The Creative will be live at 5!

Last night, after finishing up those quizzes, I started working on The Creative, the newest publication on my Substack site. (Publication is the term Substack uses for these subdivisions.*) This section will be devoted to poetry, short stories, essays, photos, videos, illustrations, and whatever else I might think of. 

As of now, I have one free publication and two paid publications. I'll attempt to use Substack Notes (the platform's version of tweets) to entice people to subscribe. I've already started this with a series of "What You're Missing" Notes. For the moment, I'm putting up old poetry and "100 Below" stories, and I already have enough to last through November. Even more will be going up tonight, to last until late next year. As I was putting up some of the old poems, I saw they needed reworking, so on Substack, you are arguably getting a new, original form of those reworked poems. There will eventually be plenty of original content, of course, to go along with this old material.

The way I've plotted it, grammar-related posts are published every Monday and Friday. The Creative's posts, meanwhile, will show up every Tuesday and Thursday. That leaves Wednesdays for something else... probably courses once I'm ready to develop and publish those. I'll have to create a course-related publication for those. Maybe I'll call it The Academic even though that term fell out of favor with the conservative crowd long ago.

I did write a Substack Note last night that bears repeating. For people who ignore my Notes:

Housekeeping notes: 

I’ve created a new publication, paid-subscriber only, that doesn’t involve learning grammar or taking quizzes and tests, so no pressure. It’s called The Creative, and it’s the same $5/month or $50/year (i.e., minimal fee) that the grammar stuff is. This newsletter will feature short stories, poems, essays, photos, maybe bad artwork, possibly videos, etc. Whatever burbles into my consciousness. Now, here’s the deal: 

1. If you’re a new paying subscriber to my Substack, you’ll get everything automatically: the grammar-related stuff (Tasty Grammar: The Superficial and Tasty Grammar: The Profound) plus the new creative-writing stuff (The Creative). You, as a newbie to my place, can opt out of the grammar-related stuff so that it doesn’t flood your inbox if all you want is the creative content. Or vice versa: if you’ve come for the grammar lessons, you can opt out of The Creative. 
2. If you’re already a paid subscriber receiving my grammar-related material, you will not automatically receive The Creative content unless you consciously opt in. 
3. My grammar-related material is published every Monday and Friday. The Creative is published every Tuesday and Thursday. If you’re a newbie, and you want it all, you don’t need to do anything. If you’re a veteran, and you want to opt in to The Creative, feel free. I assume the opt-in process is simple and straightforward. You probably just have to click on the “The Creative” label, then follow whatever instructions appear, and since you’re already a paying subscriber, you won’t be paying any extra. You’ll simply get newsletters four days a week instead of just two. Lucky you! 
4. If you’re just a free subscriber, I’m afraid the only content you’ll be getting will be my free grammar material, plus whatever Substack Notes I publish (which are for both free and paying subscribers). All my other content will be paywalled to you. In my Notes, I’ll occasionally dangle tidbits from the paid-content Substack in an effort to tempt you over to the dark side—as I’ve been doing already. 
5. A warning to the delicate flowers: my writing tends to be fairly un-PC. I’d like to market my grammar stuff to the TikTok/Instagram youth, but I’m not on either platform, so if you have any wisdom as to how to bring them over to stodgy Substack, let me know. I tend to think that the younger folks might have a better appreciation for my primitive, juvenile sense of humor. I was the guy for whom free-speech values were originally developed.

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*It's a little complicated. You can have at least one Substack site on your account, with multiple subdivisions called publications. So in my case, I have bighominid.substack.com as the main site (now called BigHominid's Many Flavors thanks to the diversification), and within that site, I have the following subdivisions:

Notes (we Substackers all have that): https://bighominid.substack.com/notes
Tasty Grammar: The Superficial (free): https://bighominid.substack.com/s/the-superficial
Tasty Grammar: The Profound (paid): https://bighominid.substack.com/s/the-profound
The Creative (paid): https://bighominid.substack.com/s/the-creative

—but you can also create separate URLs independent of the above, and there appears to be no limit as to the number of publications and URLs you can create and manage. I'm considering creating a separate URL (paid subscriptions only) called The Political, but having been mostly free of politics-related blogging for a while, I'm starting to breathe easier, and returning to political writing will only prove to be stressful. So I'm still circumspect about getting back into that fray. I do have to wonder, though, whether my political adversaries might pay to subscribe to those writings just for the opportunity to be contrarian. The human need to vent cannot be underestimated.