mission: partially accomplished

On Substack, I now have enough Bad Online English posts to last me through the end of November. I now need to make a bunch of posts for my paying subscribers to last me just as long. That's what the coming weeks are about.

My paying subscribers know that I've been marching through nouns as the very first in a series on parts of speech. There are six parts (posts) for nouns; next up will be nine parts for verbs, ten parts for pronouns, six parts for adjectives, six parts for adverbs, three parts for conjunctions, and two parts for interjections. With these posts coming out every Monday and Friday, that's enough to take us through January 5.

On January 9, the first post on punctuation will come out, and it'll be six parts for periods, twelve parts for commas (I'm repurposing and slightly rewriting the eleven posts I'd written for this blog, then adding a twelfth), three parts for hyphens and dashes, five parts for question marks, and three parts for other punctuation. That's enough to take us through April 17. My calendar has a lot more lined up, of course, through July 31st—and there's still more to plan. The entire curriculum won't be laid out for at least another year or two. We've got parts of a sentence (including clauses), a whole host of common errors, and a whole bunch of macro-level content about paragraph writing, essay writing, styles and elements of writing, and so much more. This could go on for a long, long time. Will I still have just a handful of subscribers by the time I finish the curriculum?

As that's happening, I'll also be working on book projects, videos, other Substack courses/sites, etc.—growing my online presence. We'll see how it goes. While I'm nowhere near the danger point in terms of cash availability—my bank account is still doing just fine—I am nonetheless idly considering casting about for work, maybe at my former KMA job (if they have work for me), in the event that the Substack thing hasn't progressed that far in a few months. I have a nuclear option, too: move back to the States. If I did that, I'd receive about 30 million won from Korea's National Pension Office, and I'd get my 10-million-won deposit back for my apartment. That would be, to say the least, a nice windfall.

In other news: I've noticed, on Substack, a lot of bot-like behavior in the form of posts from "people" who, over and over, challenge us readers/writers to "Tell me, in 1-3 words, why I should subscribe to your Substack." This was amazing the first time I saw one of these messages—I was so excited—but now that I've come to realize my feed is dominated by these types of challenges, and that they all sound eerily the same, I just ignore them, and I have, in fact, written my own Substack Note (a Note is like a tweet, but with no character limits) complaining about the bot-things.

So the future is still looking wide-horizoned and optimistic. Check back with me around Christmas to see whether I've begun to feel defeated yet. I've heard absolutely nothing from my former boss, but a former coworker said he'd talked to him, and my boss has quietly gotten a far lesser-paying job teaching Korean to foreigners. Well, good for him! Unlike me, he's got many mouths to feed, and if the work keeps him busy, he's less likely to call me for anything. When he and I have met, as we've done a couple times this year, nothing substantive has been discussed, so my default assumption, at this point, is that I'm on my own. I made a bad bet, leaping away from the Golden Goose with the boss, mainly because I had thought the boss might have prepared his startup to a greater degree than zero (he'd had years to prep), but at the same time, staying at the Golden Goose without the boss here to shield us furriners from capricious, unimaginative, and dense Korean management would have been hell. 

All in all, I'd rather be where I am right now—trying to see whether I have the chops to be my own boss.  It's going to take time, and I started late after months of just studying. I'm busy as hell as a result, and I'm likely to get busier, but this is the path I've chosen.

As always, fingers and tentacles crossed.