A different kind of creative writing

I decided to sit down and write something today, though I wasn't sure exactly what that something might be. Turned out, it was text to go on the website that's being constructed for the tutoring business I'm trying to get going: Five Degrees Tutoring. We have a Facebook page, which is hard to find (not enough posts, so we're way down the listings of things that start with "Five"), and even an Instagram account (ditto: I really don't "get" Instagram much, but the young'uns will be more likely to use that than FB), and the website is or soon will be up and accessible: fivedegreestutoring.com. My dear William made snarky comments on the "five degrees" part--rather understandably, actually, as the reason for the name is not self-evident. But it's because--at least in theory--I am in business with my sister, and between us, we have five academic degrees (two bachelors, one M.S., one M.Phil., and one Ph.D.)

Constructing the site has been an interesting and periodically frustrating experience. I started with a "do-it-yourself" template and shelled out far more money than I needed to for the privilege. Fortunately, my sister's boyfriend is a professional at building websites and doing web marketing, and when she ran it past him, he showed me not only why the DIY template was kinda useless but also why I didn't need to shell out the bucks for it. The frustrating part was that the marketing mind works very, very differently from the language and literature mind. I could grasp the concepts as he explained them (god love him, he is tremendously patient about explaining things to people who are little lambs lost in the woods), but boiling what I have in my head down to what the website needed was challenging. It was also interesting trying to get him to understand what I know about how students approach writing. We had to do a sort of Vulcan mind-meld of approaches to come up with something workable, but I think we've got it. Or got it well enough to start with anyway. Tweaking can happen as we roll along.

Coming up with the appropriate text was an exercise in concision for me. Readers of this blog know that I am nothing if not verbose (some friends on FB complain about how much blather they need to wade through to find the kernels of information being conveyed). So it's good for me to have to work on simplicity: the fewer words the better.

So, that was writing for the revenue stream side of things. Heaven knows if the website will bear any fruit, but we'll give it a whirl. (And not only is the site as it now exists infinitely less expensive than what I did at first--for which, mercifully, I got a full refund--it is, nicely enough, a tax-deductible business expense.) And perhaps tomorrow I will embark on more creative endeavors. I've got a couple of essay ideas dinking around in my head, and a few story ideas. I might even--who knows--get back to that novel eventually.

More posts to come. Stay tuned!