Saturday, February 20, 2021

The Joy of Non-Professional Writing

 Husband is quickly recovering now. He's still fatigued, but all the flu symptoms have gone. None of the rest of us have had any symptoms thus far.

I'm not sure when I'll get to go back to work. My company is operating on a more stringent Covid protocol than the CDC's, so I may not be allowed back for at least another week, which is longer than Husband will have had to quarantine, and he's the one who actually had Covid! That's irritating, but at least they'll let me work from home so I can get some pay. Husband can go back to work on Tuesday.

I haven't accomplished much of anything during this enforced time off. I'm very disappointed in myself for that. I mean, there's always housecleaning and cooking of meals, but that's pretty mundane not very exciting. Why haven't I written a book yet? It's not like I haven't had the time! I've certainly had the time to watch way too many Saturday Night Live sketches on YouTube. I have a million things I need to do--especially as the Relief Society president--and all of them are hard and none of them are things I am anxious to do, so they feel overwhelming. Sometimes, you need to have a little success with something that's low-stakes in order to pump yourself up to do the harder stuff.

My friend, Marco, came to my rescue. I've known him since my mission to England in the early 1990s, where we both served in the same area and became good friends. He's an enterprising guy, and he has a lot of irons in the fire with his regular day job at a well-known software company, an adjunct professor of business at his local university (he does that for fun and not for the pay, which is terrible), and as the creator of some websites that he's been operating for a few years now, his most popular one being focused on his home town in Italy. 

Marco's most recent website contains little blurbs of about 200 or so words about why we do the things we do or use the things we use. For instance, why do we shake hands as a greeting? When did forks become popular? From which country and/or tradition did knights originate? You know, the kind of interesting little facts you can use to win a trivia game or pull out at a party to start a conversation or answer the unending questions from a curious child. 

Marco has asked me to help him with this website--both as an editor for his work and as a writer of some of the blurbs. It's good to get back to some writing and editing. It stretches my brain. I sometimes help the guys at work edit their school papers (they're all either getting their doctorates or obtaining certifications that will increase their pay), but I'm not missing the pressure and stress of professional content writing. It's fun to do something that isn't high pressure writing. While Marco has offered to let me keep any revenue generated by blurbs that I write, we both laughed about the idea of making a living off of this website--at least in the short term. You'd have to get hundreds of thousands of visitors to generate enough to live on, and while that can happen if you find the right niche and the right content and work like crazy to market it, I'm not holding my breath. For now, it's just a fun little thing to do.

I took the dog for a walk and my brain came up with a few good ideas that Marco didn't already think of, so I better get cracking. 

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