SMART goal

As discussed in my book (and this is not a concept that I came up with—I'm just passing it along), SMART goals* are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. In that spirit, since my readers aren't seeing anything happening despite all of my talk, I will now put my own feet to the fire and offer some clear promises.

On the 12th of this month, five days from now, both paid Substack sites will open for business:

• Kevin's Extraordinarily Voluptuous Grammar Buttocks (paid version)
• Kevin's Extraordinarily Large and Sweaty Grammar Crack (paid, nasty, un-PC version)

For the Buttocks site, the free-subscription version has been open for days; nothing's stopping you from subscribing to that unless you just don't like receiving one email a day. The real question is: who among my readers and free subscribers will take the plunge and subscribe to the paid content once it goes live? I expect the answer is: almost no one. And even worse: I expect that the people who pay to subscribe to the PG-rated Buttocks site will have no motivation to subscribe to the Crack site, which is essentially the same content, but nastier (I'm open to suggestions on how to differentiate the nasty site further).  It'll be either one or the other. Meanwhile, the daily free Substacks will keep rolling out as long as I have strength.

When I'm making content for these sites, I'm trying to create titles and tags that make them easy to organize, but it's possible that I'm making a hash of things even before I open up shop. If you do subscribe to the paid content, please let me know in the Substack comments if navigation via titles and tags isn't going well for you, but keep in mind that Substack was originally conceived of as primarily a newsletter distributed to a community of subscribers. This puts it at least slightly in Facebook territory, where the idea is to build a networked community of people who know each other or are connected via degrees of separation.

Substack has given me ideas, though. There's also a podcast feature, and you can create video newsletters as well—as long as you have something to say. I'm thinking of creating further Substacks that will essentially be courses, but in a scaled-down, GED-level or continuing-education-level sense. Some of these courses will be things I've wanted to teach for years, mainly related to religious studies, but other things that I teach will be motivated by a desire to rescue my country from the morass of stupidity or ignorance caused by poor education—basic things like math through basic algebra or geometry. The target audience for all of that will be (1) people who are older, now, and regretful of how they didn't pay attention in class back when they should have, and (2) more highly educated people who want to learn something that's a bit out of their wheelhouse.

I imagine that, if I do offer these other courses, I'll have to use saner names for those Substack publications. I'm not going to attract many people to a Relearn the Ass Cheeks of Algebra site. I might also look at inviting some of my educated friends to create their own video courses, if they want, based on their particular fields of interest. (They would earn 100% of the money from their subscribers. Of course, they could also just start their own Substacks, and I could shill for them as part of my educational community. There's no reason for them to be under my umbrella.) My buddy-since-third-grade Mike, for example, is a huge history buff and a history-prof manqué. I could easily see him ratting off a series of five-to-ten-minute videos on the American Civil War. Would Mike accept such a teaching burden? Who knows. If I get to that point, I'll ask him.

Anyway, I'm populating my paid sites right now; newsletters are being scheduled to publish on the 12th and on successive days. Once that wheel starts grinding, it ain't ever gonna stop. If you're happy with your free subscription, there's no pressure: you do you. For me, well, taking vacations from now on will mean producing twice as much material beforehand and pre-loading it to publish while I'm off gallivanting who-knows-where such that no one will even know I'm gone. And don't worry about subscribing after August 12th: there will be publishing archives that you can access, allowing you to catch up.

This could end up being a happy, if tiring, life—that of an online content creator.

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*From George T. Doran, 1981, writing about management objectives.