This is my first visit to your blog and i have to say i am already impressed with your writing. We all want to continue to improve though, right? I believe that your work is great and I am going to read more. I don't really have any advice because I don't really feel as though I am good writer in the technical sense.
Sometimes I feel that people get so wrapped up in syntax that the creativity actually suffers. Whenever I try to focus on having perfect sentence structure rather than using an ellipse or a hyphen whenever i feel like it - that my creativity actually suffers. Therefore, I don't really focus on that so much since I am not submitting these things for critical peer review :)
I also feel as though emoticons are just fine on here :P