It has been a fairly uneventful week for Inkreadable. I finally got the translation from the translator on Saturday but because I was busy with Jasper’s parents, I was not able to send it to my web host over at Enigmart until yesterday. I did it in the afternoon as I wanted to send him some changes that I wanted to make to the website. I have decided that I am not going to offer any group classes unless asked and if people want group classes, I will happily do a group class for children and their friends or a company if they find me on LinkedIn but I am not going to necessarily advertise already structured group classes at this time. Yesterday I wasn’t sure how long it would take the web host to upload the translation and the changes that I wanted to make. As of this writing, I have not heard anything. But at least things are well underway and let’s hope that the expenditures are worth it and give me some new business.
Last Monday, dear reader, I had the first set of presentations from Imres. I am very pleased to say that all of them went very well and they all put me to shame with their PowerPoints and presentations. They were well-researched, interesting topics, and the most interesting thing to come out of the presentations was that my clients do not want necessarily only business English. they would also like regular English. I was quite happy to hear that as I really hate the term business English as if business English is another language when really it’s just a subset of the same language. The presentation pride continued yesterday with the last four. It was decided that splitting up the presentations over two days is much better than having them all on one day especially as people will be going away even towards the end of the course. It seems that one of my students is interested in doing a presentation on gambling addiction and I was quite touched that he feels enough trust in the class to stand up in front of them and talk about something so personal and so difficult.
For the last 3 months, dear reader, The English Center has been massaging a Greek client who wanted pronunciation lessons. I specifically asked for the client as I am uniquely placed to be able to teach them pronunciation in English and reduce their Greek accent. I can do that because I can almost perfectly ape the Greek accent in English. Pronunciation is quickly becoming one of my fortes in terms of my teaching skills. I can particularly teach Italian and Dutch students quite easily because I’ve taught quite a few of those students, and for the Dutch students because I went ahead and I built a Dutch pronunciation course of 12 hours. But I’m a little bit annoyed because the Greek client feels that the English Center’s prices are too high and only wants to pay for an hour and a half. That means that I get paid for a trial lesson which is fine but if I don’t turn him then there are repercussions. If he decided the class did not go as expected and he doesn’t have a high-quality experience, then it directly affects the work that I get at English Center. And as we all know I don’t have enough work of my own as yet to be able to say goodbye to the schools.
The writer’s group this week was fun as they were quite a few new people, but also back at the writers’ group was my friend Nico who had to go back to Canada for a week. We met a bit earlier than the meeting and had coffee. She brought her son Stirling with her which is always fun as he is working on some very interesting short stories. In the meeting itself, I was able to get quite some writing done as well as some plotting and I’m quite happy with the results. Did I write 1300 words? No, I never do but I did get a chance to write a little bit and further some plot issues. Once Jasper’s parents leave I’m hoping that we will start writing on the weekends more consistently and that will be good for my writing as well. I’m happy with the direction of the novel and also with where the series seems to be going as well. It looks like I have the glimmer of book two and possibly book three.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there’s more to come.