content creation: it's all behind the scenes for the moment

If you want to visit my free Substack, go here. Get a free subscription ("don't cost nuthin'"), and each post will be emailed to you as a newsletter. My Shopify store, meager as it is, is here. My Amazon store, which has been around for years, is here. Very soon, my Lulu.com publish-on-demand store (better than Amazon's POD), will be available (no link yet). I imagine that the small handful of people wanting hard copies of my books will want to visit Lulu. I have a Korean translation of my homeschooling book (really, a book about teaching principles for beginners) coming down the pipe; I'll be trying to shop that book around locally. I might even create a bilingual, Korean-English edition of the book.

I've moved from the course-watching phase to the content-creation phase of my master plan, such as it is.  For the most part, I've been building up scheduled posts for the free content—enough to get me through August. Today, I just started populating one of my two paid-subscription Substack newsletters—the nasty one, for which I have eleven comma lessons. I'll re-copy those lessons over to my blander Substack, dumbing the content down from R-rated to PG-rated so as to be a bit less offensive. In the meantime, I'm assembling my movie-review book, for which I've opted to go with smaller editions instead of a massive one. If I do do a massive edition, I'll probably make it a hardback available on Amazon. Amazon's POD hardbacks are of decent quality; it's their perfect-bound paperbacks that I don't like, given how pages tend to fall out due to shoddy binding. So aside from hardbacks (and again that's a big if, especially if Lulu produces a good hardback), I prefer to use Amazon exclusively for ebooks. Come to think of it, if I do ever publish the massive version of my movie-review book on Amazon, the ebook format might be best since ebooks don't weigh anything. I have all of A Song of Ice and Fire as one single volume. As much as GRR Martin has written, anyway.

Beyond the movie-review book, there'll be a followup to the teaching book that'll discuss nitty-gritty details of curriculum planning and design. I'll do a revised edition of Water from a Skull (CafePress no longer publishes print-on-demand books, so it's back to Square One), a new book of humor (likely titled Scarier Spasms in Hairier Chasms), a revamped version of the old humor book (originally self-published in 2001), and I hope to publish my Dirty Grammar self-paced textbook, which I hope will also be entertaining. That's a lot of stuff to do before I kick the bucket; we'll see how much I can accomplish.

It's too late for me to apply for a university-teaching job right now, so the current plan is to keep at what I'm doing until the end of the year, then apply for university or other work come January. I hope, over the next few months, I'll have acquired more skills and more a lot of content by midwinter, especially through one thing I've failed to mention thus far: app design. I'm only at the beginning of studying how app design works, but I'll be focusing on quizzes and, I hope, putting out increasingly sophisticated material, mostly grammar-related, as I build an audience. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, things are beginning to come into focus. In a few minutes, I'll try to go for another walk around the park, and I'll see how that goes. Better than last time, I hope.

Fingers and tentacles crossed.