Making Use of That English Degree...

So I mentioned I've been busy...  One of the things that has been taking up a lot of my time was that I offered to do some writing for my choir.  This began over a year ago when I offered to be on the marketing committee.  And then that committee did absolutely nothing: one guy moved away, a woman dropped out of the choir, the guy who was heading it up (who had always seemed super nice) just wanted to complain about the lack of staging in our concerts...  It just sort of died.  But that was no skin off my nose, so I didn't worry about it.

This year we have a new executive director, Christine, and she reached out to me to see if I was still interested in doing any marketing.  We met up at a coffee shop and I was pretty blunt with her.  I told her I was a good writer and I could probably interview people and do write-ups about it.  But I also explained that she would need to be incredibly specific with what she wanted from me; she could tell me: interview this person and write it up by this day, and I would get it done.  If she just said, Try to interview someone soon, I probably wouldn't get around to it.

And Christine listened!  Before our March concert, she emailed me asking if I would interview our accompanist, Daniel Hine, who had composed one of the pieces we were singing.  She'd given me only a handful of days to get it done, so I told I would try but to not have very high expectations.  Daniel didn't have time to meet, but I sent him a bunch of questions and he sent back GREAT answers, so I quickly wrote it up and-- not gonna lie-- it turned out pretty good, if a little long!  Christine shortened it a bit and posted it on Facebook.  I was so pleased with how it turned out.

I guess Christine was pretty happy, too, because she asked me to interview all our soloists for the May concert.  Four soloists, and I spent about a half hour on zoom interviewing each one, and then a couple hours writing up each piece (one hour transcribing the interview (which I really hate doing because I spend the whole time cringing at how annoying I sound), and then another hour actually writing).  Plus the prep time beforehand, googling them and trying to think of some interesting questions that will make for good content for our page.  That's a decent chunk of time!  Also, this is so embarrassing, but I never host zoom meetings, I'm usually just a participant.  So I had to make sure I knew how to do all that and how to record the interviews.  Craig was very patient helping me out with that.  I did find a transcribing app, but after reading what it gave me, I decided writing them up myself was better.  Maybe an expensive app would have done a better job, but this one was kind of worthless...  (It was pretty funny reading the app's version of each interview and seeing the weird places they thought were swear words when there DEFINITELY were NOT.)

But I've been very happy with how each write up turned out, and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about them, which is lovely.  I haven't done any real writing in a long time-- it was nice to see I could still do it!

Anyway, they're all posted here if you want to read them!  Enjoy!