even helped me overcome some unsettled feelings I had after posting (something for a potential future post about mindset editing in writing ☺️).
Still, one element remained feeling off: The postcard got too long for my liking—too many things packed into a single article. If Substack tells you the post is too long for an email, it is certainly too long for a picture postcard 🤣. Well, the digital version has a bit more flexible interpretation, but we don’t like postal owls falling from the sky in the digital world either.
And I nearly did the same thing for this week again. I even recorded another 18 minutes of voice-over and went through all the editing steps to schedule the postcard for Sunday. Just to do it all again. This seems to be the scheme for this week. I can’t tell you how often I tossed away and re-did some of the data analysis because something was off or I accidentally overwrote the wrong data. Yep, screw me.
But back to my postcards turned encyclopedia issue. I wondered why.
Then I realised that seeing the subscriber number grow, I started worrying about not delivering enough value. My intros are becoming stand-alone essays. Which is a great thing! But not as part of my lovely weekly postcards, which I simply want to be a log of my journey.
Then I came across this super timely article from
. She talks about the intrinsic value of sharing our own stories. This is all I ever wanted my weekly postcards to be about: the raw stuff, the more or less relatable story, the splashy ride in this life raft.But with all these ideas in my head, it seems I might actually post separate essays more frequently. This will allow me to go deeper into some specific issues, solutions, or more detailed stories of some aspects of my weekly postcards. Still, by keeping both at a digestible and pleasing length. I am kind of excited. I am still not more than stumbling around in the realm of online writing. But this kind of seems like a mini progress of my content.
And before you wonder: “What did she do with that long intro for this postcard? What would it have been about!?”.
I got you, it will come as a separate postcard. Maybe we should start calling them letters?! But the publication is called “Postcards”…. Mmh, overthinking here. Maybe they can simply be posts, essays, or articles. No need for fancy names 🤣. I like essays.
Ah, and before I forget, It will be about my struggles with routines and habits.
About this week’s postcard
On my desk
Research Jobs
I am finally done with processing the acoustic data and figuring out how to plot them. Hence, this week was all about making the sound data VISIBLE for further analysis.
Here is an example to give you some more practical application to my scientific mumbling. A spectrogram is just a fancy name for a graphic which makes sound visible.
This one spans a over a month. It visualises the underwater sound recorded by a hydrophone placed in the study location.
We have the time in days on the horizontal line at the bottom (x-axis). On the left vertical line (y-axis), we have the frequency in hertz. Which is the pitch of the sound. Like very low or very high.
Then, you have the colour bar to the right, which indicates how loud the sound is, with colder colours (blue) displaying low levels (black would be no sound) and warmer colours representing higher sound levels.
I used circles to highlight some of the aspects for you. First, the dotted elements are things we will investigate further by actually listening to the selected sound files and inspecting a more detailed spectrogram of that particular recording. Some of them are related to vessel noise.
The circles with solid lines are most likely biological sources: In this case - bearded seals. They are very active vocalisers in this region during this time of the year - that’s because horny males being on the look out for a mate.
How do you get such a visualisation? Well, the hydrophone has a standard memory card which records .wav files (the audio file format that you might remember adding to mp3 players some lightyears ago). The recordings in - in this case - were chunks of 12-15 minutes recorded during each hour over the course of a year.
I use coding and partial more or less standard programmes to process the sound files into .csv files (yes, sound data in table formats). And then, I use again some programming to display them in a spectrogram (among some other more mathematical graphics). Hooray.
Let me know if you liked such a mini-excurse into marine acoustics and if you have any questions!
Publications
No progress, but this week, I wanted to focus on the data analysis anyways. However, I had a brief discussion with one of my thesis supervisors to start planning for a second manuscript. So, we have three publication elements right now:
1 manuscript —> in peer review
1 popular science article —> first draft to be started
1 manuscript awaiting —> first draft to be started
PhD preparation
I am slowly getting started. I ordered a book about Marine Mammal Physiology which I will use to level up my knowledge on the biological aspects of the PhD project.
I also want to start brainstorming a bit more about the focus that I want to set for my own research within the overall project.
Relocating the pack to DK
We have been mainly questing for some further clarifications on the administrative aspects I talked about last week 😂
However, we got sufficient answers to actually complete some of the quests now. One puzzle remains: Denmark treats employees working mainly from the Home Office for a company in another EU country differently depending on their ROLE within the company. There are special rules once you reach leadership levels with a “Director” rank. What the heck is wrong with you, guys?
And to clarify these details, we either have to pay a tax consultant - or figure out with the Danish tax agency for free. We are still trying the latter. At least I managed now to complete the quest of “How to pass the first step of the hotline without having a Danish residence number yet”. (It might have involved spending a ridiculous amount of time with the chatbot of the website, who started considering me - including my IP address - spam who wanted to ask for finding a job in Denmark. But finally, a kind employee who entered the chat gave me a secret gemstone key to enter instead of a resident number). So I will continue next week.
On the more emotional side, it slowly sinks in that there is only so much time left to meet and see friends and family before we move - and it is summer vacation season. So this weekend, we had our first: “Next time, we’ll see each other around Christmas. Maybe.” As we all know, the Christmas season is busy for everyone, too. 🥺
On my ears, page or screen
Sven and I are currently watching “The Race,” a German YouTube (and Joyn) series by DAVE. It is about five content creators from Germany who have been “suspended” in the middle of the city centre in Marokko without money or a cell phone. And they somehow have to get back to Köln, Germany - which is 2.500 km away (and at the other side of the Mediterranean Sea).
Things that made me smile, laugh, think, cry or curse this week
Smile & laugh
Receiving a handwritten letter from a friend I know still from school. We have been reconnecting throughout the past three years.
Molly being the strangest and cutest hormone-driven creature (she is went into heat).
Sven buying a bottle of champagne to celebrate 🥂 the official PhD admission.
The video we received from the super kind community manager at the housing site we will be renting from. We were so busy during the showing that we did not take a single picture and now he kindly created a house tour video for us!
Meeting with a very dear friend for coffee.
Getting my first - not one but three coffees - from lovely
! Yes, I secretly set up a “Buy me a coffee” option to support my unbreakable routine of writing at cosy coffee places 🫠🤍
Think
This post from
about dealing with Disappointment:
Cry & curse
While everyone is running a little bit low on energy over here, my BMW MINI decided to join. His battery died. Poor thing, I think he is heartbroken since we decided to sell him by the end of summer 😪 (And yes, my MINI has a male personality).
Up next
I plan to work a bit more on the Publication aspects. And getting this freaking Home Office & tax issue clarified.
Hug,
Fabienne, thank you for another beautiful and vulnerable postcard! I relate so much to the fear of sharing with a growing audience. But the truth is everyone is here because they enjoy your writing and your journey ❤
Thank you for the recommendation!! I vote that you need to include more pictures of puppy Molly