Creative Writing 101

Well as I get back into the swing of the blogging thing I have perused the month long festival of google alerts clogging up my mailbox.

Found this little gem from the folks at VIA Rail who are busy trying to drum up business on the Skeena line, and while we can appreciate their efforts on our behalf to lure the monied train travelers to our various northern outposts, one must take some of their gushing with a grain of salt. To wit we quote this little blurb about the self anointed Northern Capital of Prince George....

"Prince George, where the Skeena stops overnight on its journey between Jasper and Prince Rupert, is a beautiful city located in some of Canada's densest forests. Not surprisingly, the city is one with nature, as over 100 parks can be found within city limits!

Prince George also offers several fascinating museums, such as the Fraser Fort George Regional Museum, a hands-on natural history and science center featuring "Adventure Theatre", an in-depth history of the region's human culture, and various other activities."

Now I have no bone to pick with the land of Mr. PG, hell I even lived there for two and a half years of my life. But it's a stretch to call the town that sits in a bowl, with its hot haze of pulp effluent hanging over it in the hot and occasionally stinking summer as "Beautiful", it takes a lot of rose in your coloured glasses to call it beautiful, even scenic would be a bit of a challenge as the cut banks aren't exactly the thing of the Rockies. Even Ben Meisner, a rather well known ruminator of all things PG would probably admit that it might be a stretch, his own writing for opinion 250 comes a little closer to the tone and feel of the city today.

In fact when you get off the train in PG your kind of stuck in a no mans land of industrial use, rail yards and warehouses, car lots and questionable characters wandering the streets. Not to mention that you're more than a few blocks away from a decent hotel, which you probably don't really want to hike to. Perhaps a phone number for PG Taxis might have been useful in the piece, that and the address for the Casino!

Now all that being said it's still a sizeable community along the way and has its own particular charms to explore, the museum mentioned is a nice little thing but not quite the Science Centre in Vancouver, the University site is quite nice up above the pulp haze and overlooking the bowl area and yes there are many parks to explore once you get off that monstrosity of a fast lane called the by-pass, but sheesh beautiful?.

Somebody got a bonus point in creative writing to pull those adjectives out for this PR piece...