job and vacation

Job

It occurred to me only today: For better or for worse, sink or swim, I guess I have a job now. Actually, I have multiple jobs, and there's still lots to learn. I remain way behind.

Still, I've decided to step away from the boss's plans for a startup (I've heard nothing definite from him, anyway), and I'm going full-steam-ahead with Substack. The newsletter announcing the coming of my paid-subscription Substacks, regular and spicy, will drop this coming Tuesday, forwarded to my email list (but I will almost certainly also put out a reminder on this blog). Whether people subscribe or not, the paid-Substack newsletters, both PG and R-rated, will drop as of this Friday (today, I finished the Friday posts; they're scheduled), and all subsequent Substack posts will drop every Monday and Friday thereafter. There might be announcements or notes that appear on other days of the week; we'll see. And if people pay to sign on to those Substacks after this Friday, it's not a problem. Once they've become committed subscribers, they'll have access to the archives and can catch up.*

It seems that, at least for now, Substack will be my main source of income. That's my gamble, and it's scary. For the moment, that amounts to a whopping $50 from a single subscription—already gone as of my last grocery trip. Growing membership might take a few months to gather momentum, but I'm hoping there'll eventually be a handful of paying subscribers... then a few tens... then a few hundred... a shallow linear increase, then a geometric one. And would it be too much to hope for a logarithmic one?

Unlike my attitude on my blog, where I'm not that obsessed with visitor numbers except as a statistical curiosity, I'm very interested in my Substack stats because that's basically going to be my bread and butter for the foreseeable future. Things aren't looking great on that front: my PG newsletter has a "30-day open rate" of only 53.06%, i.e., just half of the people on my email list are actually opening their emails every time they're sent. I shudder to look at my spicy Substack's stats, but then again, that one currently has no subscribers, so what would be the point? The PG-rated one, meanwhile, has seven subscribers, one of whom has paid for the, uh, full service. PG-rated full service, I mean.

We'll see where things are about a month from now, around the first week of September. I'll try floating my Substack around the old farts at Instapundit, but I suspect a lot of them are too closed-minded to want to learn about (or relearn) grammar; they'd rather keep on making their old-person typos and sloppy-minded gaffes when they write their comments. (The average age of an Instapundit commenter is around 60, I hear. These people have all stuck with Glenn Reynolds for years, and they've had a chance to cultivate whatever cyber-circles they travel in, so adding someone new—like moi—to their circuit is a tough proposition.** I understand somewhat; I'm a creature of habit, too, and we all get old and crabby.)

Once again, I'm going to have to reshuffle my work schedule as I figure out how best to organize my week now that things are finally starting to coalesce. Starting as I have, with text-based Substack posts, plays to my strengths as a text-based content creator and writer, but I've got ideas for several college-level courses (in a more relaxed format, of course, since this would amount to self-paced or continuing or, as they say in Korea, "lifetime" education, i.e., go at a slow pace, learn something new, and there's no pressure) that I want to do as a series of videos, so I also need to focus on improving my still-nascent video-making skills. Concomitant with that is the work and study I'm still engaged in regarding graphic design, photography, etc. So there's a lot of work to be done as I build the scaffold of my rising empire (cough). Wish me luck. And expect other things as well.

Vacation (added a couple of hours later)

Of course, I failed to write about the vacation aspect of this new life, so I'm adding that in now. Basically, if I want to do a walk going from, say, mid-October to mid-November, I need to start planning soon, which is why it's good that I've now got a Substack work calendar to take me through most of summer 2026. Everything else logically falls into place based on that calendar: once I figure out how much work I need to do to cover my month-long absence, I ought to be okay. But it's going to mean a few seven-day weeks, just as if I were working at my old job. If you wanna do the crime, ya' gotta put in the time. Or something like that. 

I'll write again once I know more about what my travel dates are, and what my workload is. It's not going to be pretty, but I hope it'll be worth it. And yes: I'll continue to use Blogspot for my walk blogs. My blog from last year has links to all the previous walk blogs. This year, it'll be Four Rivers for the fifth time, then something new next year, and if I'm still around, I want to do a "redemption" walk in 2027, i.e., the walk I did last year, during which I paused a month because of a serious foot injury. My main worry right now, though, is that my heart failure is progressing, which explains why it might now be difficult to do long walks. Korea apparently has innovative stem-cell therapies for heart patients, but those therapies aren't covered by insurance. I might have enough money to cover a round of experimental treatment, but after that, I'd have to drop out of the program. Frustrating.

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*I will also be introducing a third paid-subscription Substack, one with quizzes, tests, answers, and possibly explanations. Give me time to learn how to embed code. Google AI tells me it can be done on Substack, so it's just a matter of figuring out how.

**Fortunately, Substack has plenty of advice on how to grow one's audience, develop one's publications, and so on. So we'll see what happens.